This powerful, timeless, traditional classic is best known via the scintillating version from Kurt Cobain in Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged in NYC show.
Topmost amongst the highlights of that show was the very intense performance by Kurt Cobain of Leadbelly’s version of
Where Did You Sleep Last Night.
Could Kurt perhaps have been making the lyrics autobiographical and been referring to a certain skank to whom he was attached?! Course not!
“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” was actually performed live by Nirvana a few times during the early 1990s.
Cobain was introduced to the song by his pal Mark Lanegan (formerly of Seattle’s excellent Screaming Trees), and Kurt even played guitar on Lanegan’s version! Like Lanegan too, Cobain usually screamed the song’s final verse. Imitation is the best form of flattery!
Cobain earned critical and commercial acclaim for his acoustic performance of the song during Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged appearance in 1993. This version was posthumously released on the band’s MTV Unplugged in New York album (and as a B-side on their recalled “Pennyroyal Tea” single) the following year.
A solo Cobain home demo of the song, recorded in 1990, appears on Nirvana’s 2004 box set, With the Lights Out. It does not feature the final screamed verse of later versions.
An electric version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” was recorded by Mark Lanegan in August 1989 and appears on his 1990 debut solo album, The Winding Sheet. Catch this track in the vid below at the end of the post. Also in the composite RAR below. Also here; Mark_Lanegan- Sleep_Last_Night.mp3
In 2006 the Twilight Singers toured with Lanegan as guest vocalist and performed the song live several times. Catch the Twilight Singers with Laneganthis performing this track in the vid below at the end of the post.
This classic Appalachian traditional song is more properly called “In the Pines“.
“In the Pines” – also known as “Black Girl” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” – is a traditional American folk song which dates back to at least the 1870s, and is believed to be Southern Appalachian in origin.
Over the years, the song has been sung by countless singers and has been recorded by many dozens of artists in numerous genres and in numerous versions.
The identity of the song’s original author is unknown. In fact the song has undergone so many mutations and transformations that, like many traditional songs, it does not, nor could not, have one person to whom authorship could properly be ascribed.
However, Kurt Cobain attributed authorship to Huddie William Ledbetter (January, 1888 – December 6, 1949) – better known as Leadbelly – who had recorded the song several times, beginning in 1944.
Nevertheless, the fact is that all the kernel elements of the song were written years before Leadbelly ever heard it – even years before Leadbelly was born!
Interestingly, and bizarrely, though, it does appear that Leadbelly did somehow manage to obtain legal copyright on the song!
Leadbelly did make small adaptations to certain versions of the song that had thertofore circulated to form his own version of the old song. However, the the version performed by Leadbelly (and covered by Mark Lanegan and Nirvana etc.) does not differ at all substantially from other, far older variants of the song, which, like Leadbelly’s, are performed in 3/4 time.
Bob Dylan, especially in his earliest days on the folk circuit, has performed “In the Pines” a number of times at his shows. The track also appears on a number of different Dylan bootlegs but a Dylan version was never officially recorded or released.
The version below is from a Dylan show at Carnegie Chapter Hall, NY November 4, 1961, as captured on the wonderful early Dylan bootleg Dylan’s Roots.
Dylan’s version is strongly based on Leadbelly’s with some small changes to the lyrics.
As referred to, this traditional Appalachian song dates back to the 1870s – most probably earlier – and, like countless other folk songs, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” was passed on from one generation and locale to the next by word of mouth.
Lyrics in some versions about “Joe Brown’s coal mine” and “the Georgia line” may date it to Joseph E. Brown, a former Governor of Georgia, who famously leased convicts to operate coal mines in the 1870s.
Over time the song evolved and acquired numerous variants, none of which are definitive.
The first printed version of the song, compiled by Cecil Sharp, appeared in 1917, and comprised just four lines and a melody.
The Cecil Sharp lines are:
Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me
Where did you stay last night?
I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines
And shivered when the cold wind blows
In 1925, a version of the song was recorded onto phonograph cylinder by a folk collector. This was the first documentation of “The Longest Train” variant of the song.
This variant includes at least one stanza about “The longest train I ever saw”. These go along the lines of the following (however, again there are sub-variations even within this variant!)
