“Polly Wolly Doodle”

While they all sat in the soft spring twilight, Pa played and sang… His mood changed, and so did the fiddle’s… — These Happy Golden Years, Chapter 18, “The Perry School”

     
Polly Wolly Doodle was introduced by Daniel Decatur Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s and is a popular children’s song today. The origin of the song is unknown, but it may well have its origins as a song sung by slaves in the south.

Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815-1904) was born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, the son of a blacksmith. He was apprenticed to a printer, and worked for a newspaper as a teenager, but his strong interest in music was apparent. He taught himself to play the flute and violin, and enlisted in Army in 1834 as a fife player, falsifying his age. He was released the following year. In the late 1830s, Emmett worked for a circus, writing blackface songs and performing – both on banjo and singing. In 1842, he formed an act in which the “bones” were used as a musical instrument. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote that her father played the bones in the minstrel show performed for a Friday Night Literary in De Smet (see Little Town on the Prairie, Chapter 21, “The Madcap Days”).

In 1842, Dan Emmett (fiddle), Billy Whitlock (banjo), Dick Pelham (tambourine), and Frank Brower (bones) formed the Virginia Minstrels, performing as an “Ethiopian band” in blackface. They wore costumes of plantation workers and performed both as a coordinated team and as individuals. Their songs were a hit, but touring America and England was costly, and the group disbanded.

“Polly Wolly Doodle” appears in the existing manuscript for These Happy Golden Years exactly as it is used in the published version. It was not mentioned in any of the Pioneer Girl manuscripts.

     

“Polly Wolly Doodle” (THGY 18)
     “Oh I went down south for to see my Sal”