“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. Jelly Roll Morton explained the title: “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.”
The composition probably originates from the end of the nineteenth century. One jazz historian states that the song “could have been sung around New Orleans in the mid-1890s.” A 1906 report in the Indianapolis Freeman referred to a performance of the song by “The Texas Teaser, Bennie Jones”. It appeared in sheet music in 1908 as part of “Blind Boone’s Southern Rag Medley No. One: Strains from the Alleys.” “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.”
Some sources attribute the modern score to W.C. Handy, who later modified it into a song known as “Atlanta Blues”. He published “Atlanta Blues” in 1923, featuring lyrics credited to Dave Elman. The first recording of the melody appears in Handy’s band’s 1917 performance of “Sweet Child”, which was written by Stovall and Ewing.
Early recordings of the song were made by numerous musicians, including Virginia Liston (“Make Me a Pallet” 1925), Ethel Waters, (“Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” 1926), Mississippi John Hurt (“Ain’t No Tellin'” 1928); and country music duo the Stripling Brothers (“Pallet on the Floor” 1936). Delta Blues guitarist and singer Sam Chatmon accounts, during a live session captured by Alan Lomax, “When I first started picking guitar it was about the first or the second [song] I learned … [I] was about 4 years old”. Making it the year 1900 when Sam learned the song in Bolton, Mississippi.
Gilian Welch popularised this song when she covered it on her 2003 album Soul Journey. She took the original song and very much in the blues tradition added her own lyrics to it. She says that she learn the song from Doc Watson. Welch takes the song back to its simple musical style.
Not only are there many versions of the lyrics but such is the universality of the tune that it lends itself to a wide variety of treatments from blues to country, bluegrass and New Orleans. It is these variations that keep the song fresh and alows it to appeal to a great variety of audiences.
