Arkansas Traveler is the rare fiddle tune that comes with its own comedy act. The melody hit print in 1847, helped launch country music on record in 1922, and now serves as the official state historical song of Arkansas. It also hides inside a children’s song about a bumblebee. Few tunes in the songbook have lived this many lives.
Where it came from
The story begins with Colonel Sanford C. Faulkner, an Arkansas planter and storyteller. Around 1840 he got lost in the Arkansas backwoods. He turned the mishap into a stage routine. A lost traveler rides up to a squatter’s cabin and asks questions. The squatter dodges every one. Asked about his leaky roof, he explains that he cannot fix it in the rain, and that it does not leak in dry weather. All the while he saws the first strain of a fiddle tune, over and over. The standoff breaks when the traveler takes the fiddle and plays the second strain, the part the squatter never learned. Food, drink, and a dry bed follow.
The tune reached print in Cincinnati in 1847 as “The Arkansas Traveller and Rackinsac Waltz,” arranged by William Cumming with no composer credit. That blank line started a long fight over authorship. Faulkner gets credit for the routine, but the melody has other claimants. Jose Tosso, a concert violinist in Cincinnati, played it as early as 1842. An 1863 Oliver Ditson edition from Boston credited Mose Case, a Buffalo musician whose version of the skit became a standard. The Traditional Tune Archive notes that the tune and story had circulated for about two decades before publication. The honest answer is that no one knows who wrote it.
The skit kept selling. Edward Payson Washbourne painted the cabin scene by 1856, and an 1859 Boston lithograph of it carried a dedication to Faulkner. A state committee picked the melody for the Arkansas state song on November 10, 1947, and a state commission published lyrics in 1949. The legislature swapped it out in 1963, then brought it back in 1987 as the official state historical song. The melody found one more job along the way: children sing it as “I’m Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee.”
How it works
Play it in D. The form is two strains in 4/4, run AABB. Three chords cover it: D, G, and A, the 1, 4, and 5. The A part rocks between the 1 and 5 chords. The B part, the famous turn of the tune, runs downhill in streams of eighth notes. Some players set it in G or A instead.
The skit lives on at jams. One player saws the A part while another asks the old questions, and the punchlines land between phrases. The melody sits in first position and rewards clean bowing, which is why it fills beginner and intermediate rounds at fiddle contests. What makes the tune distinctive is the dialogue built into the music: the A part asks, and the B part answers.
Recordings worth hearing
Start with the record that helped start country music. On June 30, 1922, Eck Robertson of Texas and Henry C. Gilliland, an Oklahoma fiddler in his seventies, cut “Arkansaw Traveler” as a twin fiddle duet at the Victor studios in New York. Victor paired it with Robertson’s solo “Sallie Gooden” on Victor 18956, one of the first commercial country records ever issued. The Library of Congress added the disc to the National Recording Registry in 2002. The tune had been on record before that: Len Spencer cut a comic sketch version for Edison in 1902. After Robertson came the string bands. Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett recorded it for Columbia in the 1920s, and Clayton McMichen’s Georgia Wildcats cut a hot version for Gennett in 1932. Kentucky fiddlers Luther Strong and John Salyer left archival versions that old time players still mine for bowing ideas. For a modern echo, Michelle Shocked named her 1992 roots album Arkansas Traveler for the tune.
Sources
Facts on this page come from the Traditional Tune Archive, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas entries on the Arkansas Traveler and official state songs, the Library of Congress National Recording Registry essay and 2002 registry list, the Old Time Blues page on the Robertson and Gilliland Victor sessions, and Singing Bell on the bumblebee song.