The Texas Playboys and an 1856 anti-slavery song

In an episode of the British police procedure show McDonald and Dodds, a jazz club singer sang a song with these lyrics:  

“They like to chat about the dresses they will wear tonight; 

They chew the fat about their tresses and the neighbor's fight; 

Inconsequential things that men don't really care to know 

Become essential things that women find so ‘apropos.’"

The third line was intriguing, “Inconsequential things that men don’t really care to know.” 

Search for that line resulted in identification of the song as “Girl Talk,” written by Bobby Troup. Him I knew as husband of jazz singer Julie London. Another search was necessary to find out more about the song.

That search led to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, specifically to Leon McCauliffe, who recorded Troup’s “Three Little Bears.” Following on, McCauliffe was listed as recording “Faded Love” in 1962. For years, that Bob Wills song was determined the best country-western song ever written. Search on “Faded Love” showed that the song was patterned after Darling Nelly Gray, “a 19th century anti-slavery song written and composed by Benjamin Hanby in 1856.” A look at the lyrics shows that Faded Love fits the rhythm and pattern of Nelly Gray:

There's a low, green valley, on the old Kentucky shore.
Where I've whiled many happy hours away,
A-sitting and a-singing by the little cottage door,
Where lived my darling Nelly Gray.

Chorus
Oh! my poor Nelly Gray, they have taken you away,
And I'll never see my darling any more;
I'm sitting by the river and I'm weeping all the day.
For you've gone from the old Kentucky shore.

(Full lyrics are easily found by search.)

Musicians have borrowed tunes since…, forever. It’s possible that David as a shepherd borrowed harp tunes for his own use. He was known to use possessions of another.

Finding Faded Love an offspring of an anti-slavery song really wasn’t a surprise, considering Bob Wills’ Take Me Back to Tulsa, and the line “Black folks pick the cotton, white folks get the money.”