Traditional music is unique in a new century that is full of commercial music devoid of historical and cultural connection. The majority of sounds consumed in the present musical marketplace is delivered to the consumer as the ostensible original artifact of an artist, but is actually most often the product of salaried song-writing teams, digital programming and the artifice of sonic manipulation. Although we have engaged in some excesses of multi-tracking, overdubbing, and editing, the music contained in this collection represents decades of individual study and practice and the absorption of several related musical traditions. These songs and tunes have all been learned by ear from musicians who also learned them by ear, and have in some cases made the journey across the Atlantic and across the centuries.

Traditional songs may be reified by iconic recordings of famous folk artists, but their nature is ambiguous and fluid. In some cases they are learned from a single informant, in others from a multiplicity of live, recorded, and printed sources. Our approach to the interpretation of this music is a pluralistic one that embraces all of our collective influences, including Irish traditional music, blue grass, old time, early music, acoustic folk rock, and other less obviously connected genres. In some cases I have been drawn to specific songs because of an early exposure to a similar version, though I have tried in all instances to present something different and simultaneously authentic to what I hear as the nature or essence of the music; this has often to do with the curve of the melody and inherent quality of the mode in which it is sung. There is also the rhythmic component of the American versions of the Anglo-Celtic ballads and fiddle tunes: this comes from the influence of African-American music and has, in my mind, not been honored by the accompaniment that is now traditional for this music. The squared-off guitar playing of the string bands of the 1920s and 30s cuts the meter in half and forces the tune into a generic groove that is applied to everything; I think that it's primarily a functional technique that serves well for an explicit beat for dancing. Since I don't play this music for dancers, I feel there is more flexibility in the rhythmic accompaniment and have thus taken what many listeners might think of as "liberties" with the music. I accept responsibility for this self-indulgence. What ever one's predilection for a given microgenre of traditional music, I hope you enjoy – and are possibly inspired by – what you are hearing now.

– Flynn Cohen, Gloucester, Massachusetts

The Songs

Young Emily

Our rendition comes directly from Sheila Kay Adams and her Aunt Dellie Chandler Norton, both of Madison County, NC. I first heard English and Irish versions of this morbid ballad when I was in high school on recordings by Steeleye Span and Paul Brady. This American variant is a good example of an "Imported" ballad, with the words intact and the melody retaining its original character while sounding distinctly American.

Modal Pentatonic; Guitar: dropped-D tuning.

A Lazy Farmer Boy

Also known as "The Young Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn," this humorous song was first recorded ostensibly by Buster Carter and Preston Young along with fiddler Posey Rorer in 1930 and was included in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952. Carter, although a member of the band and credited as a performer, did not actually play on the recording. Rorer was a member of Charlie Poole’s string band before teaming up with Carter and Young. All were forced to retire from the musical vocation by the Great Depression. Having lived through the Great Recession, I feel privileged to have been delivered unscathed and to still be playing music for a living.

Modal Pentatonic; Guitar: dropped-D tuning.

Carolina Lady

One of a handful of ballads I have learned form the singing of Dillard Chandler, this is a story with a broad history that includes folk song naturalization, cultural cross-fertilization and inspiration for popular music. I first heard a variant called "Lady of Carlisle" sung by English singer Jacqui McShee when I was in high school and soon discovered that the Grateful Dead had written their own philosophical extrapolation of the story for the title track of their 1977 album Terrapin Station. Chandler's version (which I follow almost exclusively) includes some lyrical localization, yet is very pure in its retention of the ancient melody.

Modal Pentatonic; Guitar: G6, capo II.

Conversation with Death

Though the traditional roots of this song date back to England in the seventeenth century, these specific stanzas were claimed to have been penned by Lloyd Chandler in 1919. Chandler was man of ill repute who apparently awoke one night from a drunken stupor and was scared into obedience by a vision, thereby experiencing a religious conversion and becoming a traveling preacher. I learned this song from a 1962 recording of Berzilla Wallin from Madison County, NC.

Minor Pentatonic; Guitar: dropped-D, capo IV.

Black is the Color

This American version of a traditional Scottish song was learned from Evelyn Ramsey, Madison County, NC. The recording of her singing was included on a CD of local music published by photographer Rob Amberg in Sodom Laurel Album (2001). Another significant field recording was made by Maud Karpeles of singer Lizzie Roberts – whom Karpeles and Cecil Sharp had originally met in 1916 – on a return trip to North Carolina in the 1950s. This song is still popular with bands in all Celtic genres and is played here with a mix of guitar playing that borrows from Irish and bluegrass styles.

Minor Pentatonic; Guitar: dropped-D, capo III.

Mathie Grove (Dillard Chandler)

A variant of Child Ballad No. 81, Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard. Learned primarily from Dillard Chandler and augmented with a couple of verses sung by Mrs. Carrie Ford of Black Mountain, NC and collected by Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles in 1916. The two musicologists apparently collected nineteen different versions of this song on their trip to the Southern Appalachians that year. I first learned this ballad when I was a teenager from the very well known recording by English traditional singer Sandy Denny on the Fairport Convention album Liege and Lief (1969). Ballads like this one represent an amazing fusion of imported elements (references to Lord and Ladies, the manor house, etc.) with the down home, bluesy character of the melody and bits of native language – particularly the euphemism "gonna be some huggin done." I composed a crooked banjo-like tune on the guitar, in the same mode, as a breakdown to follow the song-proper.

Minor Pentatonic;Guitar: dropped-D, capo V.

Neighbor Girl

This number represents that league of traditional tunes that is paired with a few non-narrative verses and is sometimes played without singing. It is reminiscent of more common songs "Come and Go with Me" and "Handsome Molly." I learned it from a recording of Lee Wallin, Madison County, NC banjo player and singer. My guitar part fuses elements of Irish guitar playing with a percussive, quasi-cross-picking technique in order to imitate the sound of the banjo. I am joined here with a full duet harmony by my wife Liz, herself a traditional singer with family musical roots dating back many generations to the southern mountains.

