"Billy in the Low Ground"
#592 / Flood Times Capsule: 2009
When our beloved fiddler Joe Dobbs died in the autumn of 2015, the obituary began with Joe’s memory of being a little boy back in Mississippi in the late 1930s and hearing his grandfather playing “Billy in the Low Ground.”
Those of us in Joe’s Flood family first heard that particular story a half dozen years earlier, on a warm April evening when he then fiddled the old song for Pamela Bowen’s camera. Click the Play button on the video below to hear and see that moment from 17 years ago this week:
Joe’s grandfather, Rube Berry, a carpenter and Delta sharecropper in Greenville, Mississippi, played fiddle and banjo. “He had grown up in the eastern Mississippi hill country,” Joe said, and “as a young man he and his brothers had a string band that played for local country dances.”
When Joe published his autobiography, A Country Fiddler in 2012, he further described his granddad:
“He was short in stature, bald-headed, with some brownish-red hair left on the sides. He was a very kind man but spoke with a gruff voice that frightened me when I was a child.”
Dave Peyton chuckled when he read that. “Sounds like you’re described yourself, Joe!”
“Hrrphh,” Joe snorted. “Don’t see it.” Then everyone — including Joe — laughed.
About the Song
“Billy in the Low Ground” is one of the most enduring and widespread of American traditional dance tunes, known throughout the South, Midwest and West and even into the northern part of the United States.
It borrows motifs from British and Irish sources. Back in the 1970s, researcher Miles Krassen identified an Irish version called “Kerryman’s Daughter,” while R.P. Christeson suggests it can be traced to the Scottish “Braes of Auchentyre” and “Beaus of Albany.”
Early American printings can be found from the early 19th century onward. The melody appears under the “Billy/Low Grounds” title in George P. Knauff ‘s “Virginia Reels” (Baltimore, 1839).
It was recorded from the playing of an Ozark fiddler for the Library of Congress by musicologist/folklorist Vance Randolph who collected in the early 1940’s, and, likewise, by Herbert Halpert (also for the Library of Congress) in 1939 from Tishomingo County, Mississippi, fiddler John Hatcher. Texas fiddler Eck Robertson recorded it commercially for Victor Records in 1923 in a medley with “Sallie Johnson.”
Whence Billy?
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of fun speculation about the subject of this tune. In our research, we came across an interesting exchange online on the discussion board of BluegrassDaddy.com.
The palaver commenced when one visitor posted that he had read somewhere that Billy “refers to William the Conqueror, as in The Battle of Hastings (1066), being buried in swampy, i.e., low ground.”
Within hours, another regular of the board responded with naaaaaw, Billy of low ground fame “actually refers to the protestant William of Orange defeating the Irish Catholic forces at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, ensuring foreign occupation would continue in Ireland up through today. The battle occurred in a river bottom.”
Concurring, another noted that when William of Orange became William III, he was known in Ireland and Scotland as “King Billy,” and, he added, “‘Lowground’ could refer to the Netherlands, because that’s about what “Netherlands” means, or maybe even Lowland Scotland... or maybe both.”
Within hours, a happy contrarian joined the fray to say, “Have you all considered that you might be overthinking this? I’ve always heard the subject is just a billy goat. You know, like ‘jinny’ is a common name for a female mule and isn’t there a tune called ‘Jinny in the Lowlands’?”
As the discussion diverged into comparative anatomy and animal husbandry, we prepared to take our leave, but not before hearing our favorite Billy theory. The famous Monticello, Ky., musician Dick Burnett told bluegrass historian Charles Wolfe the most improbable story about the origin of the tune and title:
“You know how come them to make that? There was a man a goin’ through an old field one time and he had his fiddle with him and he walked out on the bank of a sink hole and it broke off and he fell down in that hole and couldn’t get out. He just sat down there and took his fiddle and played that tune. His name was Billy something but I forgot his full name. ….”