andease - Posted - 07/15/2022:  13:58:49

This week's TOTW is Cindy.

This is an old one - the earliest reference in the Traditional Ballad Archive is 1915, with recordings going back as far as 1923. I suspect it goes back farther than that.

fresnostate.edu/folklore/balla...U028.html

John and Alan Lomax's Best Loved American Folk Songs has this to say about the tune:

"When the mountain fiddlers heard [the banjo], they gave up their fiddles, sat down with the contraption and worked on it till they had produced a kind of music that was neither Afro-American, nor minstrel-style, nor a transcription of their old-time tunes, but a peculiar and wonderful mixture of all of these. [..] 'Cindy' [is] among the tunes in this book that bear, strongly, the influence of the mountain five-string banjo style.

Like with many old-time songs, there are a large number of rotating verses that performers pick from when playing. For the chorus, most people seem to sing some variation of "Get along home, Cindy / I'll marry you someday," but others are less taken with her and sing things to the effect of "Get along home, Cindy / I'm going to leave you now." I always used to sing the former, but my experiences with a modern-day Cindy have led me to consider making the switch.

The Lomaxes describe this dichotomy well:

"'Cindy,' according to one singer, was so stupendously sweet that he wanted to sew her onto his coattails so as always to keep her by his side. Others have painted her as a rather brash mountain gal, mainly interested in getting herself a man, who, on first meeting, 'threw her arms around me and hung on like a leech.' Then again, Cindy was the kind of gal who went to church and "got so full of glory that she shook her stockings down.' So it seems that Cindy is a pretty complex personality."

There are many many recordings of the song available, so I'll list a few I found interesting:

Riley Puckett singing it with guitar/fiddle from 1927:

youtube.com/watch?v=wDNcLYTkj3E

John Jackson singing a bluesy rendition on banjo:

youtube.com/watch?v=oxar-GhaYzg

Pete Seeger doing a fast solo instrumental:

youtube.com/watch?v=XfHtJ5zZQ-0

Melvin Wine fiddling with banjo/guitar accompaniment:

dla.acaweb.org/digital/collect...731/rec/4

Bluegrassers Russ Carson, Barry Reed, Jesse Smathers, Jesse Brock, Jake Workman

youtube.com/watch?v=5mqe-iIqfsk

I didn't have time to write out tab for exactly what I'm playing, but it's pretty close to the version available here on clawhammerbanjo.net:

clawhammerbanjo.net/cindy-get-the-tab/

Hope you enjoy! It's a fun tune to play and sing, and there are lots of different options for the arrangement and lyrics.

Edited by - andease on 07/15/2022 14:00:49

VIDEO: Cindy
(click to view)

 

The Old Timer - Posted - 07/15/2022:  14:16:39

Very good!

BrooksMT - Posted - 07/15/2022:  18:56:10

Neat, thanks for posting.

Mtngoat - Posted - 07/15/2022:  20:16:48

I've always played this out of G tuning but thanks to your video I'll be experimenting with double C/D.

Don Borchelt - Posted - 07/16/2022:  07:21:33

Good choice for TOTW, Andy, one of my favorite old time songs. I love your rendition, you have a wonderful stroke. I learned this back in the late '60s from a man name Cecil Jackson, who was the animal trainer at the Cincinnati Zoo. I was in high school, and a friend of mine had gotten me a job at the zoo taking folks money at the gate. I had just started learning to pick the banjo, and the fellow who was our manager assigned me to duty at either the walk-in gate, which wasn't used much, or the exit gate watching for kids trying to sneak in, so I could practice my banjo when it wasn't busy. Well, pretty soon Cecil noticed me, and invited me pick some with him over our lunch breaks. He played guitar, and had a wonderful old-time country voice. He put on a trained animal show a couple of times a day, and we would play for an hour or so in his office inside the ape house, with a couple of chimpanzees and a macaw or two as our audience. Cecil was a big influence on how I approach old time music.



The recording I have linked to below I made with a couple of friends about 25 years ago. Brian Clancey is the guitar player, and Tom Speth is on bass. I am playing three-finger style banjo. We called ourselves Wry Whiskey. I still play this all the time when I go busking in the Boston Public Garden with my fiddling friend John Maguire. Unlike me, it never gets old.



Wry Whiskey playing Cindy

Edited by - Don Borchelt on 07/16/2022 07:22:35

andease - Posted - 07/16/2022:  08:23:11

Thanks Don Borchelt. Great rendition and great story. I love the idea of playing music with a chimp audience!

JanetB - Posted - 07/16/2022:  13:35:19

This song takes me back a-ways, too.

Thanks for the delightful recordings from you Banjo Hangouters -- one version more old-timey and peppy from you, Andy, and one more folksy and pretty from Don, with even a little blue tint at the end. Like Mtngoat, I've always played this in open G (till today when I arranged it in open C -- gCGCE).  I look forward to listening to the other links you provided.

Years ago, to tease the band leader of the Rough and Ready Fruit Jar Pickers, Ev Burkhart, I used to hold out a stuffed animal version of an apple in front of him at the appropriate time and he'd pretend to bite it, based on the verse, "I wish I was an apple, a-hanging on a tree, and every time my Cindy passed she'd take a bite of me."  He was often silly and the audience loved his antics; he was also a very capable band leader with as many as 25 playing in the band at times.

I actually learned Cindy as a 4th grade guitar student about the same time Don was learning it in the 60's.  Just today I found out that my 95 year old guitar teacher, Mary Ellen Clark, is still alive, confined to a wheel chair, but often smiling and enjoying art books and music. Her guitar teacher was Beth Lomax Hawes, giving her an excellent folk music foundation,  though I didn't discover this until more recently. 

Thanks again for presenting, Andy.  It's nice to have more volunteers sharing here.

Cindy

Cindy (CH) tab

pickn5 - Posted - 07/17/2022:  02:05:57

Nice song and great melody, I'm liking all the renditions!

Emiel - Posted - 07/20/2022:  12:23:34

Here is my quick clawhammer version. Double-C capoed up to D.

VIDEO: Cindy
(click to view)