Before the pandemic, I recorded a solo album. I am working on finishing it and getting it out. Here’s a little taste.

ALABAMA BOUND – There are so many versions of this song that the point of origin is hard to pin down, although Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have written it in 1905. The Kate Adams in the song was a Mississippi riverboat line. Jackson is in central Mississippi and McComb, is south of there about 80 miles. Half the time the song title is “Don’t You Leave Me Here” taken from the recurring line that ends with,” just leave a dime for a beer.” Times have changed.

GOING ACROSS THE SEA – First recorded on the banjo by Uncle Dave Macon in 1924. I first heard it played on the mandolin by Bill Monroe in the documentary film “High Lonesome”. He is talking about the tunes his Uncle Pen would play on the fiddle and then asks, “Would you let me play one?” Priceless. Here it is as a flatpicking solo.

DIAMOND JOE – Recorded by Charlie Butler, an inmate at Parchman Farm in Mississippi, on March 8, 1937. John Lomax made several trips to Parchman to record songs and wound up recording Charlie Butler twice, both times acapella. The second time, in 1939, John’s wife Ruby wrote down additional lyrics to an unrecorded “Diamond Joe”. These lyrics suggest longing, like a love song, not a field holler or a prison song. I combined them with the recorded version. There is no definitive answer as to who or what Diamond Joe was. Perhaps it is the wish to be somewhere else.

ONE DIME BLUES – When I was about seventeen, I checked a record out of the public library called “Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians”. Recorded in 1956, it introduced me to the beautiful Piedmont fingerstyle guitar playing of Etta Baker. I quickly added her to the heavy rotation of fingerstyle guitarists I was trying to learn from. I’m still trying, every time I drop the needle. “One Dime Blues” was first recorded by Blind Lemon Jefferson in 1927. My version is not exactly like Etta’s or Blind Lemon’s but owes a debt to them both.

BEEN ALL AROUND THIS WORLD – This song is sometimes known as “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me”, and “Digging on the New Railroad”. This is one I pieced together from a bunch of different versions. The earliest recording is by Justus Begley, who claimed authorship, in 1937 for the Library of Congress. That’s where I got the Memphis verse from. I left out any reference to hanging, there were enough other things to sing about.