Template:Pagina principale/Vetrina

In the evening we’d sit out there and look to the head of Booger Hole and my father used to sit there on that front porch - and like I said, he very seldom relaxed - but when he tuned that old 5-string banjo up, he’d play that banjo - it was so doggone lonesome that it was pitiful and you could hear it all over this country...

Wilson Douglas

Played by: Wilson Douglas
Source: Spotify
Image: Wilson Douglas: Rush Fork, Clay County, West Virginia 1922 - 1999.

Wilson Douglas

...there’s so many things come into my mind. It was twelve miles from where I was raised over to Lorie Hicks’ where Ed Haley’d come to. He’d play until about twelve o’clock at night, and he got tired, he’d quit. I was really not conscious of coming back home. I’d ride a bike, had an old trap of a bicycle; and if a gang didn’t gather up to go in an old ’29 Model A Ford truck, we’d start walking, maybe somebody’d come along in an old car and pick us up. Or we’d start in time to walk it – Lord! It was twelve miles! And I’d come back home and I wasn’t really conscious of when I left and when I got there. I was just dazed with that fiddle.

And it was just like a dang carnival, you know. We just sat and never opened our mouth and, like I said, he’d scare them fellers, them fellers never tried to play. Doc White asked him one night, said, “Ed, how do you play them tunes without changing keys?” “Well,” he said, “Doc. I change them with my fingers!” He wasn’t being sarcastic with Doc, he liked Doc.

Well, when he’d take a notion to go back to Kentucky, we’d beg him to stay another week. Doc White would say, “Now Ed, listen. They’s a gang of people coming from Roane County, you can make some money. Now, you stay another week.” Ed was bad to swear. Well, they’d talk him into it. Maybe he’d make four or five dollars a night.

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This autobiographical piece first appeared in the booklet notes to the 2005 re-release of the 1974 Rounder LP, Wilson Douglas: The Right Hand Fork of Rush’s Creek (Rounder CD0047) -www.mustrad.org.uk

...more at: Wilson Douglas - full notes

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X:0 T:Arkanses Traveller [sic] [1] M:2/4 L:1/8 S:William Sydney Mount manuscripts N:Mount annotates his manuscript page with “Stony Brook (Long Island, New York) N:August 22nd, (18)52” and “As played by P(?).J. Cook.” At the end of the first part is the N:note “octave 2nd time,” meaning presumably that probably the first eight bars are to be N:played an octave higher as a variation when the whole tune is repeated, probably with N:the two bar ending that Mount entered at the top of the page. Interestingly, Mount’s N:manuscript predates the first known publication of the melody, in Buffalo, N.Y., by N:Blodgett & Bradford in 1858, although the tune and the story of the traveler and the N:country fiddler were known to be in circulation some two decades beforehand, N:stemming probably from plantation sources and then to the minstrel stage. Z:Transcribed and annotated by Andrew Kuntz K:D V:1 clef=treble name="0." [V:1] (D/E/)F/D/ B,B,/D/ | A,A,/B,/ DD | EE FF | D/E/F/D/ B,D | (D/E/)F/D/ B,(B,/D/) | A,A,/B,/ DA | (d/c/)(d/A/) (B/d/)(A/G/) | (F/D/)(E/F/) D2 :| |:(a/g/)f/a/ (g/f/)e/g/ | (f/e/)d/f/ (e/c/)A2 | d/d/d e/e/e | (f/e/)d/f/ e2 | (a/g/)f/a/ (g/f/)e/g/ | (f/e/)d/f/ (e/c/)A | (d/c/)d/A/ (B/d/)A/G/ | (F/D/)E/F/ D2 :|]