Walking in the Parlor

The tune goes back to the minstrel song "Walk in the Parlor," though some hear the English morris tune "Shepherd's Hey" in it. Records by D. Dix Hollis in 1924 and the Hill Billies in 1926 spread it through the South and Midwest. On the Hill Billies' New York session Tony Alderman and Fred Roe played the fiddles.

It was French Carpenter's favorite tune in West Virginia. His student Wilson Douglas said Carpenter learned it from an old woman fiddler named Trod Evans, and that it took him five years to get its swing right.