Annotation:Stacked 'em up in Piles

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STACKED ‘EM UP IN PILES. American, Song & Breakdown. A Mixolydian. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB. From the playing of Copen, West Virginia, fiddler wikipedia:Melvin_Wine (1909-2003), who supposedly fashioned the tune from a Revolutionary War song. West Virginia musician and academic Gerry Milnes believes that it is connected with the Civil War and not an earlier conflict. Wine sings only this chorus:

We run 'em nine miles and we stacked 'em up in piles,
Besides what got drownded in the river.

One verse only for the song, collected in West Virginia, appears in Cox’s Folk Songs of the South where it is listed as "The War Song". The informant was a man from McDowell County, W.Va., who maintained he sang the song, accompanying himself on the fiddle, in a parade in Breathitt County, Kentucky. It goes:

Down in Bowling Green,
Such a sight was never seen,
The earth all stood in a quiver;
We run 'em twelve miles, and the devils laid in piles,
Besides what we drowned in the river.

Laws, in Native American Balladry, only mentions Cox's collected version, from which Milnes deduces it is a rare piece, given the thoroughness with which Laws investigated.

Additional notes

Recorded sources : - Augusta Heritage Records AHR 014, Melvin Wine – “Folk Music and Lore of the Civil War" (1994. Various artists). PearlMae 008-2, Jim Taylor & Friends - "Civil War Collection, vol. 2" (2001). Helena Triplett Faust & Jimmy Triplett – “Green are the Woods” (1999. Learned from Melvin Wine). Jack Krack & Doug Van Gundy – “Two Far Gone.”

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