Gypson Davy- McKinney (AR) 1973 (c.1820s)
[Tip Mckinney was a member of Pope's Arkansas Mountaineers, an old-time band that recorded in the 1920s. His versions came from his father, who learned them in Mary, Kentucky. McKinney estimates the song in 1973 to date to "hundred and fifty years old at the least calculation," or at least 1823.
There's a recording by Missouri Friends of the Folk Arts, MFFA 1001 ('I'm Old But I'm Awfully Tough') by Lee Finis Cameron (Tip) McKinney. Cf. Stein version from Missouri.
R. Matteson 2012]
Pope's Arkansas Mountaineers: An Interview with Tip Mckinney by Julia Hager and Jim Olin in the spring of 1973 originally printed in the Missouri Friends of the Folk Arts Newsletter.
Your father was born in Kentucky?
Yeh, he was borned over there. He lived in a little place called Mary, Kentucky. When he come over here, they had a big concert of some kind at a schoolhouse one night. Out here at Center Hill, a little place just nine miles out from here. And he went. And they had him up and he won the blue ribbon of singing that night.
I don't know just what it was that he sang. Back in the fall of 1870, my father came here from Kentucky, and that's when he won that blue ribbon.
What kind of songs did your daddy sing?
Well, he’d sing religious songs most of the time. But some of them would be kind of foolish. Well, we heard him sing, you know. But we didn't sing songs like he did, though. I'll sing one like he used to sing. He’d sing some of them to tell us how it was then.
GYPSON DAVY
Go fetch out that little black horse
The speediest one of any,
And I'll ride down to the maple swamp
And see if I can overtake her.
CHORUS: Swaddle loliddy liddy liddy
Straddle I liddy lidee
Straddle addle liddy, pretty all day.
She's gone with the Gypson Davy.
So I rode down to the maple swamp
It looked so deep and muddy,
And I looked o'er on the other side
And there I spied my lady.
CHORUS
So I looked o'er that sheathing ridge
It looked so bric [bright] and gaily,
Enough to make the wildwood ring
And charm the heart of a lady.
CHORUS
And you forsake your house carpenter
And you forsake your baby,
And you forsake your own lords son
And go with the Gypson Davy.
CHORUS
Oh, last night I lay in my warm bed
With my arms on my sweet baby,
Tonight I lay in these wild woods
In the arms of the Gypson Davy.
CHORUS
Now he could sing songs like that. I just wanted to sing that one especially for you'uns because I've heard him get up of the mornin' early and he'd go to the barn, you know, to feed his horses, and we lived on a farm then, you'd know. And when he got up, why, he'd commence singing. And he'd sing first one kind of a song, then two, you know. But most of them was religious songs, don't you see. But held sometimes get off on some of those songs that he knowed.
I expect that thing's a hundred and fifty years old at the least calculation. If my Daddy was livin', he'd been 130 some-odd years and, you know, he learned that when he was a boy.