Gratitude and Gratefulness when embraced radiates happiness.. they are reflections of each other. Let us form a gratitude chain to make this world live able for all concerned - in reference to our previous blogs on the subject mentioned. Here I specify the music based on its tune which gives relax and gratitude during this pandemic crisis - like colleague indeed
A new album, "On The Street Again", was widely already released in most places people are buying, streaming or stealing or hacking music these days. This album contains a mix of songs recorded both before and after my stroke of a year and a half ago, and I feel confident that the newer material holds its own in the mix with the older stuff. That brings all catalogue to 4 albums in wide circulation - Here's a copy of the liner notes, so you can see what's on it.
DOWN UPON THE TOWN: This song began as a banjo/harmonica instrumental that slowly morphed into a slightly cryptic, perhaps fragmentary, somewhat apocalyptic song, framed by the instrumental parts (mostly) at the beginning and the end. I like these lyrics that seem to have wafted up, unbidden, from my subconscious over the course of a few days, though I caution against seeking any great profound hidden meaning in them. Perhaps there is one in there, somewhere below the surface - but if so, I haven’t really quite figured it out yet.
WISH I WAS A MOLE IN THE GROUND: I don't know exactly when or where this song was born. I suspect it was probably in the late 1800s somewhere in Appalachia. It's a song that has bits and snatches of a story, and a number of floating verses that appear in several songs, and is a song that exists in a variety of divergent versions. That seems to me to make it a song that's ripe for new versions, and over the years, I have come up with several different ways of playing and singing it. This time, I’m playing it on a fretless banjo from what I think is the era that gave birth to the song. As is my usual practice, I used the bits and pieces that fit where I wanted to take the song, and made up my own bits and pieces to fill in the rest. In this version, I emphasize some of the darker aspects of the song. The melody I sing has not much more than a passing resemblance to the original melody, based as it is upon my fuzzy memory of how I had heard this song sung when I was a small child. This is generally the way I work - I emulate, but do not imitate, what I have heard. To me, this is the way I feel this kind of music works best, and has led to the great richness of variation in "old time music" - a richness that seems to be gradually disappearing under the influence of mass media, which tends to lead to a greater and greater degree of homogenization of these old songs.
THAT OLD TIME COCAINE BLUES: This song was first learned by Reverend Gary Davis from the travelling carnival musician Porter Irving in 1905, and Davis passed it on to the rest of us during the blues revival in the 1960s. My version was drawn from lot of different sources and synthesized into a somewhat more melancholy song than it is usually presented as. It makes reference to historical facts about the way cocaine was once marketed which are generally forgotten today.
ON THE STREET AGAIN: I wrote this song around 5 years after the actual events in the song had occurred in February of 1970 when I was 20 years old. It's about the first time I played the banjo and sang in public in front of strangers - on the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans during Mardi Gras. I had come up with this particular chord progression and melody several years before I actually wrote this set of words, and I had originally used the music for a completely different song. At a certain point, I had the opportunity to sing that earlier song for a record producer, who had only negative things to say about those lyrics. (He called the song "a conventional romp", whatever that means). So I discarded those lyrics at that point. However I thought the chord progression and melody were too good to just throw away, and I eventually recycled them into this song. This was written fairly early on in my banjo playing, and I note that I used more chords at that time than I would tend to do now. At the time that I recorded this version in October 2018, I tinkered with a few of the song’s lyrics, adding a little bit more specificity about some details of this true story. I know it’s true, because I was there.
MA CREOLE BELLE: This is essentially a fragment of a much longer old minstrel song from around 1900, from which blues great, Mississippi John Hurt, preserved two stanzas in his repertoire, dropping the rest of the song. He introduced the song, in recordings and concert performances, to a new audience during the 1960s blues revival. It’s John Hurt’s shortened revised version of the much older song that survives today. When I decided to learn it, I was hoping to find a few more lyrics by doing a Google search, and I stumbled upon, what turned out to be, the mostly offensive lyrics of the original song. I found one more usable couplet in there, and made up a couple of stanzas of my own to create this version.
WHERE ARE YOU NOW DOCTOR WHO: I recorded this on January 1st 2019. What a way to start the year! I was looking out my window, when suddenly a London police box appeared on the sidewalk in front of my house. I went out to investigate, and a woman in a long coat stepped out and handed me an 1880s Dobson fretless banjo, saying, "I've just come from the past". Then she handed me an Edison wax cylinder, and said, "This song is from the place where the past and the future collide. Learn it!" Then she stepped back into the police box, and it disappeared! Here's the song, played on that very banjo.
OODLES OF NOODLES: Mostly record songs, with the emphasis on the singing and storytelling aspect, one day in November 2018, I thought maybe I ought to sit down and record a little instrumental piece - basically the kind of "meditative" “noodling” that I tend to play when I'm playing just for myself. So I made this up in front of my video camera that day – basically a series of motifs and patterns just sort of mushed together in a stream of consciousness kind of way. At the time, I thought it was just a little piece of self-indulgence that wouldn’t really interest anyone other than myself. But since then, it has surprised me by becoming the most watched video I’ve ever posted.
THE TRAGEDY OF LEAR: I originally wrote this around 15 years ago, to be played before a short run of performances of Shakespeare's King Lear, specifically to be used as a sort of musical prologue (and thumb-nail plot synopsis) to precede the play. I've subsequently also used it as accompaniment to a puppet show that opened a play that I wrote entitled "Lear In Limbo”. It is played here on a 1910 Fairbanks banjo with Nylgut strings, that is tuned in the range that banjos were often tuned in the 19th century prior to the introduction of metal strings, about a tone and a half lower than modern tuning. On opening night of the King Lear play, I was supposed to leave the stage when the lights went down after I had finished the song, and before the curtain went up. I had not realized that the theatre would be in total blackout at that moment, and found myself on my hand and knees, carrying my banjo in one hand, crawling to the staircase at the end of the stage, feeling my way with my free hand, because I could not see the edge of the stage, and was afraid of falling off and breaking my banjo! The lighting was adjusted for subsequent performances!
ONE KIND FAVOUR I’LL ASK OF YOU: This version of “One Kind Favour I’ll Ask of You”, A.K.A. "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean", originally recorded by Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920's, uses a mixture of old time banjo playing styles, moving in and out of claw hammer, thumb lead two finger picking, and finger lead two finger picking. It's played here on an 1880's Dobson fretless banjo, tuned cFCFC, in F.
DEVIL’S IN HIS BIG WHITE HOUSE: I made up the lyrics to this song in bits and snatches one day in late January 2020, mostly while driving the car, with blues playing on the sound system, and it was about ¾ done when I sat down at the computer to finish it and type it up that evening. Immediately thereafter I sat down in front of the camera to record it, with no warm-ups, try-outs, experimentation etc. (which I would usually do with a new song). I just sat down and tried to capture what was in my head - and it just came out in one take, first try, sounding like what I wanted it to sound like. Believe me, that almost never happens. I guess I just wanted to get this one off my chest in a hurry.
JUST LIKE SOME CHARACTER TRAPPED INSIDE A SONG: This is a somewhat “twisted” song, both in terms of the twists and turns the story takes, and also in the un-savoury nature of most of the characters in the story. It was written during the years I spent living in Arusha Tanzania, during the first decade of this century. It's a fairly long and complicated story that I've often found kind of difficult to deliver to an audience. Here, I took a new approach and mostly delivered it as a spoken word piece over the chord progression. I only actually sing the last stanza. I think this idea works well, and makes the story much easier to follow. (The idea probably came to me from hearing how Leonard Cohen very effectively talks his way through some of the songs on his last records.)
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