In the Pines

For other uses, see In the Pines (disambiguation).

"In the Pines" "Black Girl" "Where Did You Sleep Last Night"
Written by	Traditional
Published	1917
Language	English
Original artist	Unidentified field musician (1925)
Recorded by	Dick Justice (1929) Peg Leg Howell (1929)
Performed by	Hole Nirvana Mark Lanegan

"In the Pines", also known as "Black Girl" and "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", is a traditional American folk song which dates back to at least the 1870s, and is believed to be Southern Appalachian in origin. The identity of the song's author is unknown, but it has been recorded by many artists in numerous genres. Traditionally, it is most often associated with the American folk musician Lead Belly, who recorded several versions in the 1940s, as well as the American bluegrass musician Bill Monroe, who helped popularize the song (in a different variant, featuring lyrics about a train) among bluegrass and country audiences with his versions recorded in the 1940s and 1950s.

The song, performed by The Four Pennies, reached the UK top twenty in 1964. A live rendering by the American grunge band Nirvana, which reinterpreted Lead Belly's version and was recorded during their MTV Unplugged performance in 1993, helped introduce the song to a new generation.

Early history

Like numerous other folk songs, "In the Pines" was passed on from one generation and locale to the next by word of mouth. The first printed version of the song, compiled by Cecil Sharp, appeared in 1917, and comprised just four lines and a melody. The lines are:

"Black girl, black girl, don't lie to me
Where did you stay last night?
I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines
And shivered when the cold wind blows"

In 1925, a version of the song was recorded onto phonograph cylinder by a folk collector. This was the first documentation of "The Longest Train" variant of the song, which includes a stanza about "The longest train I ever saw". This stanza probably began as a separate song that later merged into "In the Pines". Lyrics in some versions about "Joe Brown's coal mine" and "the Georgia line" may refer to Joseph E. Brown, a former Governor of Georgia, who famously leased convicts to operate coal mines in the 1870s. While early renditions which mention the head in the "driver's wheel" make clear that the decapitation was caused by the train, some later versions would omit the reference to the train and reattribute the cause. As music historian Norm Cohen pointed out in his 1981 book, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong, the song came to consist of three frequent elements: a chorus about "in the pines", a stanza about "the longest train" and a stanza about a decapitation, but not all elements are present in all versions.

Starting in 1926, commercial recordings of the song were done by various folk and bluegrass bands. In a 1970 dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 permutations of the song. As well as rearrangement of the three frequent elements, the person who goes into the pines, or who is decapitated, is described as a man, woman, adolescent, husband, wife, or parent, while the pines can be seen as representing sexuality, death, or loneliness. The train is described as killing a loved one, as taking one's beloved away, or as leaving an itinerant worker far from home.

In variants in which the song describes a confrontation, the person being challenged is always a woman. The folk version by the Kossoy Sisters asks, "Little girl, little girl, where'd you stay last night? Not even your mother knows." The reply to the question, "Where did you get that dress/ And those shoes that are so fine?" from one version is, "From a man in the mines/ Who sleeps in the pines." The theme of a woman being caught doing something she should not is thus also common to many variants. One variant, performed in the early twentieth century by the Ellison clan (Ora Ellison, deceased) in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, tells of a young Georgia girl who flees to the pines after being raped. Her rapist, a male soldier, is later beheaded by the train.

Some versions of the song also reference the Great Depression, with the "black girl" being a hobo on the move from the police, who witnesses the murder of her father while train-jumping. She hides from this by sleeping in the pines, in the cold.

Notable versions

Bill Monroe

Bill Monroe's 1941 and 1952 recordings of the song, under the title "In the Pines," were highly influential on later bluegrass and country versions. Recorded with his "Bluegrass Boys" and featuring fiddles and yodelling, they represent the "longest train" variant of the song, and omit any reference to a decapitation. However, as Eric Weisbard writes in his 1994 New York Times article, "A Simple Song that Lives Beyond its Time," "...the enigmatic train is almost as frightening, suggesting an eternal passage: 'I asked my captain for the time of day/ He said he throwed his watch away.'"

Lead Belly

Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly recorded over half-a-dozen versions between 1944 and 1948, most often under the title, "Black Girl" or "Black Gal". His first rendition, for Musicraft Records in New York City in February 1944, is arguably his most familiar. Listed as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," this version appears on a number of Lead Belly "best-of" compilations, such as Absolutely the Best (2000).

Another familiar version was recorded for Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, in New York City. Listed as "Black Girl" or "In The Pines," this version appears on compilations such as Where Did You Sleep Last Night - Lead Belly Legacy Vol. 1 (1996), and The Definitive Lead Belly (2008).

