The Old Grey Mare (She Ain’t What She Used to Be)

An American song and dance tune in G major, Roud 751, whose melody comes from the 1858 minstrel song “Down in Alabam’ (Ain’t I Glad I Got Out de Wilderness),” credited to J. Warner of Bryant’s Minstrels and published in New York by Wm. Hall & Son. The tune carried several sets of words through the nineteenth century, including the 1860 campaign parody “Old Abe Lincoln Came Out of the Wilderness,” and the familiar refrain beginning “The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be” attached to it later. Fiddlers in southwestern Pennsylvania knew it in AABB form in 2/4 or 4/4, and Bayard notated versions in Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife from the Hoge manuscript of 1944 and from Marion Yoders, a fifer and fiddler in Greene County, in 1963. Early commercial recordings include Prince’s Orchestra in 1917 and Arthur Collins with Byron Harlan in 1918.

Note: Shares a title with the nursery song in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, which carries a different text. Filed separately.