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This week’s instalment of Music Monday is In the Pines, an Appalachian folk song of unknown authorship dating back to at least the 1870s. Lead Belly recorded the version that made the song famous in 1944 for Musicraft, and is still often mistakenly credited as its author. He’d actually learned it from earlier field recordings decades before.

By coincidence, two very different artists returned to the song in the same year, 1994, with no connection to each other. Nirvana closed out their MTV Unplugged set with a haunting rendition titled “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, learned directly from Lead Belly’s recording and released on MTV Unplugged in New York. Dolly Parton cut her own take, closer to the song’s Appalachian roots, for Heartsongs: Live from Home, a home video companion album released that same year. She was no stranger to the song by then. Dolly had been performing it since at least 1976, when she sang it on her TV show with her parents and siblings as one of the old mountain songs from their childhood.