Around campfires North and South, many of the tunes played and sung during the Civil War were the work of a 35-year-old Pennsylvanian who was America’s first full-time professional songwriter.
By the time the war started, Stephen Collins Foster — who as a youth taught himself to play the clarinet, guitar, flute and the piano — had published more than 200 songs.
His best ones — “Oh Susannah,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home (Swanee River),” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Hard Times Comes Again No More” — already were widely known throughout the country to amateur and professional musicians alike.
About “Angelina Baker”
This song, though, was not one of the famous ones. Foster wrote “Angelina Baker,” sometimes performed as “Angeline the Baker,” in 1850 for use by the theater world’s Christy Minstrels troupe.
Today folks know it primarily as an instrumental dance tunes performed by old-time and bluegrass bands, almost always with a lively fiddle leading the way. An early version was recorded for Victor in 1928 by Uncle Eck Dunford of Galax, Va. Meanwhile, West Virginia fiddler Franklin George called it "Angeline" and played it with Scottish overtones.
Foster’s original, though, was a bit slower and had lyrics that lamented the loss of a woman slave, sent away by her owner.
Huntington-born music historian Ken Emerson — who in 1997 wrote a definitive biography called Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture — said that “Angelina Baker” entered the American consciousness during a period of great controversy between free and slave states.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was among the hotly debated topics at the time of the song's composition, and, Emerson noted, Foster's lyrics obliquely acknowledge these controversies. (Angelina likes th’ boys as far as she can see ‘em / She used to run old Massa round to ask him for to free ‘em…. Angelina Baker, Angelina Baker's gone / She left me here to weep a tear and beat on de old jawbone… )
Our Take on the Tune
The Flood has always celebrated diversity. The guys often follow a folk blues with a swing tune or chase a 1950s jazz standard with some 1920s jug band stuff.
And deep in The Flood’s DNA are the fiddle tunes learned from Joe Dobbs and Doug Chaffin. This Civil War-era tune the band learned from fiddlin’ Jack Nuckols, their newest band mate.
From the Archives: How We Met Angelina
As reported earlier, Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen started 50 years ago trying to draw Nuckols into the band.
On an April evening back in 1974, Peyton and Bowen trekked over to Jack and Susie’s place in South Point, Ohio, for a jam session.
It was during that session that they first heard “Angelina Baker.” Here from the fathomless Flood files is that specific archival moment. Click the button below to travel back 51 years and hear Jack on fiddle, Dave on Autoharp and Charlie on guitar:
More Instrumentals?
Finally, if all this has you wanting some more wordlessness in your Friday Floodery, tune in the Instrumentals channel in the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
There you’ll have a randomized playlist of everything from folksy fiddle tunes to sultry jazz numbers without a lyric or vocal in sight! Click here to give a try.
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