Legend has it that this fine old folk song was born among the roustabouts who loaded and unloaded steamboats on the Ohio River at the turn of the last century.
Hundreds of contemporary versions of “Alberta, Let Your Hair Hang Low” exist, including one by The Blues Project and another by Bob Dylan. Decades earlier, the great Lead Belly recorded four different versions of the song between 1935 and 1948.
But the very first trace of the song was collected at an unknown date by Kentucky-born musicologist Mary Guthrie Wheeler. In the 1930s, while teaching at Paducah Junior College, Wheeler began to document and study the songs of the former roustabouts who worked on the Ohio, Cumberland, Mississippi and Tennessee rivers. She published “Alberta” in 1944 in her book “Steamboatin’ Days: Folk Songs of the River Packet Era.”
“It was late in the afternoon when I reached the street on which Gabriel Hester lived,” Wheeler recorded in that book. Neighbors who sat fanning themselves on small porches directed the writer to Gabe’s house, where she was invited to wait for him. “Bless the Lord, honey,” his wife said, “he don’t never mind singing, and he just loves to play on the box.”
Moments later, when he arrived, “the old man obligingly … touched the guitar strings with gifted, untrained fingers, (and) sang the lovely melody of 'Alberta, Let Yo' Hair Hang Low’.”
Hester also told Wheeler that music of all kinds was central to the lives of riverboat roustabouts when he worked on the Ohio. They always sang when they were working, he said, remembering how the passengers liked hearing songs in the evenings and usually dropped coins down from the upper decks when music came up to them from below.
Our Take on the Tune
A fresh set of ears — especially if they’re as attuned as Veezy Coffman’s — can hear something new in something old. Just listen to all the new opportunities that Veezy’s tenor sax finds in this dusty old folk melody. And then listen to how that inspires Dan Cox and Sam St. Clair to new exploration in their own solos.
From the Vault
— A few months after this podcast, Pamela shot a video of a performance of the tune at a mid-August 2022 rehearsal. Want to see it? Click here.
— Or if you’d like turn your time machine in the other direction, Alberta made an appearance on our 2002 album, The Flood Plays Up a Storm. Click here to hear that track.
Alberta, Let Your Hair Hang Low