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Gittin' Upstairs (Such a Getting Upstairs)
Old-Time, Breakdown. USA; Virginia, southwestern Pa., Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky.
ARTIST: "Never Seen The Like Since Getting’ Upstairs" by "Skillet Lickers" Columbia 15472 - D Issued: October 1929
CATEGORY: Fiddle and Instrumental Tunes DATE: 1830’s Minstrel song;
RECORDING INFO: County 786, Clyde Davenport (Ky.) - "Traditional Music From the Cumberland Plateau, Vol. 1."
OTHER NAMES:"Sich A Getting Upstairs" "Such A Getting Upstairs," "Asa Hoge Tune," "Never Seen The Like;"
SOURCES: George Strosnider (elderly fiddler from Greene County, Pa., 1930's), Irvin Yaugher (fiddler from Fayette County, Pa., 1946; learned from his great-uncle), Frank Thomas (elderly fiddler from Somerset County, Pa., 1946), Thomas Hoge (fiddler and fifer from Greene County, Pa., 1944; as he fiddled it in the 1870's), and Hiram White (elderly fiddler from Greene County, Pa., 1930's) [Bayard]; James H. "Uncle Jim" Chisholm (Albmarle County, Va) [Wilkinson]. Bayard (Dance to the Fiddle), 1981; No. 170A-E, pgs. 122-123. Ford (Traditional Music in America), 1940; pg. 239. Wilkinson (Southern Folklore Quarterly), 1942; pg. 4.
NOTES: D Major (Bayard): G Major (Bayard). Standard. AB. An early version of the tune was published by George P. Knauff in his Virginia Reels, volume IV (Baltimore, 1839). Samuel Bayard (1981) thinks the tune may have originated as a stage or vaudeville number, and indeed, it was adopted by American minstrels and was first published as a minstrel song in the 1830's. It was in the repertoire of minstrel Thomas "Daddy" Rice and Sigmund Spaeth reports it was sung by P.T. Barnum in black-face. The minstrel publication mentions its interpretor as "Mr. Bob Farrell, the Original Zip Coon." The song was said by Brown to have been featured by one Barney Burns, a low comedian connected with a rural travelling circus in the mid-nineteenth century. Several writers, beginning with Winston Wilkinson (Southern Folklore Quarterly, Vol. VI, No. 1, March 1942, "Virginia Dance Tunes"), have found that "Such a Getting Upstairs" is derived from the morris dance tune "Getting Upstairs," collected by Cecil Sharp and published in 1909.
Headington Morris Dance 'Getting Upstairs', which has the snippet:
Some likes coffee, some likes tea
Some likes a pretty girl, just like me
Such a getting upstairs and a playing on the fiddle
Such a getting upstairs I never did see
Such a Getting Upstairs from Bodley Library also appears as:
“The Wedding of England's Queen” (To the tune- Sich a Gittin Upstairs)
There'll be such a running round the palace
And playing on the fiddle
When the Queen gets married
You never did see.
And also from Bodley, “Such A Getting Out of Bed”:
Oh is it not most strange to think
All night long I can't sleep a wink
Some constant care my mind perturbs
And all my downy sleep disturbs.
For I've such a getting out of bed
For some cause or other
Such a getting out of bed
You never did see.
MORE NOTES:Henry Reed's fiddle playing of "Such a Getting Upstairs" can be heard online with some notes. "Sich a Gittin Up Stairs" in George Knauff's Virginial Reels (1839) is transcribed for guitar in Joseph Weidlich, Virginia Reels (Centerstream, 1999) [CD included].
There is a song sheet (without music) containing "Sich a Gitting Up Stairs" in America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets, Library of Congress. This was "Sold by L. Deming, wholesale and retail, No. 62, Hanover Street, 2d door from Friend Street, Boston, and at MIDDLEBURY, Vt.," and begins with:
On a Suskyhanner raft I come down de bay,
And I danc'd, and I frolick'd, and fiddled all de way.
Sich a gitting up stairs I never did see, &c.
Trike he to and heel--cut de pigeon wing,
Scratch gravel, slap de foot--dats just de ting.
Sich a gitting up stairs, &c.