The longest train I ever saw
Went down that Georgia Line
The engine passed at six o’clock
and the cab went by at nine
The longest train I ever saw
was 19 coaches long
The only boy I ever loved
is on that train and gone
The kernel of “The Longest Train” stanza(s) originally comes from a separate song entirely, that over time merged into “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”.
Yes, there does actually exist a totally separate traditional song known as “The longest train I ever saw”, wherein are essentially the same lines;
The longest train I ever sawRun by Joe Brown’s coal mineThe headlight passed at six o’clockThe cab came by at nine
The prettiest girl I ever saw
Is on that train an’ gone
Her eyes were blue, her cheeks was brown
An’ her hair is hung way down
Th train it wrecked at four miles
It killed my Evalane
Her head was found in th driver’s seat
Her poor body hain’t been found
Th longest way, th longest day
The longest night
Was th day Evalane died
I walked th track
Whole day alone
I bowed my head an’ cried
Th long steel rail, the short cross ties
They carried away
The arms that brought me safely here
But I’ll make it home, someday
thanks to maxhunter.missouristate.edu
And where is any proper traditional song without death and sadness!
Where Did You Sleep Last Night, in many variants, tells of the grisly decapitation of the protagonist’s loved one, often ascribed to a train.
Early renditions, wherein mention is made that someone’s “head was found in the driver’s wheel”, usually make clear that a train caused the decapitation.
However, a number of later versions would drop the reference to the train and reattribute the cause of the decapitation/ death to different and various sources.
Music historian Norm Cohen, in his 1981 book “Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong,” states that eventually the song came to consist of three frequent elements:
- a chorus about “in the pines”,
- a stanza (or more) about “the longest train”
- a stanza (or more) about a decapitation.
However, not all elements are present in every version!
In the Leadbelly version, the “in the pines” chorus is prominent but the longest train verse is excluded entirely.
However, the death of the protagonist’s loved one is clearly stated and it’s cause attributed indirectly to a train. In rather macabre fashion, only the corpse’s head is found!
Her husband, was a hard working man
Just about a mile from here
His head was found in a driving wheel
But his body never was found
In a 1970 dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 permutations of the song.
McCulloh’s findings included facts such as that, as well as rearrangement of the three frequent elements, the person who goes into the pines or who is decapitated has been described as a man, a woman, an adolescent, a wife, a husband or a parent, while the pines have represented sexuality, death or loneliness.
The train has been described killing a loved one, as taking one’s beloved away or as leaving an itinerant worker far from home.
In variants where the song describes a confrontation, the person being challenged is always a woman, and never a man. The Kossoy Sisters folk version asks, “Little girl, little girl, where’d you stay last night? Not even your mother knows.”
The reply to one version’s “Where did you get that dress, and those shoes that are so fine?” is “from a man in the mines, who sleeps in the pines.”
The theme of a woman who has been caught doing something she should not is also common to many variants.
One variant, sang in the early twentieth century by the Ellison clan (Ora Ellison, deceased) in Lookout Mountain Georgia, told of the rape of a young Georgia girl, who fled to the pines in shame. Her rapist, a male soldier, was later beheaded by the train. Mrs. Ellison had stated that it was her belief that the song was from the time shortly after the civil war.
The only conclusion to be drawn is that this great song, over many many years, took on a life of it’s own, mutated into countless versions – even absorbing other songs into the mix – but retained it’s inherent, elemental power, it’s timelessness!
Here are the lyrics to the best known version, officially ascribed to the great Huddie Ledbetter!
My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, where will you go
I’m going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
Her husband, was a hard working man
Just about a mile from here
His head was found in a driving wheel
But his body never was found
My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, where will you go
I’m going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, where will you go
I’m going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
Nirvana perform Where Did You Sleep Last Night at their MTV Unplugged Show in 1993
Cream combined Clapton’s blues guitar playing with the powerful voice and intense basslines of Jack Bruce and the jazz-influenced drumming of Ginger Baker. They have sold over 35 million albums worldwide, while their 
The event was simply billed as “Willie Nelson Sings the Blues,” but the historic two-night stand on January 12 and 13, 2007 at Jazz at Lincoln Center was far more than that. Call it a summit meeting between two American icons, Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis, two of the most significant figures in modern-day country and jazz, who discovered common ground in their love for jazz standards and the blues.
