"Boil Them Cabbage Down" (also "Bile 'Em Cabbage Down") is an American folk song. Hoecakes are small cornmeal cakes that were baked over a fire on the blade of a hoe. A breakfast of hoecakes and cabbage soup testifies to the humble origins of this song. According to Alan Lomax, musicologist and folklorist formerly of the Library of Congress, this tune was originally associated with African slaves brought from Niger.
Contents
Notable versions of the song have been played by such artists as Pete Seeger, Ruby Jane Smith and the Smothers Brothers.
Content
As Byron Arnold and Bob Halli noted in An Alabama Songbook, the song, musically and lyrically, is far from stable, with verses being swapped at will by the performers, and is interchangeable with many other songs, including "Old Joe Clark" and "Cindy".
Music
This simple tune is often used in old-time music circles to teach young folks how to play the fiddle, banjo, mountain dulcimer and/or guitar. The following is the basic tune with the lyrics of the chorus. These tabs assume the player has a diatonically fretted instrument tuned to one of the 1-5-8 open tunings like G-D-G or D-A-D, such as one might find on a mountain dulcimer or a stick dulcimer.
Here's the same tune tabbed for a chromatically fretted instrument like a tenor guitar (or banjo) tuned GDgd (or other 1-5-8-12 tuning).
The tablature below is for violin (or viola), using the 2-3 finger pattern most students learn first. Only 2nd and 3rd fingers are close together. The numbers followed by a dash are held twice as long as the rest of the notes. It may be played on any string, though it is usually done on the D string.
Lyrics
There are many different verses to this song, and only a few popular ones are listed here:
CHORUS: