In the Pines

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

"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 dozens of artists in numerous genres. A 1993 acoustic version by Nirvana introduced the song to many people at the end of the twentieth century. Kurt Cobain attributed authorship to Lead Belly, who had recorded the song several times, beginning in 1944, but the version performed by Lead Belly and covered by Nirvana does not differ substantially from other variants of the song.

Early history

Like numerous other folk songs, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" 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. This variant include a stanza about "The longest train I ever saw". "The Longest Train" stanzas probably began as a separate song that later merged into "Where Did You Sleep Last Night". Lyrics in some versions about "Joe Brown's coal mine" and "the Georgia line" may date it to Joseph E. Brown, a former Governor of Georgia, who famously leased convicts to operate coal mines in the 1870s. While early renditions that mention that someone's "head was found in the driver's wheel" make clear that the train caused the decapitation, some later versions would drop the reference to the train and reattribute the cause. Music historian Norm Cohen, in his 1981 book "Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong," states 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, though not all elements are present in all versions. Cohen goes on to characterize "The Longest Train"/"In the Pines" as a "song complex" with an unstable form because, as a lyric folksong, it lacks the narrative thread that organizes narrative folksongs. As lyric folksongs borrow verses from other songs and contribute in turn, it is sometimes difficult to determine the boundary when a song is a version of "In the Pines" or another song that has borrowed from it.

Starting the year following the 1925 recording, 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 has been described as a man, a woman, an adolescent, a wife, a husband or a parent, while the pines have represented sexuality, death or loneliness. The train has been described 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, and never a man. The Kossoy Sisters folk version asks, "Little girl, little girl, where'd you stay last night? Not even your mother knows." The reply to one version's "Where did you get that dress, and those shoes that are so fine?" is "from a man in the mines, who sleeps in the pines." The theme of a woman who has been caught doing something she should not is thus also common to many variants. One variant, sang in the early twentieth century by the Ellison clan (Ora Ellison, deceased) in Lookout Mountain Georgia, told of the rape of a young Georgia girl, who fled to the pines in shame. Her rapist, a male soldier, was later beheaded by the train. Mrs. Ellison had stated that it was her belief that the song was from the time shortly after the U.S. Civil War.

The song can also have reference to the depression, "black girl" being a hobo on the move from the police, who witnesses the murder of her father who was train jumping. From this she runs into the Pines, sleeping in the cold.

Notable versions

• Peg Leg Howell recorded a traditional blues version as "Rolling Mill Blues" in 1929 for Columbia Records; also performed with Eddie Anthony on fiddle and recorded as "The Rolling Mill Blues" in the late 1940s.
• Bill Monroe's 1941 and 1952 recordings with his Bluegrass Boys were highly influential on later bluegrass and country versions. Fiddles and yodeling are used to evoke the cold wind blowing through the pines, and the lyrics suggest a quality of timelessness about the train: "I asked my captain for the time of day/He said he throwed his watch away". His rendition is slower than the versions performed by Lead belly and others.
• 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.
• Nathan Abshire, a Louisiana Cajun accordion player, recorded a distinct variation of the song, sung in Cajun French, under the name "Pine Grove Blues." 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?" It became his theme song and he recorded it at least three times from the 1940s onward. The Pine Leaf Boys have recorded a version based on Abshire's.
• Pete Seeger's version of "Black Girl" appears on the 2002 Smithsonian Folkways re-release of recordings from the 1950s and the 1960s entitled American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 1.
• The Louvin Brothers' version appears on the 1956 album, Tragic Songs of Life.
• The Kossoy Sisters recorded "In the Pines" in their 1959 session with Erik Darling.
• 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.
• The New Christy Minstrels, under the direction of Randy Sparks, recorded a version for their 1961 debut album on the Columbia label.
• Joan Baez's version appears on Very Early Joan (performances between 1961 and 1963).
• Doc Watson often performed the song, and a live recording exists, dating from the 1960s. He sang it faster than most other versions, accompanied only by his banjo.
• Roscoe Holcomb recorded a version, available on The High Lonesome Sound.
• Jackson C. Frank's version appears on the second disc of Blues Run the Game.
• Clifford Jordan's 1965 jazz arrangement with singer Sandra Douglass.
• The Four Pennies recorded and released "Black Girl" in October 1964, which reached No. 20 in the British charts.
• The Pleazers recorded "Poor Girl" in 1965. It was originally recorded as "Black Girl," but changed due to it being viewed as racist.
• Grateful Dead recorded the song on July 17, 1966. It appears as "In The Pines" on their 2001 box set, The Golden Road.
• Norma Tanega recorded the song in 1967. It appears as "Hey Girl" on her only album Walkin' My Cat Named Dog.
• 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.
• Long John Baldry's "Black Girl," a duet with Maggie Bell, appears on It Ain't Easy.
• Dave Van Ronk's version appears on The Folkway Years 1959 - 1961.
• Link Wray recorded two versions titled "Georgia Pines" and "In the Pines" on his 1973 folk-rock release Beans and Fatback.
• The Osborne Brothers recorded a version for the album Up This Hill And Down (Decca DL-74767) in June 1966.
• Gene Clark recorded the song for his 1977 album Two Sides to Every Story.
• Charlie Feathers recorded a version in the 1980s in Memphis.
• Blood on the Saddle recorded a version featuring Annette Zilinskas for their 1986 album Poison Love (Chameleon Records CHLP-8601).
• 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.

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

• Nirvana occasionally performed "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" during the early 1990s. Singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain was introduced to the song by Lanegan, and played guitar on the latter's version. Like Lanegan, Cobain usually screamed the song's final verse. 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 of the song, 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.
• 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."
• Odetta, the American folk/blues singer, recorded the song for her 2001 tribute album to Lead Belly, Looking For A Home - Thanks to Leadbelly.
• 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.
• Ralph Stanley & Jimmy Martin's version appears on their album, First Time Together, released in 2005.
• (Smog)'s version appears on his 2005 album A River Ain't Too Much to Love.
• Josh White's recording of "Black Girl" on New York to London (2002).
• Susheela Raman performed "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", on his 2007 album 33 1/3.
• Tracy Bonham performed "In The Pines" at a Brooklyn gig on February 12, 2010.

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.

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 lead 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 the minstrel-hero Silver John is "Shiver In The Pines", and makes reference to the song.