"In the Pines", also known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", "My Girl" and "Black Girl", is a traditional American folk song originating from two songs, "In the Pines" and "The Longest Train", both of whose authorship is unknown and date back to at least the 1870s. The songs originated in the Southern Appalachian area of the United States in the contiguous areas of Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, Western North Carolina and Northern Georgia. Versions of the song have been recorded by many artists in numerous genres, but it is most often associated with American bluegrass musician Bill Monroe and American blues musician Lead Belly, both of whom recorded very different versions of the song in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1964, a version of the song by English Beat music group the Four Pennies reached the top-twenty in the United Kingdom. A live rendition by American grunge band Nirvana, based on Lead Belly's interpretation, was recorded during their MTV Unplugged performance in 1993, and released the following year on their platinum-selling album, MTV Unplugged in New York. Early history Like numerous other folk songs, "In the Pines" was passed on from one generation and locale to the next by word of mouth. In 1925, a version of the song was recorded onto phonograph cylinder by a folk collector. This was the first documentation of "The Longest Train" variant of the song, which includes a verse about "The longest train I ever saw". This verse probably began as a separate song that later merged into "In the Pines". Lyrics in some versions about "Joe Brown's coal mine" and "the Georgia line" may refer to Joseph E. Brown, a former Governor of Georgia, who famously leased convicts to operate coal mines in the 1870s. While early renditions which mention the head in the "driver's wheel" make clear that the decapitation was caused by the train, some later versions would omit the reference to the train and reattribute the cause. As music historian Norm Cohen pointed out in his 1981 book, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong, the song came to consist of three frequent elements: a chorus about "in the pines", a verse about "the longest train" and a verse about a decapitation, but not all elements are present in all versions. Starting in 1926, commercial recordings of the song were made by various country artists. In her