Old Joe Clark is the tune that teaches bluegrass pickers the flat seven. It is an A tune with a G natural in the melody, and that one note gives it a sound no plain major scale can make. It is also a song with more than a hundred floating verses about a Kentucky mountaineer who may have been real. Call it at any jam in America and the whole circle knows it.
Where it came from
Clay County, Kentucky claims the man. A state historical marker there names Joe Clark, born in 1839, a rough mountaineer who ran a moonshine still and was shot to death near his store. Folk researcher Mike Yates traced a Joseph Clark born in Clay County on September 18, 1839, who married Elizabeth Sandlin in 1857, served in the Civil War, and died after a neighbor shot him. The marker dates the murder to 1885, and Yates gives 1886. His neighbors made up verses about him, and the verses never stopped. The marker claims soldiers from eastern Kentucky sang some 90 stanzas of the song in World War I and later wars. Other collectors have counted as many as 144 verses.
The paper trail starts late. Fiddle scholar Alan Jabbour found no printed version from the 1800s. Researchers on the Mudcat folk forum turned up an 1890 North Carolina newspaper item about a fiddler playing it at a dance. The Journal of American Folklore printed stanzas from East Tennessee in 1905 and from Mississippi in 1909. Cecil Sharp took down a version from Margaret Dodd in Virginia in 1918. In homes where dancing counted as sin, it lived as a play-party song: young people sang the verses and walked the figures, no fiddle needed.
Records made it a national hit. Fiddlin’ John Carson cut “Fare You Well, Old Joe Clark” for OKeh in New York on November 7, 1923, in the first months of country music on disc. Fiddlin’ Powers and Family cut it for Victor in 1924, the third best-selling country record of that year. Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, with Riley Puckett singing, cut it for Columbia in 1926, the fourth best-seller of that year.
How it works
The tune runs AABB: play the first part twice, the second part twice, then start over. The key is A, but the seventh note of the scale drops a half step, G natural instead of G sharp. That is the mixolydian mode in one sentence: a major scale with a flat seven. Rhythm players mark that note with a G chord inside a tune that lives on A and E. In bluegrass circles the B part gets the G chord. Some old-time players harmonize the same spot with an E chord instead, and the two camps still argue about it.
At most jams somebody sings. The chorus starts with “Fare thee well, Old Joe Clark,” and the verses float in from everywhere. Singer Hedy West noted verse trading with Ida Red, Cindy, and Shady Grove. Add a verse of your own and no one minds. That is how the count passed one hundred.
Teachers assign this tune for a reason. The fiddle melody sits in first position, it is hard to ruin, and it plants the modal sound in your ear. Learn it and mixolydian standards like June Apple, Red Haired Boy, and Salt Creek stop sounding strange.
Recordings worth hearing
Start with Fiddlin’ John Carson’s 1923 OKeh side, the defining early record, rough and loose, with Carson singing over his own fiddle. The 1924 Victor disc by Fiddlin’ Powers and Family captures a family string band at the birth of the industry. The Skillet Lickers’ 1926 Columbia side with Riley Puckett is the rowdy Georgia version, and it sold big. Wayne Perry’s 1934 fiddle version, recorded in Louisiana for a Library of Congress field collection, is the strange beauty of the bunch. Henry Reed’s 1966 home recording, made by Alan Jabbour in Glen Lyn, Virginia, is free to stream at the Library of Congress and helped feed the old-time revival. Hedy West’s 1965 Topic album take brings clawhammer banjo and deep family verse stock. For flatpickers, Doc Watson’s cut on The Elementary Doctor Watson! is the guitar benchmark. More tunes like this live in our songbook.
Sources
Facts on this page come from the Traditional Tune Archive annotation for Old Joe Clark, the Discography of American Historical Recordings entry for Carson’s OKeh matrix, the DAHR entry for the Fiddlin’ Powers Victor matrix, the Library of Congress Henry Reed Collection page for Old Joe Clark, the Mainly Norfolk page for Old Joe Clark, the Mudcat Cafe thread on the song’s origins, and the Clawhammer Banjo core repertoire essay on the tune.