Walky-Talky Jenny
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-04-09

Day 24 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex.com)

This has the saunter and the swagger of the southern mountaineers when they are having a luminous good time. Its style is comic rather than humorous; it has dangerous moods; its eyes have odd twinkles from under the hat brim; it says to the city slicker, "You all better looka out, we might be tellin' you to not let the sun go down on you hereabouts." 

This version of WalkyTalky Jenny" came from H. Luke Stancil of Pickens County, Georgia. He wrote the verses and monologues on the porch of the Holden home in Athens, Georgia, a house which is the residence of a niece and grandriiece of Alexander Stephens. Long ago, perhaps before the Civil War, a minstrel troupe played one-night stands in the valley towns, performed with this song, and it was picked up by the mountaineers and made into what we have here. The mingling of comic bucolic monologue with song lines arid chorus was a minstrel feature.