ndlxs - Posted - 04/24/2020:  05:47:55

612 Tunes of the Week is a LOT of banjo tunes; it ranges from “Abe’s Retreat” to “Zinger”. I myself have contributed 16 of them.



Selecting a new tune is difficult; many (or all...) popular ones have been done (some multiple times), even very obscure tunes have as well.  The most obscure one I ever posted that landed with a dull thud are two Finnish polkas that I posted on Halloween, 2009:

banjohangout.org/archive/161392

They are good tunes, give them a chance.



I am choosing a fiddle tune called “Molly Kiss Your Darling”.  It is in the key of A, with the standard open G banjo tuning capo’ed up two frets.  It is a dandy tune, and an obscure one.  If you look it up on Youtube you will find that they have no idea what you are talking about and want you to watch “Unchained Melody” from the movie “Ghost”. 



I heard the Indian Creek Delta Boys play it here:

fieldrecorder.bandcamp.com/tra...latona-il

This can be had on CD or as a digital download.  Buy it.



The fiddler of this band was a man named Garry Harrison, who wrote a popular tune called “Red Prairie Dawn”;  @JanetB did a  TOTW for that tune:

banjohangout.org/archive/333748



Mr Harrison, who passed away way too young at age 58 in September, 2012, documented hundreds of folk songs and fiddle tunes with a collaborator in the book “Dear Old Illinois – Traditional Music of Downstate Illinois”, along with 3 CDs worth of recordings from that project.  The book is out print; used copies are found once in a while, and the CDs used to be available on CDBaby until a month or two ago, when CDBaby in their infinite wisdom shut down their CD shop.  Once in a while it goes back in print.  I got a copy 5 years ago for under $30; currently the only used copy is $106 on Amazon. This tune is NOT on those CDs.



Garry Harrison performed with another band called Mule Team. They recorded CDs…of course, not available anywhere.



This points out an observation I have of old-time musicians: the love of obscure fiddle tunes by fiddlers or banjo players you have kind of heard of but are not available anywhere, especially on the internet.  If you have heard of the tune name, it will be a weird crooked version, or a different tune by the same name. “I knew a gal who had a friend (Portland? Maybe it was Seattle?) who burned a cassette that was lost in a move many years ago. “



A side issue: it has only been 10 years since these were in print.  Imagine trying to find a LP with someone from the 1950s like Billy Faier or a 78 from the 1920s.



This tune fits the bill: people will know of the collection and the collector, but the music and the recording can not be had for love or money.  This tune also has the side benefit of frustrating the fiddlers in your jam session: the second part goes up to a high C#, which requires the fiddler to be able to play in third position, which is difficult but possible for fiddlers of moderate to low ability, including this writer.



This tune also has something those fiddlers like though: a crooked 3^rd part, which has 12 measures rather than the usual 8.  That will mess up your guitar playing friends if you don’t warn them.



The original performer that Harrison recorded playing this is Cliff Pulliam, of Latona, Illinois.  I used the last day of my trial newspapers.com subscription to look him up and found him listed only in the obituary of his mother in law. If you try looking for Latona, Illinois on Google Maps Street view: You can’t! it is too small and they have never bothered to send their camera car past the Latona Church of Christ.



Here is my re-writing of the tune itself from the book, created with Musescore (which does dandy guitar and banjo tab, too, and is FREE):

banjohangout.org/photo/261037



Here is the tab I did, which I created in MuseScore and is uploaded to Banjo Hangout as a PDF.

hangoutstorage.com/banjohangou...42020.pdf



Here is a video of me playing it:

youtube.com/watch?v=XWd1gsoEBN...=youtu.be



Here is Genevieve Harrison Koester and Mareva Lindo playing it too fast:

soundcloud.com/marevaraves/mol...ce-finale.  They also did this tune on the Get Up in the Cool podcast here:

podbay.fm/podcast/1131463879/e/1569999600



That’s it for this tune of the week.  If you ever find a copy of “Dear Old Illinois”, check out the tune “Nonsense”: it is another good tune, with even fewer places to hear it than this one.



 

carlb - Posted - 04/24/2020:  09:09:06

quote:

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Originally posted by ndlxs

Mr Harrison, who passed away way too young at age 58 in September, 2012, documented hundreds of folk songs and fiddle tunes with a collaborator in the book “Dear Old Illinois – Traditional Music of Downstate Illinois”, along with 3 CDs worth of recordings from that project.  The book is out print; used copies are found once in a while,



 

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Plenty of used copies out there starting at just under $100,

bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&a...0illinois

hweinberg - Posted - 04/24/2020:  16:36:35

Thanks. That's a tune I'm going to recommend to my fiddler. We have a growing list of tunes that we've decided to learn to play when we can get together again. (This will be the second one from Gary H.)

carolynf - Posted - 04/24/2020:  17:43:55

Thanks, Andy! I like hearing both what you put on YouTube, and the “too fast version.”

JanetB - Posted - 04/25/2020:  19:30:52

A complete presentation and nice performances, both slower and fast, thanks Andy. In the DOI book I read that Cliff Pulliam lived from 1911-2002, that he played fiddle very melodically, and his bowing style was to change directions in unusual places, so that his fiddle sounded as if it were “speaking.” I listened to him in a field recording collection by Garry Harrison called Fiddle Tunes ‘98.

VIDEO: Molly Kiss Your Darling (TOTW)
(click to view)

 

Bill Rogers - Posted - 04/25/2020:  20:32:17

Good stuff, Andy. What’s your banjo? Sounds good.

ndlxs - Posted - 04/27/2020:  08:19:24

It is an Arthur E Smith Shelburne II, internal resonator model.  They were made in Vermont in the late 1970s and slid under the waves by the early 1980s.  I lucked into getting it: at a time in my life when I had just moved to No. California and money was tight (also a big car repair then), somehow this came into the Fifth String on consignment right on the same day the money to pay for it magically became available to me.  



aesmithbanjo.com/models/2/

Ldickerson - Posted - 04/28/2020:  03:26:17

Hi, and forgive my ignorance, I'm new here and there may already be consensus on this... If the tunes are getting super obscure at this point, would any folks be into collectively starting over?

JanetB - Posted - 04/28/2020:  09:46:08

 

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Originally posted by Ldickerson

Hi, and forgive my ignorance, I'm new here and there may already be consensus on this... If the tunes are getting super obscure at this point, would any folks be into collectively starting over?

Response:  Good question. It's already been agreed that repeating tunes is totally permissible, especially when it's been a matter of years since they were covered. So as you say, starting over is something we've already done to some degree.  Personally, I still have tunes ready to present that are in the Jam repertoire.  If you are interested in presenting a tune that has already been covered, just let us know, please. Your presentation would be welcome. 

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