Here’s a tune with a spooky title to celebrate the beginning of Fall and approach of Halloween!

I learned this tune from a friend who had learned it in the Canotes’ string band class. They credit it to Street Butler (1904–1977, Kentucky) by way of Bruce Greene, but the tune as they play it is pretty significantly different from the 1976 field recording Greene made of Butler. I haven’t heard Greene play it, so I don’t know if the changes come from him or from Greg Canote. I put a little asterisk by the first note of the B part in this transcription, which means play that note as a B the first time through and as a G the second time.

Both versions of the tune seem more cheerful than the title might suggest, but in the field recording, Butler sings some lyrics which may connect the tune to an African-American spiritual song, putting it in a different context. Butler’s lyrics as I hear them are something like this:

Somebody’s buried in the graveyard,
Somebody’s buried in the sea,
Somebody’s buried in the graveyard,
That [unintelligible] of me.

Mudcat Cafe has a thread about a song with the same title which may be related, and in it are these lyrics:

Somebody’s buried in the graveyard,
Somebody’s buried in the sea,
Going to get up in the morning a shouting,
Going to join jubilee.

I’ve extracted the portion of the field recording where Butler plays his version, which he attributes to someone whose name I didn’t catch, and included it below. I’ve also made a transcription of what I hear, except that Butler leaves a beat out or adds an extra beat in a few measures, which I’m taking as an indication that (as he says in the recording) he wasn’t entirely sure he was remembering the tune right. I’ve adjusted the pitch of the recording up a bit, since either he was tuned a little lower than cross-G or the recorder was running a little fast, and I’ve made the transcription an even number of beats and indicated repeats for each part that Butler mostly doesn’t play.

Street Butler playing his version, extracted from the field recording at the Berea College Special Collections & Archives:

Here’s me playing my interpretation of that:

I wish I knew more about either Street Butler (and what a great name that is) or this tune. If anyone has more information, please let me know in the comments!

Here are the two versions with playable MIDI and ABC transcriptions in Michael Eskin’s ABC Tools site:

• Canote/Greene version: https://baz.link/graveyard-greene
• Butler version: https://baz.link/graveyard-butler

—Josh

Gravestone image credit: CoolGuySlate, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons