Barlow Knife – Mumblety Peg

~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 Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Also, it is reported that George Washington owned one as a boy, and so did I. I imagine there was a time when the Barlow knife was more American than apple pie.

So, what does one do with a Barlow knife? Well, for one thing, you can whittle with it. I expect that most folks think of it as making small pieces of wood smaller by shaving them down, while chawing tobacco and relating pointless tall tales. But history shows that whittling is one of our species’ oldest art forms.

There are oral traditions that tell us that long pointless stories can be traced back to Homer in ancient Greece and even farther back to Mesopotamia almost five thousand years ago. And there are examples of whittling that date back more than eleven thousand years.

Whittling is more than just a way to pass the time—although, that’s not a bad thing. It can be a way to make useful things like toothpicks and wooden spoons. Or you can make useless novelties like whimmy diddles and whirligigs to befuddle the grandkids.

Or you can even whittle decorative items. In the case of decorative items, you have to be on guard not to let your whittling cross the line into ART. When that happens, you cease to be a whittler and you become a woodcarver. You will know that you have crossed that line when you start looking at catalogs that offer chisels, gouges, and parting tools. Once you go down that path, there’s no coming back.

There are other uses for a Barlow knife. You can clean and scale fish with it, or you could kill and dress out a Grizzly bear. I have found mine to be useful for making shavings to start a campfire and for tightening loose screws. The only limitation for the usefulness of a good pocket knife, Barlow or other, is your imagination.

One thing that occurred to the imagination of boys from time immemorial is the game of mumblety peg. If you are not a boy and/or never owned a pocketknife you might not be familiar with this exercise of daring and precision and stupidity.

Mumblety peg is a game, generally, played by two players, in which turns are taken to throw a knife into the ground close to but not hitting the opposing players foot. This will cause the player to move his foot and widen his stance. When one player’s stance becomes so wide he can no longer maintain it, he loses. Or, if the thrower stabs the other player’s foot, the thrower loses, and more often than not, a fight breaks out.

That feature along with school and TSA confiscation of pocketknives is probably why the game is no longer popular. There have been some efforts made to resurrect similar activities in modern times—like lawn darts, for instance. But we will leave that discussion for another time.

“You can take my money or take my wife, just don’t take my Barlow knife.” Just kidding, Honey!