Yellow Rose of Texas

Old time song and breakdown in D major, traditional in Southern fiddling but traceable to the minstrel stage, where the words appeared anonymously in Christy’s Plantation Melodies No. 2 (Philadelphia, 1853) before an 1858 sheet music setting credited to a composer known only as J.K. The “yellow rose” of the title described a light-skinned woman of mixed African and European ancestry, and the minstrel lyric is sung in the voice of a Black man returning to her. As the melody moved into fiddling that reference faded from view, and some players came to know the tune as “Red Rose of Texas.” Tommy Jarrell played it in ADae tuning, having learned it from his father Ben Jarrell, who recorded it with Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters for Gennett in 1927. The New Lost City Ramblers cut it on String Band Instrumentals (Folkways FA 2492, 1964) and the Red Clay Ramblers on Stolen Love (Flying Fish FF 009, 1975).