(I have just discovered as I’m writing this that Stuart Williams also featured this as a tune of the month back in 2003, and it’s in the Evergreen Fiddler Tunebook Volume II. Well, it’s still a good tune, and I’ve already posted my video to YouTube, so I’m sticking with it. But I’ll try to remember to check the list of past tunes before starting next time.)

Sam and Elzie, or Sam and Elsie, or Crooked Road (although see later for a note about that title), is a tune I think I first heard from the Canotes on their “Sugarbaby” CD. I’d forgotten it until it came up on a random play of my phone’s music library while driving recently, and I was reminded what a good tune it is. According to the liner notes, the Canotes got the tune this way:

Banjoist Harley Bray’s father, Monte Monroe Bray, used to hear this tune at dances around Oskaloosa, Illinois in the late 1920’s. Harley taught it to Vivian Williams, who showed it to David, who does it on the button box here. Whew!

The Williams’ Voyager Records site has a 1995 recording of Wilson Bray (1918–2007) playing it in a jam in 1995 when he came from Illinois to attend the NW Folklife festival. And according to the liner notes there:

It is believed that the tune was named for Sam and Elzie Crutchfield, father and son, who ran square dances in the early 1900s near Omega, Illinois.

Sam would be Samuel Taylor Crutchfield (1851–1923) and Elzie would be Elza Otis “Elzie” Crutchfield (1884–1928). (Confusingly, Elza’s wife’s name was “Elsie”.) The Crutchfields and Brays all lived in downstate Illinois, as did the other source for this tune, Stelle Elam, a cousin of the Brays. You can hear a recording of her playing it, probably some time in the 1960s, on a 1972 album thanks to the Internet Archive. However, by the time the tune was collected by Chirps Smith and published in “Dear Old Illinois” (unfortunately out of print again), the name for the tune had been lost, and they used the title “Crooked Road” for publication. It’s not clear to me whether anyone plays it using that name, though — I can’t find any recordings of a tune with that title which sound like this tune, anyway. There’s more information about the history of the tune and the families involved in this Banjo Hangout thread.

There’s been some serious drift between the tune as Elam played it and how it was recorded by the Canotes, which makes sense, given that it came to them five or six steps removed, at one point through a banjo. It’s interesting that the parts have been reversed, though. I was just the other day having a conversation that involved speculation about whether there were regional preferences for starting a tune on the high part or the low part. I definitely prefer it with the low part first, like the Canotes and the Williams play it, but both Bray and Elam play it with the high part first.