Little Maggie

The song comes from western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia, and its words belong to the same family as "Darling Corey," though the tune is different. Grayson and Whitter recorded it for Victor in 1928 as "Little Maggie with a Dram Glass in Her Hand," and the Stanley Brothers' 1946 record carried it into bluegrass.

Tommy Jarrell remembered it arriving around Round Peak, North Carolina, in about 1915, when the young people all took it up. His fourteen year old cousin Jullie was badly burned in a kitchen fire that year, and the one thing she asked for that evening was for him to play "Little Maggie" on the banjo. She died the next morning. According to Richard Nevins it had been played in nearby Grayson County, Virginia, a generation earlier.