Liner Notes for Alone Will Tell

 

All music traditional.

 

Recorded and mixed by Eric Wiggs at Vermillion Road Studio in Longmont, CO.

Mastered by Mike Monseur at Axis Audio.

 

Photos by Mara Sedlins.

Design by Anna Jane Lester.

 

This album couldn’t have been made without the support of many dear friends - thank you. Special thanks to the Kickstarter backers who funded this album, and also to the Newport Festivals Foundation and Bluegrass Pride for additional financial support.

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for Domenica

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A note on tuning

As is fairly common among guitarists, for many tunes in D I drop the low sixth string by a whole step (yielding a low open D note - DADGBE). A couple of my other, less common tunings follow a similar approach: for many G tunes I drop both the sixth and fifth strings by a whole step (yielding low open D and G notes - DGDGBE), and I approach many C tunes by dropping the sixth, fifth and fourth strings (yielding low open D, G, and C notes - DGCGBE). (The same goes for tunes that I want to play out of a G or C position, but are capo’d up to sound in other keys.) I find this helps make certain important drone notes easier to find in those keys, while leaving most of the melodic playing where it would be in standard tuning. The only exceptions to this general approach on this album are ‘Lonesome Road’ and ‘Girl With the Blue Dress On’, both of which see the top five strings of the guitar tuned and capo’d to mimic a G modal, ‘sawmill’ tuning on the banjo, with the guitar’s high first string corresponding to the banjo’s fifth. (For these I either retuned or left the remaining low sixth string depending on what bass notes I wanted to be able to reach.)

 

1 Lonesome Road

Tuning: EADGAD, capo 5

There are a multitude of different variants of this song scattered throughout the recorded history of American folk music - this one takes inspiration from a 1960s field recording by the banjoist and singer Addie Leffew. Her enigmatic version helped me hear the song with new ears, and became the jumping off point for my rendition.

 

2 Old Sage Friend

Tuning: DGDGBE

This fiddle tune comes from the playing of Gribble, Lusk and York, a Black string band from Warren County, Tennessee whose music was documented in the 1940s. I follow their lead in setting the entire melody above one droning chord - I like the way the sustained notes of the high section to push and pull against that steady backdrop.

 

3 All Away

Tuning: EADGBE, capo 2

I came across this song on YouTube from a performance by Sheila Kay Adams, of the renowned Madison County, NC ballad tradition. In the video she sings unaccompanied; I added some fingerstyle guitar in a style modeled after two finger, thumb lead banjo picking.

 

4 Brushy Fork of John’s Creek

Tuning: EADGBE

This comes from a mid-1940s recording of Ed and Ella Haley, who play it a good deal faster than I do here. There are some beautiful points of tension between the Ed’s melody and Ella’s chords, and I wanted to slow the tune down to really savor those moments.

 

5 Glory in the Meeting House

Tuning: EADGBE

One of the more well known tunes played by the famed Kentucky fiddler Luther Strong, from a 1937 Library of Congress field recording. There are a few spots in the tune where he consistently plays ‘in between’ notes (i.e. notes that don’t fit into twelve tone equal temperament) so in moving the tune to a fixed fret instrument like guitar, you have to make some choices about which side of these notes to err on. Here I tend to go for the higher option, which to me seems to lend some little touches of brightness in an otherwise dark tune.

 

6 Betty Baker

Tuning: DGDGBE 

One of my favorite tunes from the masterful and idiosyncratic Kentucky fiddler Clyde Davenport. The words I sing come from a different, squarer variant - I wanted to see if I could fit them to Clyde’s twistier interpretation of the melody.

 

7 My Dearest Dear

Tuning: DGCGBE, capo 2

This oddly phrased version of the common Appalachian folk song My Dearest Dear/The Blackest Crow/As Time Draws Near comes from Banjo Bill Cornett of Hindman, Kentucky - his rendition appears in a set of 1958 recordings that were thought lost until they were rediscovered in 2002. I do my best to replicate the driving energy of his banjo playing on guitar.

 

8 Girl With the Blue Dress On

Tuning: DADGAD, capo 5

A mysterious one from a 1967 recording of the Clay County, West Virginia fiddler Doc White, who also called it ‘Old Wylie’. I thought the stately, spacious feel of the tune would especially suit a two finger banjo-inspired fingerstyle approach. 

 

9 Muddy Creek/Eighth Day of January

Tuning: DADGBE

A medley of two Kentucky fiddle tunes. The first is also known as ‘Morgan on the Railroad’ (yeah I know, how appropriate). It comes from the playing of fiddler Jim Booker, although - as is too often the case with Black source fiddlers - our only recorded evidence of the tune comes from those white fiddlers who learned it from him, namely John Masters and Ed Buck Barnes. My take is mostly based on those recordings, save for a little added beat that worked its way in to my playing of the tune. The second tune comes from Jim Bowles, and if it has a connection to the more well-known ‘Eighth of January’ melody, I can’t hear it. 

 

10 Chilly Winds

Tuning: DADGBE

My rendition here doesn’t really come from any particular recorded source. Rather, there’s a version of the related song ‘Lay Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor’ that I really like (recorded by Mike Seeger and Paul Brown, and then by Libby Weitnauer and Jake Blount as Tui) that plays with that song’s phrasing in an interesting way, namely by just dropping one of the usual repetitions of the title line. My version of ‘Chilly Winds’ came from me experimenting with a similar trick, and liking the way it seemed to transform this familiar melody into something a little unexpected.

 

11 Love Has Brought Me to Despair

Tuning: DGCGBE, capo 5

From a 1960s recording of Berzilla Wallin, an earlier singer in the Madison County, North Carolina ballad tradition. As is often the case with these unaccompanied ballad recordings, its loose time feel leaves a lot of room for different interpretations when it comes to instrumental accompaniment. When my partner Domenica and I first learned this song, we were surprised by how well the melody worked within a five beat pattern - a sort of crooked waltz, with three beats followed by two. Over time I got attached to this way of performing the song, and here we are.

 

12 Peep O’ Day

Tuning: DGCGBE 

My take on a Texas fiddle tune, which I learned from a home recording of the fiddler Thomas Jefferson ‘Duck’ Wootan. In that recording, there’s some interesting stuff happening in the double stops of the high part, and I‘ve tried to echo and expand on this in my playing of the tune.