An additional reason for choosing to marry "Mattie Groves" to the "Shady Grove" tune is that the Dorian melody sounds noticeably archaic and ballad-like.

The tune may be older than the words, but there seems to be no way of knowing.

Our records of nineteenth-century Southern U.S. fiddling are maddeningly sparse, and the tune may have existed - since God knows when - under a different title.

Or it may have popped up in the 1890's. Unlikely, but who can say?

A different question is "How widely known was it in the days before radio and recordings?" People like to assume that all trad tunes made familiar by the revival were once known by just about everybody in the South. But few references, that, of course, is quite an assumption!

I've long been searching old books and newspapers for mention of Southern fiddle-tune titles before about 1920. Until the rise of "Old-Time Fiddlin' Contests" in the 1890s, they're rather few and far between.