Lead Belly is often attributed with authorship of the song, as on the version released by Nirvana on their MTV Unplugged album in 1994. However, Ledbetter discovered and reinterpreted it much like other musicians did before and after him. According to the American folklorist Alan Lomax, Lead Belly learned the song from someone's interpretation of the 1917 version compiled by Cecil Sharp, and by the 1925 phonograph recording.

Cajun versions

"In the Pines," converted into the Cajun French language and sung under the titles "Pine Grove Blues" or "Ma Negresse," became one of the landmark songs of Cajun music. The song is most associated with Nathan Abshire, the Louisiana Cajun accordion player, for whom "Pine Grove Blues" was his biggest hit. His melody is a hard-driving blues, but the lyrics, when translated to English, are the familiar "Hey, black girl, where did you sleep last night?" He recorded it at least three times, from the 1940s onward. Since then, Abshire's version has been covered by a wide variety of Cajun and zydeco musicians, including the Pine Leaf Boys, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, Beau Jocque, Fernest Arceneaux, Cedric Watson, and Corey Ledet.

The Four Pennies

The Four Pennies recorded and released "Black Girl" in October 1964. Following their number one hit "Juliet" and number 14, "I Found Out The Hard Way", both self-penned, their version was much played but only reached No. 20 in the British charts, though it also had some success in the U.S.A.

Nirvana

Promo single from Nirvana's 1994 album MTV Unplugged in New York

Nirvana occasionally performed the song during the early 1990s. Singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain was introduced to the song by Mark Lanegan, and played guitar on a version on Lanegan's 1990 album, The Winding Sheet. Like Lanegan, Cobain usually screamed its final verse.

It is likely that Cobain referenced Lead Belly's 1944 Musicraft version for his interpretation of the song; this is the version Lanegan owned an original 78 rpm of, and the one Cobain's version most closely resembles, in lyrics, form and title. In a 2009 MTV article, Kurt Loder remembers arguing with Cobain about the song's title, with Cobain insisting, "But the Leadbelly version is called 'Where Did You Sleep Last Night,'" and Loder preferring the "In the Pines" title used by Bill Monroe (as well as Lead Belly).

Cobain earned critical and commercial acclaim for his acoustic performance of the song during Nirvana's MTV Unplugged appearance in 1993. This version was posthumously released on the band's MTV Unplugged in New York album the following year. A solo Cobain home demo, recorded in 1990, appears on the band's 2004 box set, With the Lights Out. It does not feature the final screamed verse of later versions.

Other artists

Jerry Reed recorded a version on "Jerry Reed Explores Guitar Country" released in 1969.

