<P> American field workers were also active in the Appalachians . A (tuneless) text for "On Top of Old Smokey", similar to what Memory Shelton sang, was published by E.C. Perrow in 1915, slightly before Sharp's fieldwork . In the following decades, still further variants of "On Top of Old Smokey" were recorded by fieldworkers in North Carolina and Tennessee . </P> <P> The Appalachian tradition characteristically spawned multiple variants of the same song . In the extreme case, the same basic set of words could be sung to more than one tune, or the same tune could adopt a completely different set of words . The now - standard tune of "On Top of Old Smokey" competed with a completely different tune, which Sharp and Karpeles encountered when they returned to the Appalachians for further fieldwork in 1917, and versions of this tune were also found by later fieldworkers . </P> <P> The tune of "On Top of Old Smokey" familiar to most people today was also paired with a completely different set of words in a folk song called "The Little Mohee", about a frontiersman who falls in love with an Indian maiden (or, in some versions, a sailor who falls in love with a South Seas maiden). This tune was collected by the American fieldworkers Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway in Pine Mountain, Kentucky from a singer named Mary Ann Bagley, and published by them in 1916, hence a year before the Sharp / Karpeles version mentioned above . </P> <P> Because the versions gathered in fieldwork vary so much, there is no particular version of "On Top of Old Smokey" that can lay claim to being the "authentic" or "original" version . The version that Sharp and Karpeles collected from Memory Shelton can be read on line (see Sharp and Karpeles (1917), in References below), and the version by Pete Seeger that greatly popularized the song in modern times (see below) is also on line . </P>

What does the song on top of old smokey mean
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