Stay All Night and Don’t Go Home / Waterbound / Way Down in North Carolina

River’s up and I can’t get across
River’s up and I can’t get across
River’s up and I can’t get across
Stay with me till morning

I was already very late with this month’s tune when the atmospheric river hit and seemingly every terrestrial river in Western Washington flooded. The image above is from drone footage over Duvall, where the Snoqualmie valley flooded from edge to edge, isolating many areas on the east side of the valley. As I saw footage of the rivers rising, I kept having bits of a tune I couldn’t quite remember go through my head, and it wasn’t until a day or two later that I remembered the whole tune and what one of its names is: Waterbound.

I don’t think I’m up to the task of transcribing this tune, so I encourage you to try learning this one by ear. I also encourage you to try tuning your A and E strings down a whole step to G and D and playing in cross-G for this one. It is possible to play it in standard tuning, but I really recommend cross-tuning instead.

I learned this tune in Dan Gellert‘s band lab at Fiddle Tunes in 2013. In fact, here’s the recording I made of him playing it while he was thinking of what tunes he wanted to teach us:

Dan has a unique and immediately identifiable style on both banjo and fiddle; while his version is recognizably a descendant of Tommy Jarrell’s version, he’s put his own rhythmic spin on it. Here’s Tommy, for comparison:

This version has a completely different ‘B’ part than the 1929 Grayson County Railsplitters recording (which has a third name: “Way Down in North Carolina”), and to confuse things further they’re both completely different from Dirk Powell’s song “Waterbound” and the Bob Wills song “Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer)”. Here’s Foghorn Stringband playing a great version of the 1929 song, though:

One caveat about this version of the tune: you may be tempted in the A part to resolve a phrase on an E, but resist that urge. The phrase resolves on D. If you don’t hear any phrases which feel like they ought to resolve on an E, congratulations: you’re hearing the tune more clearly than most everyone I can find on YouTube who’s playing a version like Jarrell’s.