Aunt Jennie, Logan County Woman of Mystery
#582 / Flood Time Capsule: 1975
The late Dave Peyton brought many Aunt Jennie Wilson songs to The Flood’s table, none more curious than the Logan County songstress’s unique version of “Old Reuben.”
On a spring Saturday night 51 years ago this week, Charlie Bowen lugged his suitcase-sized reel-to-reel tape recorder to the Peytons’ place on Mount Union Road, where he and David sat down to record some of the tunes they had begun working on as a duo:
Highlighting the evening was when Charlie accompanied Dave on a not-to-be-missed tune that is featured in the video above. Click the Play button to hear Peyton’s performance of Aunt Jennie’s tale of a women driven to take a near-fatal dose of morphine after seeing her lover with another woman.
One Song
“Old Reuben” or “Reuben’s Train,” first popularized by Fiddlin’ John Carson’s 1924 Okeh recording as “I’m Nine Hundred Miles Away from Home,” is a cornerstone of old-time and bluegrass music, originating in the late 19th-century Appalachian Southeast.
Over the decades, its lyrics have morphed into various versions, while the core narrative of a lonesome, wandering engineer remains a quintessential example of the “lonesome train” folk tradition.
But no other version that we can find is like Jennie Wilson’s. So where in the world did she get her haunting lyrics about morphine and suicide and such?
Spoiler Alert: Nobody seems to know. However, the search for the answer has been an interesting one.
Another Song
As you can hear in Dave’s vocal in the video above, central to Aunt Jennie’s rendition are these lyrics:
I took morphine last Saturday night, oh, I took it in a dangerous way.
If it hadn’t have been for the doctor, Oh Lord, I’d have been in my grave today.
Peach and honey, rock and rye, baby, let me tell you my dream.
I dreamed last night I had a pocket full of money, and a-rolling in a big dice game.
But when I woke up, I found it all a joke, for I didn’t have a brownie to my name!
Searching….
In our hunt for origins for these lines, we relied on newer, more powerful search tools on the Internet, and the quest led us to an entirely different song.
A couple hundred miles southwest of Jennie’s Logan County home, in Knox County, Ky., a musician named Bill Cornett (he called himself “Banjo Bill” and had a colorful career in politics as well as music) was recorded in the mid-1950s for Folkways Records by folklorist John Cohen.
Among the tunes that Cohen recorded in Cornett’s home was one called “Morphine Blues” or simply “Morphine,” and it contains all of those lyrics that Jennie sang (though Cornett used an entirely different melody).
“Morphine/Morphine Blues” might have been lost after that but for the work of another banjo picker named George R. Gibson, who in 1938 also was born in Knox County and who met ol’ Banjo Bill as a child.
In 2000, June Appal Recordings recorded George for an album called Last Possum Up the Tree, featuring two dozen of his tunes, including “Morphine.”
Gibson didn’t know much about the origin of the tune. “The only people I heard sing this song,” he wrote on the album liner notes, “were James Slone and Mel Amburgey. James said he learned the song from Mel and his brother Shade. Mel and Shade were both balladeers and banjoists, as was James.”
More recently, a young traditional Knox County picker named Clifton Hicks did a great service by uploading versions of “Morphine” to YouTube, among them his own rendition as well as audio of Cornett’s original 1950s home recording.
In 2018, Hicks told Sing Out! magazine’s Patrick Blackman that he suspected the song came to Eastern Kentucky via the railroad workers and/or other migrant laborers from back East.
Train Connections?
And could that be the connection to Jennie Wilson that we’re looking for? Not long ago, when we researched the history of another of Jennie’s tunes — “Georgie Buck” — we remembered Dave Peyton’s theory:
Jennie — who started playing square dances and parties when still a teen-ager — probably learned the song from African American musicians who came through Logan County in the 1920s to work on the railroad and/or in the coal mines. Nowadays it is well-documented that some mountain music and dance were influenced by black traditions of rhythmic dance and songs.
Jennie’s grandson, Roger Bryant, who played years’ worth of music with her, said he doesn’t remember hearing her say anything about where she heard “Old Reuben” or from whom she learned it.
“I would guess,” he added, “that she picked it up from several people that she played with growing up, as she did a lot of songs. She learned some from her brothers. Wherever she learned it, she believed it to be ‘the song’ because she was a stickler for authenticity.”
Recording
“Old Reuben” landed on Jennie’s first album. Back in 1965, it opened the B Side of Billy Edd Wheeler Presents a Portrait of Aunt Jennie Wilson.
We used to wonder if Peyton might have learned it from that album, but Bryant doubts that. “I think Dave learned directly from her,” Roger said, “because I believe he was doing the song before the album came out.”
(You can hear for yourself that supporting that idea is the fact that Dave’s version of the song in the video at the start of this article contains a final verse that is not contained here in Jennie’s recorded rendition.)