"Such a Getting Upstairs" as a going-up-to-bed song from Indiana is in Ruth Crawford Seeger's American Folk Songs for Children (Doubleday, 1948, p.53) with music:
Such a getting upstairs I never did see,
Such a getting upstairs it didn't suit me.
In her notes, Ruth says: "It is the refrain of a play-party tune whose second section can be whistled or hummed or played, or sung with varying words like the following from Virginia: Some love coffee, some love tea, But I love the pretty girl that winks at me." The Indiana version is sung by Mike and Peggy Seeger in their Rounder album with the same title as the songbook's (LP & CD).
From Kuntz, A Fiddler's Companion, the lyrics often include a reference to coffee and tea:
Some love coffee, some love tea,
But I love the pretty girl that winks at me.
Such a gittin' up stairs you never did see,
Such a gittin' up stairs you never did see.
Cecil J. Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1932; 1966), no. 272 (the last song of the volume):
Some loves coffee, some loves tea,
Some loves money, but they don't love me.
Singing in the lonesome cowboyee,
Singing in the lonesome sea.
This was "sung by Mrs. Laurel Jones at Brurnsville, N.C., Sept. 17, 1918." The same version is also in his Nursery Songs from the Appalachian Mountains [1st series] (Novello, n.d.) with piano accompaniment, with copyright year 1921. The title given by both books is "Some Love Coffee" (with grammatical agreement corrected). The nursery song book version has the "Some love coffee" line; the rest is the same.
Leah Jackson Wolford in "The Play-Party In Indiana" (1916 Indiana Historical Commission) has four variants of "Getting Upstairs". "It is interesting to find "Hunt the Squirrel" and "Getting Upstairs" as morris dances in "The Morris Book" of Sharp and Macilwaine. (C. J Sharp and H C Macilwaine, Novello and Co., London, no date) We have also the game, "Hunt the Squirrel"...but it has no music. This play-party game, "Getting Upstairs", may be connected with the English dance of that name. The movements are not very different. The unusual complexity of this in comparison with most of the other games also suggests that a relationship exists."
NO MORE NOTES:The tune is probably the "Getting Upstairs" mentioned in a 1931 account of a LaFollette, northeast Tenn., fiddlers contest. It is similar to West Virginia fiddler French Carpenter's "Shelvin' Rock." The title appears in a list of traditional Ozark Mountain fiddle tunes compiled by musicologist/folklorist Vance Randolph, published in 1954. Wilkinson finds a variant of the melody as a play-party tune collected in Indiana, and in similar use by children in Liverpool, England (where they sing a rhyme beginning "Up the streets and down the streets," which Wilkinson sees as a possible morris dance relic). North Georgia fiddler Clayton McMichen, recording with the Skillet Lickers for Columbia in 1929 (No. 15472), sang the song as "Never Seen the Like Since Getting' Upstairs."
A "Gittin' Upstairs" was recorded by Ridgel's Fountain Citians in 1930 which uses the tune of "Shoot the Turkey Buzzard" for the Chorus. It has been categorized by Meade as "The Higher Up the Monkey Climbs."
Here are the Skillet Licker's lyrics to "Such A Gettin' Upstairs:
"Never Seen The Like Since Getting’ Upstairs" by "Skillet Lickers"
Columbia 15472 - D Issued: October 1929
(Fiddle intro)
Never seen the like since I’ve been born
Big cow jumped in the little cow’s horn.
Never seen the like since gettin’ upstairs
Never seen the like since gettin’ upstairs.
(Fiddle)
Went right down to the muddy muddy pond
*I got Joe’s boot but the heels was gone
The heels was copper and the toes was brass
I kept fallin’ out of Joe Buck’s boots.
(fiddle)
(sings partial lyrics)
(sings melody with: whee-hee whee- hoo)
Jump hi-diddy, jump high Joe,
Every time you’ll jump, you’ll jump Jim Crow
Jump hi-diddy, jump high Joe,
Never seen the like of that jumpin’ before.
(Fiddle)
*I’m a-goin back to the muddy muddy pond
I’m a-goin back to the hole in the ground.
(sings melody with: whee-hee whee- hoo)
*lyrics unclear
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