"Make Me a Pallet on the Floor" (also "Make Me a Pallet on your Floor", "Make Me a Pallet", or "Pallet on the Floor") is a blues/jazz/folk song. It is considered a standard.[1] As Jelly Roll Morton explained, "A pallet is something that – you get some quilts – in other words, it's a bed that's made on a floor without any four posters on 'em."[2]
Structure
The melody is 16 bars long.[2] One writer describes the structure as "a proto-blues [...that] has little in common
musically with regular blues".[3] When played in the key of C, the typical structure is:[3]
F
F
C
C
F
F
C
C
C
E 7
Am
Fm 6
C
D 7G 7
C
C
History
The composition probably originates from the end of the nineteenth century.[3] One jazz historian states that the song "could have been sung around New Orleans in the mid-1890s."[2] A 1906 report in the Indianapolis Freeman referred to a performance of the song by "The Texas Teaser, Bennie Jones".[2] It appeared in sheet music in 1908 as part of "Blind Boone's Southern Rag Medley No. One: Strains from the Alleys."[4] "The lyrics first appear in a 1911 article by folklorist Howard Odum, who had transcribed them from a performance he had heard in Mississippi a few years before."[3]
Some sources attribute the modern score to W. C. Handy, who later modified it into a song known as "Atlanta Blues".[5] He published "Atlanta Blues" in 1923, featuring lyrics credited to Dave Elman.[3] The first recording of the melody appears in Handy's band's 1917 performance of "Sweet Child", which was written by Stovall and Ewing.[3]
During a live session captured by Alan Lomax, Delta blues guitarist and singer Sam Chatmon accounted, "When I first started picking guitar it was about the first or the second [song] I learned ... [I] was about 4 years old",[7] making it the year 1900 when Sam learned the song in Bolton, Mississippi.
References
^Oricelli, Robert (2006). "Odetta". In Komara, Edward (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Blues. Routledge. p. 733. ISBN978-0-415-92699-7.
^ abcdefgMuir, Peter (2006). "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor". In Komara, Edward (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Blues. Routledge. pp. 648–649. ISBN978-0-415-92699-7.
^Blind Boone's Southern Rag Medley No. One: Strains from the Alleys. Allen Music Co. 908 Broadway, Columbia Missouri. 1908.