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Songs
Some songs I like to play. See also my Charts page.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
This morning I was thinking about how to do a fiddle accompaniment to "Mama Tried", and I came up with a melody that was pretty distinct from that song. Neat! Thought it over for a while and then hummed it into my cell phone's recorder; so I would have it later on to write down.
By the evening I had forgotten it, and listening to my humming wasn't a lot of help. But I tried repeating the process -- thinking about how I might accompany "Mama Tried" -- and came up with two other distinct melodies! This song is like a gold mine. Hoping I will be able eventually to come up with the tune from this morning, I liked it; the two from this evening are Laughing in the Back Yard and Biscuits on the Table.
posted evening of March 7th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
So the first melody I came up with whilst riffing on "Mama Tried", was apparently this one -- not sure how exactly, it doesn't sound much like "Mama Tried" at all.
posted evening of March 8th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Listening to "Sweet to Mama" in the car today, and then replaying it in my head all day at my desk. And thinking, that's really a song I could play pretty well on my violin. I came up with a nice-sounding rhythm part consisting of an eigth-note rest followed by a triplet of sixteenths followed by eighths -- it sounds catchy and unusual. So when I got home I tried playing it on my violin -- and was a bit disappointed in the sound. Put it down, and an hour or so later I wanted to try it again, but only the viola was handy -- so I picked it up and was amazed by how natural it sounded. The key is G minor, which I think fits just as well to a violin as a viola; but something about the lower register is just fantastic for this song.
Update: Well, tonight I tried it on the violin in D minor and it sounded just as good -- so it was a matter of finger positions rather than register. Unfortunately it seems pretty hard for me to sing it in either G or D, I'm going to need to work out fingerings for it in some other key.
Listening this evening to MS John Hurt playing "Stagger Lee", and it hit me that his guitar part would translate really well to violin. Going to try it out when I go downstairs later on.
Janis lent me a CD of Jelly Roll Morton's music, which I'm loving. Today after listening to it for a while, I played this on my violin, which I think is supposed to be kind of a take on the music I was listening to:
So what do you think? I was really enjoying playing that piece and I think if I had some kind of accompaniment (and -- of course -- spent more time on polishing the performance and the arrangement) it could be really worthwhile music. But I'm not sure how I would find someone that was interested in playing like that. Or for that matter what the instrumentation should be.
Let me know what you think about the sound.
Update: Two songs that I think I could play and that would go really well with this, are "Gimme Pigfoot" by Bessie Smith and "They're Red Hot" by Robert Johnson. (Thinking about it, these two songs are very similar to one another -- but not exactly the same.)
So I've had this song on my mind for a couple of days. I wish I knew its title so that I could find the B part (and get the second half of the A part a little better in mind as well). I believe it is Irish or possibly and American Civil War-era tune. If you have any idea what song I'm thinking of, let me know. It goes a little like this:
Aha! OTJunky at the Fiddle Hangout supplies the name of the tune: it is (a poorly remembered) "Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine." Here are some folks playing it for reals on YouTube:
Take 2! This one is, I dare say, up to tempo and generally in time. I figured out a neat riff to start it out with; but got a little bit lost at the end. Still, I manage to keep straight when I'm playing the A or the B part, and have the correct number of repeats. Not bad!
Note: to hear a real fiddler performing this (with fretless banjo!), check out Twelvefret's recording of it at fiddlehangout.com.
I worked up a fiddle part for "Rollin' in my Sweet Baby's Arms" to play at the jam tonight, and I must say it was pretty successful. I kept it fairly simple, everybody stayed with the beat and it sounded nice -- and my singing was as good as it ever gets. A couple of people complimented me on it later on.
The jam leader tonight was Barbara Lamb -- it was really great to get a chance to hear her music. She did some far out stuff like setting up rhythm tracks by overdubbing lots of different clapping patterns and rattles just before she started playing, and playing duets with herself through a delay box. She's playing a house concert in Rockaway on Saturday, I hope we can make it out there.
So I'm pretty mystified by this Lightnin' Hopkins lyric. Leaving aside the obsession with women who wear wigs, what's up with the rats? Am I hearing this wrong?
(I am definitely hearing at least some of it wrong -- "ain't her own line", "all over mine", "I went to swing out" are all approximations.)
Update: I found a more authoritative version of the lyrics at the African-American Registry. "Rats" is correct. (The verse starting "I woke up this morning" is not present in the recording I've been listening to, from Hello Central.)
Update: Aha! Just figured it out! Thanks, unknown browser who came to this site by searching for "are wigs made of rat hair?" -- This is obviously what Hopkins meant by "rats": "wigs (putatively) made from rat hair."
Update III: Another idea comes by way of Martha M. -- "rats" are the structures used to support outlandish early-20th-C hairdos. The OED says,
5. Something resembling a rat in shape.
a. U.S. A hair-pad with tapering ends.
1869 Mrs. WhitneyWe Girls v. (1874) 98 She can't buy coils and braids and two-dollar rats. 1888Century Mag. 769 The crescent shaped pillows on which it [hair] was put up, the startling names of which were 'rats' and 'mice'.
I don't want no woman
If her hair ain't longer'n mine
I don't want no woman
If her hair ain't no longer'n mine
Yes you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
She'll keep you buying wigs all the time
Yes, you know I carried my woman to the hair dresser
And this is what the hair dresser said
I stuck that straightener in, and
Wig fell off her head
I told her no!
Boy, if her hair ain't no longer'n mine
Yes, you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
She'll keep you buying rats all the time
(Wigs and rats 'll get you killed)
Yes, you know I woke up this morning, peoples, poor Sam
'Bout the break of day
You know I even found a rat
On the pillow where she used to lay
You know I don't want no woman
If her hair ain't no longer'n mine
Yes, you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
She'll keep you buying rats all the time
You know I went to get on the good side of my woman
Said Come and let's go and have some fun
You know I went to make a swing out when a rat fell from her head
Like one from a burning barn
But I just told her, I don't want no woman
if her hair ain't no longer'n mine
yes, you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
she'll keep you buying rats all the time.....
Cut the rats out, rat, caught you buyin' wigs now, play it a long time.
↻...done
posted afternoon of September 9th, 2008: 2 responses ➳ More posts about The Blues
It seems to me like the line "You know that was the last thing on my mind" admits of two not mutually exclusive readings. It could just be a restatement and intensifier of "Didn't mean to be unkind"; or it could also be a separate statement, that he just wasn't thinking about how he was behaving toward the woman he's singing to. The difference here keys on whether that takes "I could have loved you better" or "to be unkind" as its antecedent; I like the ambiguity.
(Yeah, any excuse to post this song... I was listening to Chet Atkins' cover of it last night in the soundtrack to Stroszek and it became the song I want to have in my head all the time. Maybe I will try and learn the words and figure out a violin part for the October jam. Do you know there are like 50 covers of this song -- most of the ones I can find on YouTube are inferior to the original although Dolly Parton's version is pretty easy on the ears. Oh also: here is a tape of Tom Paxton singing "Rambling Boy" on Pete Seeger's "Rainbow Quest" show.)
