It was twelve years ago that I took these pictures, at the old time music gathering at Lake Genero, in Hamlin Pennsylvania.  I was playing tunes with my friends Marty Lebenson and Matt McConeghy.  The little critter landed on my peghead while I was playing, and stayed long enough for me to snap a few pictures with my cellphone.  The early settlers gave the name to his species when they first came across his ancestors high in the oaks and elms of the old growth forests they encountered as they moved west from the coastal lowlands.  The called him the katydid, the onomatopoetic word they concocted to describe the sound the male insect makes to attract a female mate.  But those early Americans also took note that, unlike most other insects, the katydid didn’t sing his love song, he made the sound by rubbing the edge of one wing against the other, not unlike the way they produced a musical sound by drawing their bows across the strings of their violins.  The katydid, they decided, was Mother Nature’s fiddler.   I realize now that the little fellow I took pictures of a dozen years ago just wanted to join in the music.  Another one of life’s opportunities lost while I was busy with a camera.

The first recording of this tune, named after that flying grasshopper, was made by fiddler Lowe Stokes, accompanied by guitarist Mike Whitten, for Columbia Records back in 1929.  I went back to that recording to work up the tune on banjo.  The flip side of the 78rpm record was Take Me Back to Georgia.  A substantial number of the records were shipped with the labels reversed, which is why the tune is still known by the latter name in some places.  Both tunes are in the key of C.  

Stokes was born in Rome, Georgia in 1898. He first appeared on the old time music scene in 1924, when as a young upstart he beat time fiddle master John Carson in the contest at the Old Time Fiddlers’ Convention in Atlanta. He played Hell Broke Loose in Georgia in the contest, a tune that had been considered one of Carson’s masterpieces. The poet Stephen Vincent Benet read about Lowe’s victory in a magazine later that year, and wrote up the poem The Mountain Whippoorwill” (Or, How Hill-Billy Jim Won the Great Fiddlers’ Prize), about the Devil challenging a young fiddler to a contest at the crossroads. Billy Jim beats the Devil by playing Hell Broke Loose in Georgia. In 1928, one year before he made this solo recording of Katy Did, Stokes was invited to join the Skillet Lickers by his longtime friend Clayton McMichen. A couple of years later, he lost his right hand in a bar fight, or perhaps in a farming accident, as some in his family later said. McMichen fashioned a prosthetic attachment that would allow him to grip the bow effectively. You can see the attachment in the picture of him taken in his living room about fifty years later.

I only found one clawhammer rendition of Katy Did on the internets, but it is a truly wonderful one by now Vermont mountain man Tom MacKenzie, who has been a member of the BHO for the last twenty years.  Tom posted the video below nine years ago, and he is moving those fingers at a good clip of about 130bpm.  I am awestruck every time I listen to it, his playing is smooth and articulate, and nails the tune perfectly.   I stripped the audio from his video and slowed it down to about one-quarter speed to figuring out what he was doing, and tabbed out the first break, which I have attached in PDF format.  First of all, to my surprise, he only dropped his thumb once that I could tell, in the 4^th measure  I also like the way he starts off, just playing the 1^st string at the 2^nd fret, and letting that note ring alone for almost the entire first two beats, only pulling off at the very end.  The rest of the time he plays it with regular clawhammer strokes.  It’s as if he was saying at the start, I’m here to play the tune, not to show off, and then proceeds to show off how good he is. 

For the clawhammer players out there who aren’t retired and don’t have the extra hours in the week to learn all of those fancy notes, I have come up with a much simpler arrangement, also in double C, that you can learn in just a few minutes. Here’s what it looks like, below. I’ve also attached it in PDF format, and you can find a Tabledit (TEF) file uploaded to the BHO tablature list.

Walt Koken and Clare Milliner posted a video of Katy Did about five years ago, a very clean fiddle duet that really shows off the tune and their immense talent.  It is one of the videos in their long running series that they have dubbed Happy Hour!  I’ve used their videos many a time to learn a tune when some old timer’s original 78 or field recording was just too scratchy or muted to hear all the notes clearly.  Clare and Walt host the Brandywine Revival of Old Time Music festival every year in West Chester, Pennsylvania.  This years festival will be held the weekend of June 19^th.  I have attended several times, and highly recommend it. 

