Songnotes

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A Companion to the Old Town School Songbook

Compiled and edited byMark Dvorak.

Deck the Halls

The music to Deck the Halls is an old Welsh melody. Mozart used it in a piano and violin duet in the 1700s. The words are believed to be American from the 19th century

Source: The Anthology of Christmas Music, Montrose Music.
Recordings on File by: John Fahey.

Deep River Blues

Originally composed by the Delmore Brothers as Big River Blues in the 1930s, this tune has since become a signature piece of the great Doc Watson.
     Born in Deep Gap, NC in 1923, Arthel "Doc" Watson lost his sight at a very young age. He possessed a natural talent for music and by the time he was a young man he had mastered the guitar, banjo, harmonica, and traditional mountain singing.
     Folklorist Ralph Rinzler discovered Doc in the late 1950s when he and members of his family and neighbors from Deep Gap were gathered together to record the indigenous music of the region. Although Doc had performed occasionally around North Carolina, he didn't get into the music business full-time until 1961 when he was invited to New York for some performances, where he was enthusiastically received.
     An undisputed master of his instrument, Doc remembered as a young man hearing the Delmore Brothers sing and play Big River Blues on record. He worked and worked at learning to pick the tune exactly as it sounded. Finally satisfied that he had done the best he could, he settled on an arrangement that borrowed from the finger-picking style of Merle Travis (for whom Doc named his first son) which suitably duplicated the sounds he heard on the recording. It wasn't until much later that Doc realized that the Delmore Brothers had used two guitars on their recording, and that had caused him the difficulty in mastering the arrangement.

Source: Liner notes “Doc Watson” Vanguard Recording.
Recordings on File by: The Songs of Doc Watson, Forward by Ralph Rinzler. Oak Publications.

Dink's Song

John A. Lomax and his son Alan are important names in the world of folk song. They have collected and documented thousands of songs for the Library of Congress and published dozens of books. John Lomax discovered and recorded the great Lead Belly in a Louisiana prison, and he was among the first to recognize the genius in Woody Guthrie’s work.
     On one collecting trip in 1904, John Lomax was recording the singing of African American levee workers who were brought from Mississippi to Texas to work on a project on the Brazos River. Lomax brought his huge Edison recording machine to the encampment where the men and women lived while the levee was being constructed.
     Lomax “found a woman named Dink scrubbing her man’s clothes in the shade of their tent along the Brazos, across from A. & M. University.” He was told that Dink knew all the songs, but he did not find her helpful, “until I walked a mile to a farm commissary and bought her a pint of gin.”
     As Dink drank, the sounds of her scrubbing board increased in volume and intensity. She talked and sang into Lomax’s Edison recorder; she described a life that was hard and work that was hard. She talked and sang about her loneliness and a better life for her children. She talked about one day leaving the levee and heading “on up the river where I belong.” She sipped her gin and sang and drank until the gin was gone.
     When Lomax got back to Harvard University to transcribe his findings, he listened again to Dink’s songs and stories and realized he had never asked her for the title of the beautiful lament she had sung, so it simply went into his collection as “Dink’s Song.”
     Win Stracke loved to sing “Dink’s Song” and he loved the story behind its discovery. He recorded it twice.

Source: Folk Song USA, Alan Lomax, Editor, New American Library.
Recordings on File by: Pete Seeger, Win Stracke.

Don't You Hear Jerusalem Moan?

In terms of number of recordings, Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers was the most prolific of the Georgia string bands of the 1920s and 30s. They typified the unrestrained Georgia string band style, featuring comedy skits, fiddle breakdowns, and the hillbilly showman personality of Gid Tanner. The band featured Tanner and Clayton McMichen on fiddle, Fate Norris on a barely audible banjo, and Riley Puckett on guitar.
“Don’t You Hear Jerusalem Moan” is an old gospel/novelty song which manages to poke fun at several of the major religions. As if the words weren't enough to make this song outrageous, the chorus has a few extra beats added for good measure.

Source: Old Time Songbook, by Wayne Erbsen. Native Ground.
Recordings on File by: Sam Bush & Friends.

Done Laid Around

In 1961, Pete Seeger reported that he "...first learned ‘Done Laid Around’ from Larry Ehrlich of Chicago, who learned it from Paul Clayton, who learned it from Arthur Kyle Davis of the University of Virginia, who got it from a small booklet, published by a now deceased French professor. His original sources, African American folk singers of Virginia, were not listed."
Seeger recorded “Done Laid Around” as “Gotta Travel On” in the 1950s with the popular folk-singing quartet, The Weavers. It was a hit record for them and became one of their many signature pieces.

Source: “Sing Out!” Magazine.
Recordings on File by: Cisco Houston, The Weavers.

Don't This Road Look Rough & Rocky

In the early 1930s, a new form of country music began to emerge from the older Southern mountain traditions. It was called Bluegrass music. Many agree the term was coined by the great Bill Monroe, a Kentuckian who called his band, “The Bluegrass Boys.”
     Bluegrass musicians pride themselves on their tight harmony singing and instrumental virtuosity. Where old-time string band instrumentalists will all play the melody simultaneously, each musician in a bluegrass ensemble will often “take a break” while the others vamp in the background.
     The characteristic sound of bluegrass was complete when banjo player Earl Scruggs, who developed a three-finger picking style, now known as “Scruggs Style Picking,” joined Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys in the late 1930s. Soon after, Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt formed their own band, and helped bring the sounds of bluegrass music to an ever-widening audience. If you remember the music from the television show, “The Beverly Hillbillys,” you've heard Earl Scruggs pick his banjo.
     “Don’t This Road Look Rough and Rocky” is an old country song, kept alive by the likes of bluegrass masters such as Flatt and Scruggs.

Source: The Bluegrass Songbook, By Peter Wernick. Oak Publications.
Recordings on File by: J. D. Crowe & Friends, Emmy Lou Harris, Earl Scruggs & Tom T. Hall.

Down By the Riverside

Also known as “Study War No More,” this powerful spiritual was first transcribed in the years following the Civil War. It was made popular again decades later when Pete Seeger and the folk singing group, The Weavers revived it in the 1950s. Only a few years later, thousands of Americans were singing it to express sentiments of anti-war and anti-violence during the troubled nineteen-sixties. It's an example of a folk song's power to endure and reflect new meaning to different generations.

Source: Liner notes “Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall,” Folkways FA 2412.
Recordings on File by: Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly, Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger & Sonny Terry, Joseph Spence, Sweet Honey in the Rock, The Weavers.

Down in the Valley

Popular music almost always has to do with the subjects of love and heartbreak, and in the days before records and radio, “Down in the Valley” was among the most popular songs sung in rural America. Folklorists count many, many variations of this classic, but each is sentimental and nostalgic and each deals with isolation.
“You Are My Sunshine” and “Home on the Range” are close musical relatives of “Down in the Valley.”

Source: Folk Song USA, Alan Lomax, Editor, New American Library.
Recordings on File by: Burl Ives, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Various artists.

Drunken Sailor

A sea chantey (or shanty) is a work song. Different types of jobs on a tall ship required different rhythms and tempos. “The Drunken Sailor” is what’s known as a “capstan chantey,” a song sung to the rhythm of a group of men turning a capstan, a huge device for winding ropes on a tall ship. On the words, “Way hay and up she rises!” the men would stamp loudly on the deck. This led to a whole category of songs known as “stamp and go” chanties.

Source: The Burl Ives Song Book, Ballantine Books.
Recordings on File by: Burl Ives.

A Final Note…