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Mammoth Springs

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Make Me a Pallet On Your Floor


Doc and the late Merle Watson with Michael Coleman.

This song was made famous and probably written in it's current form by Mississippi John Hurt in the late 1920's. Another fellow, might have been Willie "Bunk" Johnson, claimed to have written it and copywrote it in 1934 or 5. The great W.C. Handy had fragments of the song in his "Atlanta Blues". Now after doing a little research I find that it was actually first published by white ethnomusicologist Howard Odum in 1911 in an academic journal. He wrote that he first heard it from an itinerant black guitar player in Lafayette County, Mississippi.

One of my old favorites to play. Doc does it in his beautiful and inimitable way.