Major Pentatonic; Guitar: G6, capo II.

Sailor Being Tired

A classic people-take-warning ballad learned from the singing of Jake Owen who had learned it from a recording of Dillard Chandler. When I first heard this I felt that I had already absorbed the story and many of the phrases from dozens of English folk songs and that it was suddenly distilled in this beautiful example of the American folk tradition. I do my best to bring it to life with the help of an Indian drone instrument called a sruti box.

Modal Pentatonic.

The Tunes

Fine Times at Our House/Falls of Richmond

A child prodigy and non-conformist, fiddler Edden Hammons is the source of these two beautiful modal tunes. They come from a field recording made of his playing in 1947 when he was in his early seventies and are stunning organic, traditional fusions of Celtic and American fiddle music. Hammons is infamously known for saying, in response to his first wife's pleas for him to get a job to support his family, " 'pon my honor, I'll lay my fiddle down for no damn woman." He later found a suitable mate and forged a path well known to many modern-day peripatetic artistes: scraping together a living by what is presently known as "multiple revenue streams."

Mixolydian; guitar: G6, capo II.

Cousin Sally Brown

This is a chirpy fiddle tune originally recorded in the late 1920s by the Sweet Brothers, a string band from Galax, VA. We play it over an evolving chord progression that utilizes the open strings on the guitar and follows (almost) exclusively the chords native to the key of G major. The tune itself uses six of the seven tones of the scale and fits what scholar Jeff Titon calls his "Third Melody Type" of old-time fiddle tunes, featuring "prominent rhythmic syncopation;" the result of the "ongoing black-white musical interchange that characterized vernacular music throughout the colonies . . .that came into [southern Appalachia with] the antebellum music of African American fiddlers and banjo players."

Major hexatonic; guitar: G6.

Lady Hamilton

One of the most squirrely tunes in my repertoire, I learned this from a 1941 field recording of fiddler Marcus Martin, originally from Macon County, NC. This fiercely crooked and modal tune uses what theorists call "inflection –" switching back and forth between parallel mixolydian and major modes by strategically shifting one note of the scale (the seventh degree). It also has obvious musical and nomenclatural ancestry in Irish and Scottish fiddle traditions.

Mixolydian, guitar: G6.

Booth Shot Lincoln/Hog Went Through the Fence, Yoke and All

Two tunes unrelated by geography and mode, I decided to pair them for their contrast, rather than similarity (though they share the same root note of A). The former comes from North Carolina fiddler Marcus Martin (see notes for "Lady Hamilton," above) and the latter from Hazard County, Kentucky fiddler Luther Strong. Strong, who is the sole source for this tune, played it for a recording by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax in October 1937.

Major Hexatonic/Mixolydian; guitar: G6, capo II.

Modes

The modes (scales) used in the construction of the melodies of the songs presented here are all pentatonic (5 different pitches-per-octave) and can be categorized in three types: Major, Minor, and "Modal." Using D as the root, here they are spelled out with pitch-classes (note letter names) as well as their equivalent interval abbreviations:

Major Pentatonic
D-E-F#-A-B-D
P1-M2-M3-P5-M6-P8

Minor Pentatonic
D-F-G-A-C-D
P1-m3-P4-P5-m7-P8

"Modal" Pentatonic
D-E-G-A-C-D
P1-M2-P4-P5-m7-P8

The various melody types on this recording signify different influences on the tradition; specifically, the Major and Minor Pentatonic modes show the affect of African-American music, while the "Modal" Pentatonic harkens back to the Scottish and English roots of many of the songs.

The fiddle tunes use a combination of pentatonic (5-note) and heptatonic (7-note) scales; the latter being represented almost exclusively by the Mixolydian mode which can be thought of as a major scale with a flattened seventh degree:

D-E-F#-G-A-B-C-D
P1-M2-M3-P4-P5-M6-m7-P8

Guitar Tunings

I use two different guitar tunings on this record: dropped-D (DADGBE) and G6 (DGDGBE), a variant of open-G. The former is used for playing chords and melodies out of D-position and the latter out of G-position; the capo is used to transpose the positions to fit the appropriate key for the voice or to match the original key of the fiddle tune.

Dedicated to the memory of John McGann: mentor, friend, bandmate, plucked-string virtuoso, musical and comic genius.

Credits

Flynn Cohen: acoustic guitar, lead vocals, sruti box
Matt Heaton: bouzouki, bodhrán
Danny Noveck: mandolin, fiddle
Liz SImmons: harmony vocals
Recorded at Sounds Interesting Studios, Middleboro, MA
Engineers: Brian Cass and Corey Sherman
Final Mixing by Overclock, Inc., New Bedford, MA, Brian Cass, engineer
Mastering: SolundMirror, Inc
Photography: Erin Prawoko
Graphics design and cover illustration:Eric Higgins
Liner Notes: Flynn Cohen,
Executive Producer: Jack Radcliffe

Tracks & Times

1. *Lady Hamilton; 2:45
2. Black Is The Color; 2:41
3. *Cousin Sally Brown; 2:19
4. Conversation With Death; 3:29
5. *Fine Times At Our House/Falls Of Richmond; 3:16
6. Neighbor Girl; 2:29
7. Young Emily; 4:18
8. A Sailor Being Tired; 3:29
9. *Booth Shot Lincoln/Hog Went Through the Fence, Yoke and All; 2:32
10. *Carolina Lady; 4:27
11. Mathie Grove; 6:40
12. A Lazy Farmer Boy; 3:31
* Instrumental only

Total playing time: 42:12