Talk:Knoxville Girls

Elizebethan song?

Isn't "Knoxville girl" an Elizabethan song that went up into the Appalachians in the 18th and 19th centuries and came back American? FWIW, I hung out w/ some New York punk bands when I was younger, and they would have known music trivia like that ... linas 05:17, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, Duhh, the Cramps/Congo Powers would have known the song, its classic Gun Club material too:

Colin Escott, a Canadian journalist (as quoted on http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/dulcimer2.html)

The Everly Brothers borrowed the sound of the Louvin Brothers. The Louvins sang an old murder ballad called 'The Knoxville Girl,' and if you dig around you'll find that the Blue Sky Boys recorded an even spookier version twenty years earlier, in 1937, and that the first recorded version dated all the way back to the dawn of the country music record business in 1924. Dig around some more and you'll find that the song came over from England as 'The Wexford Girl,' but what's really interesting is that 'The Wexford Girl' isn't really 'The Knoxville Girl.' Something happened in the darkness and isolation of Appalachia, something indefinable. It happened before the recording machine, and it happened in the little hollers [sic] and valleys. The American experience warped and transformed the immigrants, changing their music as it changed them. 'The Knoxville Girl' is eerier and darker than 'The Wexford Girl,' despite the fact that 'The Wexford Girl' is more explicit. (vii)

• Escott, Colin. Roadkill on the Three-chord Highway: Art and Trash in American Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2002.

linas 05:27, 1 November 2006 (UTC)