Annotation:Want to go to Meeting and Got No Shoes

Back to Want to go to Meeting and Got No Shoes

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WANT TO GO TO MEETING AND GOT NO SHOES. Old Time, Breakdown. USA, Mississippi. A Major. AEac# tuning (fiddle). AABBC. The tune is better known as “Calico” from the rhyme:

Don’t care where in the world I go,
Can’t get around for the calico.

Tom Rankin (1985) believes the title “Want to go to Meeting and Got No Shoes” is “almost certainly” the second line of a rhyme as well. The source, Frank Kittrell (b. 1871) of Lauderdale County, Mississippi, learned the tune from his uncle David Kittrell of the same county and recalled going to a party when he was ten years old (c. 1881) and hearing his uncle fiddle it while a cousin seconded on the straws. In 1939, when he recorded the tune, he told one of the collectors that, “Nowadays, they are playing ‘Turkey in the Straw’ and all this classical stuff.” The melody of the first phrase is similar to “Johnson Gals.” See also the related "Granny Went to Meeting with Her Old Shoes On" by Vernon and Zora Judd (Estill County, Ky.).

Source for notated version:

Printed sources:

Recorded sources: Document Records DOCD-8071, Frank Kittrell - "Mississppi Fiddle Tunes: 1939 Library of Congress Recordings Collected in Mississippi" (2015). Mississippi Department of Archives and History AH 002, Frank Kittrell – “Great Big Yam Potatoes: Anglo American Fiddle Music from Mississippi” (1985. Originally recorded for the Library of Congress in 1939).

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