Rather be a sailor way out on the sea...

I'm going to start this off with the song that got me hooked on old time music: I've Got No Honey Baby Now by Frank Blevins and His Tarheel Rattlers.

During the fall 2005 I left the US to study on the Semester at Sea program, an experience which unquestionably altered my life. Before leaving my friend Tony gave me a mixtape called "The Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat." I spent a lot of time sitting on the deck and listening to it while staring out at whatever expanse of ocean we cruised across and taking in the immensity of the ever loving world.

Among groups like Minor Threat, Johnny Cash, Rage Against the Machine, Black Flag, Hank Williams Sr. and III and picking up right after a really fuzzed out early Flaming Lips song, this song grabbed me on the first listen. I owned and enjoyed Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music but this old time tune... this was like nothing else. The song was so raw it was like nothing I had ever heard before. I could feel where the singer's voice was coming from in my chest. The fiddling remained in my head between listens and the rhythm laid down by the banjo and guitar was fantastically choppy and primitive. I couldn't make out the lyrics all that well, in fact I thought at the beginning he says something about a dirty old hound when he says "I didn't know how." What I could make out was "Rather be a sailor/way out on the sea/than to be a married man/with a baby on my knee." As a young man with the oceans of the world churning all around me, this line made a lot of sense. I wonder what sort of sense it made to the 17 year old boy who sang it into a beat old microphone one afternoon in the late 1920's in North Carolina.

Here's an mp3 of the tune. This song is what actually made me want to pick up the fiddle, which I did about 2 and a half years ago. I still haven't learned how to play this tune.


http://www.mediafire.com/?zmymntmkzmz

Everything (I think) the Tarheel Rattlers recorded is on available on a compilation called "Music From the Lost Provinces." It's one of my absolute favorite records and I'd suggest to anyone with an interest in real, raw fiddle tunes.