Johnny Get Your Hair Cut Lesson

A documented Pennsylvania performance

The firmest starting point for Johnny Get Your Hair Cut is not a guessed composer or a nostalgic date. It is a field record. Folklorist Samuel P. Bayard wrote down a setting played by Mrs. Sarah Armstrong, near Derry in southwestern Pennsylvania, on 18 November 1943. He published it as tune 71 in Hill Country Tunes in 1944.

Armstrong’s notation is in D major and contains several strains. Bayard’s note explains that the first strain was also sung locally to short haircut and dog-bite jingles. He had encountered similar refrains elsewhere in the United States, but often with different tunes. That warning matters: a floating phrase can travel between games, sayings, and melodies without preserving one fixed “original.”

Bayard also found a Pennsylvania play-party song built from the melodic fragment. Other versions had different second sections, and the third part of Armstrong’s instrumental setting appeared unique in his evidence. He cautioned that traditional players could attach extra parts to an older air. The archive therefore preserves a living tune family, not a single composition frozen by one author.

Who Bayard was and why the collection matters

Bayard was a major scholar of Anglo-American instrumental tradition. Research on his Pennsylvania State University archive describes Hill Country Tunes as one of the earliest scholarly collections devoted to American instrumental folk music. It contains 95 tunes and variants from nine musicians, transcribed from players in western Pennsylvania and supplied with comparisons to other sources.

That method makes the volume especially useful here. Bayard did not merely reprint a commercial songbook title. He named the performer, place, and date; notated what was played; and discussed variant relationships. This lets us distinguish three separate things:

1. Armstrong’s particular 1943 performance;
2. the wider family of sung refrains and play-party fragments;
3. Whisflo’s former eight-bar teaching arrangement and the present full transcription.

Confusing those layers would erase the very variation that the field record documents.

Whisflo now follows the complete archive notation

The earlier Whisflo file kept only a simplified relative of Armstrong’s first strain. The revised score instead transposes Bayard’s complete D-major notation down to C, retaining the G4 pickup, the E4 turn in the first strain, the two short G4 attacks in its third bar, and both later strains.

The first four-bar strain is played twice as Bayard marks it. An eight-bar high strain then reaches A5, and an eight-bar low strain returns as far as C4. Repeats are written out so playback follows the archival form directly.

A refrain with more than one branch

The Folk Music Index separates at least two entries under this title. One points to Sarah Armstrong and Bayard, with links to related haircut and dog-bite refrains. Another connects the title to Hey Betty Martin, a widely circulated Anglo-American singing-game tune, and to later teaching books.

Carl Sandburg printed Hey Betty Martin in The American Songbag in 1927. His commentary reports that a haircut form was sung in corn-belt towns in the early 1890s, when bobbed hair could attract teasing. He also relays family memories that attached other words to related music in earlier war periods.

Those reports are valuable evidence of circulation, but they do not prove an uninterrupted musical lineage back to the War of 1812 or the Civil War. Oral memories can preserve history while also combining words, occasions, and tunes. The secure claim is that related refrains were already circulating by Sandburg’s reported 1890s context and were published by 1927. The more dramatic war-era ancestry remains a reported tradition, not a note-by-note documentary chain.

The Kodály Center classifies Hey Betty Martin as a widespread Anglo-American action song with a compact range, question-and-answer character, and an aa′ form. This helps explain why the tune family works so well for movement and elementary teaching, even though it does not turn every title variant into the same melody.

From play parties to children’s songs

Bayard’s play-party reference places part of the tune’s history in a particular American social practice. The Library of Congress explains that play-party songs began largely as young people’s party material. In communities where religious rules discouraged dancing to instruments, singing games could provide movement, courtship, and group recreation without formally becoming a dance.

Smithsonian Folkways similarly describes nineteenth-century play parties as unaccompanied songs whose words often cue actions. Over time, much of this repertory moved into children’s singing games. Children also continually borrowed from popular, political, and dance music, reshaping words and melodies for new generations.

That process fits Bayard’s evidence: a short refrain can be sung, danced, teased, or played on a fiddle; its second part can change; and its title can migrate. It is safer to speak of a tune and refrain family than to invent one definitive lyric, composer, or birth date.

The Clarke tin-whistle teaching route

The Irish Traditional Music Archive catalogues Bill Ochs’s course The Clarke tin whistle since 1843. Its lesson 5 includes Johnny Get Your Hair Cut. The Folk Music Index also points to page 24 of Ochs’s The Clarke Tin Whistle, published in editions from 1988 onward.

Several surrounding repository titles appear in the same teaching sequence catalogued by ITMA. This makes a Clarke-course lineage for the title probable, although the revised notation itself now follows Bayard’s archival tune directly.

The evidence is not yet complete enough to say that Whisflo copied Ochs note for note: the consulted catalogue lists lesson contents but does not display his notation. The careful chain is:

1. Bayard documents an older Pennsylvania fiddle and play-party branch;
2. later indexes connect the title to elementary tune books;
3. Ochs includes it in a Clarke whistle course;
4. Whisflo presents the complete Bayard setting as a transposed, slide-free intermediate arrangement.

That pathway explains the compact form without pretending that each transmission preserved every pitch.

Beware of the modern title collision

Search results also show Johnny, Get Your Hair Cut!, a piano solo credited to composer Lynn Freeman Olson and dated 1991. It is a modern, separately authored work. A nearly identical title is not enough to merge it with the traditional tune family.

This is a useful research lesson. Titles made from everyday phrases are not unique identifiers. Before borrowing a composer, date, key, or recording, the melody and publication context must be checked. Olson’s piece belongs to its own catalogue; Armstrong’s setting and Whisflo’s lesson belong to a different evidence trail.

What the complete Whisflo score contains

The revised score is in C major, 4/4, at 116 BPM. It spans C4–A5, uses all seven natural notes, has no accidentals, and keeps the slide released. Its 24 bars form A–A–B–C: a four-bar strain twice, then two different eight-bar strains.

Begin the A strain slowly and preserve its pickup. Bar 2 is A4–G4–E4–G4, not the former A–G–A–G simplification. In bar 3, the last G4 is attacked twice as eighth notes.

The B strain moves into C5–A5 and alternates dotted-quarter-plus-eighth figures with flowing eighth-note runs. The C strain drops to C4 and answers with a broader low-register contour. Practise each strain separately before joining the 24-bar pass.

At 116 BPM, keep the archival reel/polka character lively but controlled. The nylon-guitar voice softens the edge while leaving every short attack clear.

What can responsibly be said

The song has a real and interesting history precisely because the evidence shows change. A named Pennsylvania musician played a multi-part version in 1943. Bayard related its first strain to floating jingles and a play-party fragment. Sandburg and later indexes reveal another network around Hey Betty Martin. A Clarke whistle course carried the title into modern instrumental teaching. Whisflo now offers Bayard’s complete three-strain setting in C major for chromatic harmonica.

No single source proves an original composer, one immutable melody, or a direct war-era origin. Those gaps should remain visible. The best introduction is not the most dramatic story; it is the one that lets the performer hear how a small traditional phrase travelled, changed, and became teachable.