Come Back, Boys, Let’s Feed the Horses

I picked this tune up earlier today, mostly from Mossy Roof‘s recording of the Canote String Band Class, but also from Paul Kirk’s tune of the week video and a video of Dwight Diller playing it on the banjo. I was prompted to check it out by a question on the Seattle Old-Time Music facebook group from someone asking how, if you’re learning a tune by ear, you know if you’re playing it the way the source of the tune played it. I hadn’t really thought about that too much before, but what I settled on is that it’s not actually that important to me that I play a tune exactly like I first heard it. It’s certainly important to be able to tell whether what you’re playing goes well with what someone else is playing, whether it’s in a live jam or playing along with a recording, but I’m not sure I care whether I’m playing it exactly the same. Is it recognizably the same tune? Does what I’m playing sound good with whatever else is going on? If so, great.

There are fiddlers who have clearly listened very closely to a source recording and can sound almost exactly like their source — Grace Forrest plays a couple of Ed Haley tunes, for example, which sound to me like what Ed Haley would have sounded like if he had been recorded with modern equipment. That’s an incredible skill, and it’s not something I can do, and I’m ok with that. If there’s a tune I like and want to learn, my goal is to learn it well enough that I’m putting my own spin on it, influenced by everyone who I’ve learned from and their own styles. I’m not going to sound exactly like Greg Canote, or Sarah Comer, or David Bragger, or Rayna Gellert, or Grace Forrest, or Gabrielle Macrae, or Chirps Smith, or Tricia Spencer, or Howard Rains. But I hope that if someone is listening to me play, they’ll hear bits that remind them a little of those folks.

So with that in mind, here are two different takes on “Come Back, Boys, Let’s Feed the Horses”. The first is pretty close to how I hear the version that the Canotes taught, in standard tuning in the key of A:

They credit this to Burl Hammons, by way of Jimmy Triplett. If you listen to Hammons play it, you may notice that he starts on the low part, rather than the high, and he doesn’t seem to quite remember it, so it’s difficult to tell whether some of the pauses are intentional or not. Someone between him and here made the choice to settle on this way of playing it. It’s a valid choice, but it’s not the only one.

If you tune the two high strings down a whole step, so your fiddle is tuned GDgd, you can play the same fingerings on the top two strings as before and be in G instead of A. Playing it this way feels more natural to me, and I wonder if the reason Burl Hammons sounded hesitant about this tune in the recording on Slippery Hill is that he’d forgotten that he used to play the tune in a cross key. I’ve also removed the half-measure from the end of the high part in this one, because a bunch of the versions I listened to did that.

Is one of these interpretations more valid than the other? I don’t think so. Try them both, see where you think extra measures do or don’t belong, make the tune yours. I bet this would sound great tuned even lower, in FCfc.

Front page photo by Özge Sultan Temur