Make Me a Pallet on the Floor
song performed by Sandy Denny
"Make Me a Pallet on the Floor" (Roud 13930; also "Make Me a Pallet on your Floor", "Make Me a Pallet", or "Pallet on the Floor") is a blues/jazz/folk song. It is considered a standard. As Jelly Roll Morton explained, "A pallet is something that – you get some quilts – in other words, it's a bed that's made on a floor without any four posters on 'em."
Structure
The melody is 16 bars long. One writer describes the structure as "a proto-blues [...that] has little in common
musically with regular blues". When played in the key of C, the typical structure is:
History
The composition probably originates from the end of the nineteenth century. One jazz historian states that the song "could have been sung around New Orleans in the mid-1890s." A 1906 report in the Indianapolis Freeman referred to a performance of the song by "The Texas Teaser, Bennie Jones". It appeared in sheet music in 1908 as part of "Blind Boone's Southern Rag Medley No. One: Strains from the Alleys." "The lyrics first appear in a 1911 article by folklorist Howard Odum, who had transcribed them from a performance he had heard in Mississippi a few years before."
Some sources attribute the modern score to W. C. Handy, who later modified it into a song known as "Atlanta Blues". He published "Atlanta Blues" in 1923, featuring lyrics credited to Dave Elman. The first recording of the melody appears in Handy's band's 1917 performance of "Sweet Child", which was written by Stovall and Ewing.
“Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” enters the record as song performed by Sandy Denny. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Make, Pallet and Floor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Make, Pallet and Floor provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6739025. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1906, 1908, 1911 and 1923.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Make Me a Pallet on the Floor primary sources, Make Me a Pallet on the Floor archive and Make research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor”?
- How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.