There are two audio files in the BHO archives of Katy Did that are well worth a listen.  The first is by long time member John D, who plays a really lively clawhammer version he posted in 2009.  It truly sparkles.  It’s a bit complex, so if you are not an experienced player, it will take a bit more time to wrap yourself around it.  But it represents some truly exemplary picking.

Katy Did by JohnD

Old timey five string banjo players are usually of the firm if sometimes unconscious opinion that old time music can only be played on a banjo with five strings, one of which is stunted in its growth.  But in the old days, when records spun around on the turntable at 78 revolutions per minute, there were a number of prominent 4 string players.  One was Shorty Lindsey, a tenor banjo picker who played with Seven Foot Dilly and His Dill Pickles, an old time band that competed with Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers around Atlanta in the late 20s.  Seven Foot Dilly was the nickname of John Dilleshaw, who was the singer and guitar player, who was actually just 6’7”.

So the second audio recording from the archives features an elegant rendition on banjo mandolin by Mark Ralston of Centre Hall, Pennsylvania.  Mark posted this elegant version back in 2012, when I was just an old man, not old, old.  Mark is a banjo picker, collector, and dealer, who I believe still sets up a booth every year at Clifftop.  Mark had placed the mandolin he is using here up for sale in the BHO classifieds, and the Katy Did recording was posted to show what it sounded like.  It’s probably sold by now. 

Katy Did by Mark Ralston

I first learned Katy Did in 2017.  I was in a sort of project here in Boston that started a few years earlier with my picking pals John Reddick, John Maguire, and Tim Rowell to learn every single key of C fiddle tune we could scrape together.  By the time we collapsed from C tune exhaustion, we had learned about seventy-five tunes.  Some you’d recognize right away, like Billy in the Lowground (we learned three versions), Denver Belle, I Don’t Love Nobody, Hell Broke Loose in Georgia, Listen to the Mockingbird, and Texas Gals.  But most of them were pretty obscure.  Here is my Katy Did:

I made this video not long after I first learned it.  I am picking three finger style on my 1928 Vega Tubaphone, equipped with a semi-fretless conversion neck tuned to double C, the tuning I now use for all of my C tunes. 

I have attached the tab of my arrangement in PDF format.  You can find a Tabledit (TEF) file of it on my website, here:

Katy Did 3 Finger Style by Don Borchelt

I like the double C tuning for a lot of reasons, perhaps the most important that I can pick that open C on the 2^nd string as a drone (along with the 4^th), even when I am fretting way up the neck.  It will keep ringing until it gets tired out, or I end up fretting the string to get a note I can’t easily get anywhere else at the time.  You can see this immediately in the first four measures, where I dance around the open 2^nd string, sometimes using the note for melody, and sometimes just as part of the roll pattern, to create a droning effect. At the beginning of the 2^nd beat of that 1^st measure, I move the melody note down an octave, again to create the drone effect.  In the second time through the low part, though, I shift to a more typical fingering, both to cozy up closer to the original fiddle melody, and also get the smooth slide on the 2^nd string that the semi-fretless fingerboard affords me.  Further down the melody, in measure 14, I syncopate the melody a little bit.  The notes to emphasize are highlighted in yellow.  You might notice that at the end of each four measure high part, Tom Mackenzie jumps up to a high C and comes down to resolve the melody.  That is how my friends played it, and how most old time musicians do it today.  Lowe Stokes doesn’t do that in the original Columbia recording, and that’s how it is worked up here in my tab. 

The tab does include an up the neck break that will test your patience, but it isn’t very complicated, and mostly uses basic roll patterns.  Lowe Stokes ends the tune at the end of low part, and I follow his lead.

Now, if you are at all curious about  what a real katydid sounds like, take a listen to this video:

- Don Borchelt

Katy Did-3 Finger Style by Don Borchelt

Katy Did-Clawhammer Tab

Tom Mackenzies's Katy Did

 

Edited by - Don Borchelt on 01/23/2026 19:11:49

Edited by - Don Borchelt on 01/25/2026 07:56:01

Edited by - Don Borchelt on 01/29/2026 06:18:46

Edited by - Noah Cline on 01/29/2026 11:09:55