In the Pines: A Guide
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Here’s Dock Walsh singing such a version for Columbia Records in 1926:
And here’s a 1927 version by the Tenneva Ramblers recorded as part of the Bristol Sessions:
A popular 1941 recording by Bill Monroe offered listeners a bluegrass version, leaving out the decapitation but adding in the whistles of the oncoming train:
Different but similar versions were recorded by J.E. Mainer, Roscoe Holcomb (love this one), and others. In Smog’s 2005 version, Bill Callahan picks up the traits of these bluegrass and hillbilly versions. I adore his haunting, slow-tempo rendition:
Through the 1970s many more versions were recorded by a range of artists, all of whom cut things here and added things there. The entertaining Cajun accordion player Nathan Abshire incorporated snippets of “In the Pines” into one of his most popular songs, “Ma Negresse,” sometimes called “Pine Grove Blues,” which he recorded several times. Pete Seeger, the Louvin Brothers, Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead, and numerous others also recorded notable versions.
Within these versions, the gaps proliferate. As Norm Cohen notes in Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong, the most frequently found elements are a verse about sleeping in the pines, a verse about a long train, and a line or two about a decapitation. Sometimes there is an accident, sometimes not. Sometimes the accident involves a train, sometimes not. Sometimes the pines become the central image, in various versions representing solace, pain, innocence, shame, life, death, taboo sex, or pious abstinence. Sometimes a specific crime is identified and the train serves as avenging angel, swooping down to decapitate the sinner. Sometimes the interrogator shifts from first to second or third person. Almost all versions do include some sort of interrogation, and the person being interrogated is always a woman. Sometimes the interrogator is also a woman, as in a version by the Kossoy Sisters in which a mother apparently interrogates her daughter (or, at least, you can interpret it that way).