Barlow Knife – Mumblety Peg
Musings
~ by Mark Blackwell
I
recently got together with a couple of old buddies that I used to play music with. We had taken a short break that wound up lasting about ten years. We decided break time is over. We got out our trusty implements of musical destruction and tried to remember our old song list. One of those tunes was called“ Barlow Knife.”
“ Barlow Knife” is a song about a knife and the poor boy who owns it. It’ s an old song— so old nobody knows who wrote it. The tune goes back far enough that different musicians have given it several different names.
It is reported that those who favor sawing a fiddle call it“ Cabin Creek,” but banjo pickers prefer the other title. I suspect that this has something to do with lyrics. It’ s fairly difficult to sing while playing a fiddle, so fiddlers give it a different name and go on about their business. That’ s all I know about the song.
There is some history to the knife itself. The original Barlow knife was developed in Sheffield, England back in the late 17th Century by a fellow named Obadiah Barlow. It started out as a folding knife with one blade. But the most common and familiar Barlow has two blades both fastened at one end.
It features a a long steel bolster and a substantial handle, usually made of bone, stag, or wood. The lager blade runs about three inches and can be one of various designs, clip or spear point to name two. This makes the closed knife around three and a half inches. The Barlow was built to be tough and affordable. This made it one of the most practical and popular knives ever made.
They were first exported to the American colonies by John Barlow, Obadiah’ s grandson, in 1745. But it was soon copied by homegrown knife makers. A man named John Russell was probably the first American to mass produce Barlows and they soon became ubiquitous.
The Barlow knife’ s popularity can be attested to by the fact that Mark Twain mentions them in his novels The
30 Our Brown County • July / August 2024