• Joan Baez's version appears on Very Early Joan, which includes performances from 1961 and 1963.
• Long John Baldry's "Black Girl," a duet with Maggie Bell, appears on It Ain't Easy. Baldry performed it and in Columbus, Ohio, on July 19, 2004, his last live performance in the USA before he died.
• Blood on the Saddle recorded a version featuring Annette Zilinskas for their 1986 album Poison Love (Chameleon Records CHLP-8601).
• Tracy Bonham performed "In The Pines" at a concert in Brooklyn on February 12, 2010.
• Gene Clark recorded the song for his 1977 album Two Sides to Every Story.
• Cryin' Sam Collins recorded a variant of this song called "Lonesome Road Blues" in 1930.
• Cows covered the song on the 1992 Sub Pop compilation album Smells Like Smoked Sausages.
• R. Crumb performed "In the Pines" in Hamburg, Germany in 2003. The only known release of this live performance is on R. Crumb's Music Sampler that is included with the R. Crumb Handbook.
• Della Mae's version appears on their 2010 EP, Acoustic.
• Bob Dylan performed the song on November 4, 1961 at the Carnegie Chapter Hall in New York City. He performed it again on January 12, 1990 at the Toad's Place in New Haven, Connecticut. Neither of these recordings has been officially released.
• Charlie Feathers recorded a version in the 1980s in Memphis.
• Jackson C. Frank's version appears on the second disc of Blues Run the Game.
• Grateful Dead recorded the song on July 17, 1966. It appears as "In The Pines" on their 2001 box set, The Golden Road.
• Micah P. Hinson performs "In the Pines" in his 2009 album All Dressed Up & Smelling of Strangers.
• Roscoe Holcomb recorded a version, available on The High Lonesome Sound.
• Peg Leg Howell recorded a traditional blues version with Eddie Anthony on fiddle as "Rolling Mill Blues" in 1929 for Columbia Records.
• Clifford Jordan recorded a 1965 jazz arrangement with singer Sandra Douglass.
• Dick Justice did a version called "Brownskin Blues" in 1929.
• The Kossoy Sisters recorded a version in their 1959 session with Erik Darling.
• Mark Lanegan's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" was recorded in August 1989, and appears on his 1990 debut solo album, The Winding Sheet.
• Courtney Love's band Hole covered the song frequently while touring for their first album Pretty on the Inside in 1991. Love would later marry Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who also covered the song (most notably on MTV's Unplugged in 1993), and she continued to play the song live following his death in 1994.
• The Louvin Brothers' version appears on the 1956 album, Tragic Songs of Life.
• My Own Private Alaska's version appears on their 2010 album Amen.
• The New Christy Minstrels, under the direction of Randy Sparks, recorded a version for their 1961 debut album on the Columbia label.
• Odetta recorded the song for her 2001 Lead Belly tribute album, Looking For A Home - Thanks to Leadbelly.
• The Osborne Brothers recorded a version for the album Up This Hill And Down (Decca DL-74767) in June 1966.
• Dolly Parton's live version was recorded in 1994. It appears on her album Heartsongs: Live From Home. "It's easy to play, easy to sing, great harmonies and very emotional," said Parton of the song, who learned it from elder members of her family. "The perfect song for simple people."
• John Phillips' version of "Black Girl" appears as a bonus track on the remastered CD of John Phillips (John, the Wolf King of L.A.) recorded in 1969.
• The Pleazers recorded "Poor Girl" in 1965. It was originally recorded as "Black Girl," but changed due to it being viewed as racist.
• Hugo Race performs "In The Pines" on his 2010 album Fatalists.
• Susheela Raman performed "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", on her 2007 album 33⅓.
• Dee Dee Ramone and Youth Gone Mad recorded a version on their 2002 album Youth Gone Mad featuring Dee Dee Ramone; the liner notes credited the song to Lead Belly.
• Jack Rose's version appears on his 2010 EP Ragged and Right.
• Doug Sahm of Sir Douglas Quintet recorded "In The Pines" on the Crazy Cajun label
• Pete Seeger's version of "Black Girl" appears on the 2002 Smithsonian Folkways re-release of recordings from the 1950s and 1960s entitled American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 1.
• Martin Simpson performed live in Edinburgh 2011.
• (Smog)'s version appears on his 2005 album A River Ain't Too Much to Love.
• Ralph Stanley and Jimmy Martin's version appears on their album First Time Together, released in 2005.
• Norma Tanega recorded the song in 1967. It appears as "Hey Girl" on her only album Walkin' My Cat Named Dog.
• Tiny Tim's version appeared 1966 on the B-side of his single "April Showers".
• Dave Van Ronk's version appears on The Folkway Years 1959 - 1961
• Alexander Veljanov's version appears on his album The Sweet Life, released in 2001
• Josh White's version of "Black Girl" appears on his 1955 25th Anniversary album, The Story of John Henry, a musical narrative. (Elektra 123)
• Doc Watson often performed the song, and a live recording exists, dating from the 1960s. He performed it faster than many other versions, accompanied only by his banjo.
• Josh White's recording of "Black Girl" on New York to London (2002).
• Piter Wilkens's version appeared on his 2010 album Fleanende Hollanner.
• Link Wray recorded two versions titled "Georgia Pines" and "In the Pines" on his 1973 folk-rock release Beans and Fatback.
• The Oakridge Boys Recorded a version of in the pines on their 1983 album Deliver
• Delaney Davidson recorded "In The Pines", on his album Self Decapitation.

Appearances

In films

• The song can be heard in the background of the Nicholas Ray film The True Story of Jesse James.
• A few lines of the song are sung by Sissy Spacek, playing Loretta Lynn, in the 1980 film, Coal Miner's Daughter.
• Lead Belly's version of the song appears in the 1997 horror film, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
• Sung at the funeral of Jo Van Fleet's character, Ella Garth, in the 1960 film Wild River.
• Part of the song can be heard at the end of the movie Lucky Number Slevin.
• The song is sung by Danielle Harris in the 2010 film Stake Land.
• This song is also sang by Sissy Spacek in her portrayal of Loretta Lynn in the 1980 movie Coal Miner's Daughter.

In plays

• The song appears in the 1958 play A Taste of Honey, by the British dramatist Shelagh Delaney. It is sung by the character Josephine, who replaces the lyric "black girl" with "black boy." The "black boy" in the play is her boyfriend Jimmy, a black sailor who impregnated her.
• The song also appears in the 2009 play Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Anna Friel as Holly Golightly. Sung acoustically by Holly at the front of the stage with just a guitar.

In literature

• The song is mentioned in Charles Frazier's novel Thirteen Moons. While writing of the progress of the railroad through North Carolina in the years following Reconstruction, the main character, Will Cooper, reminisces of a song "about pines and the head caught in the driving wheel and the body on the line, the narrator pleading to know where his woman slept last night."
• One of Manly Wade Wellman's fantasy stories about Silver John is "Shiver In The Pines", and makes reference to the song.
• The poet Alice Notley has written a book length poem sequence entitled "In The Pines" (2007).