Banjos, bootleg whiskey, and Bascom Lamar Lunsford

Finding Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s Ballads, Banjo Tunes, and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina is like opening a door into another time. With all due respect to the artists on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, this is the real thing. Old English ballads (“Death of Queen Jane”), historical songs (“Swannanoa Tunnel”), famous songs (“I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” brilliantly anthologized on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music), even a whiskey drinking song (“Old Mountain Dew”):

The conductor said with a nod of his head
“My wife she never knew
That I take my fun when I'm out on my run
So bring me a quart or two”
Of good old mountain dew
For those who refuse it are few
But his wife said to me, “You can bring me three
By the time his train is due.”

But the best part for me is that it’s a connection back into the county where my father was born and where his family was from, for as long as anyone can remember. Bascom is distant kin, and getting to hear him speak on this disc, introducing the tunes as he recorded them for the Library of Congress in the late 1940s, is spine-chilling.

Not as spine-chilling, though, as the a cappella version of “To the Pines, To the Pines” on this collection. Better known in the versions by Leadbelly (“In the Pines”) and Nirvana (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night”), this rendition features a different tune (which Lunsford’s notes in the liner point to as the ancestor of “Look Down That Lonesome Road”) and slightly different lyrics. Where Leadbelly’s lyric (which Kurt Cobain used) narrows to a tightly dramatic accusation and defense of a girl, presumably the narrator’s wife or girlfriend, Lunsford’s version (recorded in 1949 two years after Leadbelly’s) interrogates a little boy who is a witness:

The prettiest girl I ever did see
Was killed one mile from here.
Her head is in the driving wheel
Her body never was found.
To the pines, to the pines, where the sun never shines
Gonna shiver where the cold winds blow.

Article Author: Timothy Jarrett

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