Farewell Trion

I apologize: this is another of my idiosyncratic transcriptions. Nobody else that I know of puts the B part in 3/2, but I swear that’s how I hear it. Most people write it as nine measures of an even number of beats, but it has two phrases the same length as each other, which just doesn’t work if there’s an odd number of measures! Anyway, just listen to recordings, and you’ll hear how it goes and can decide for yourself. In any case, if you’re reading my sheet music, watch out for the B part: it’s weird.

Farewell Trion, according to Andrew Kuntz at the Traditional Tune Archive, was originally written (probably in the late 1800s?) with two parts by Joe Blaylock after being laid off from a mill in Trion, Georgia. James Bryan added a third part, but I don’t know which part. I’m guessing the weird-length B part, but I could be wrong. I’m not sure where I learned this tune, but I suspect it was mainly from Sally Jablonsky on a CD by Rabbit Foot Stringband, circa 2011, and then from jams around Seattle in the next few years after that. It was one of the only tunes in C I knew for a long time, and still one of my favorites.

My recording this month was initially made using JamKazam, an online low-latency jamming tool, with Paul Meredith on banjo. I then added myself playing it again so I could get video, because we don’t use JamKazam’s video feature.

This recording and transcription are more or less how I play it these days; listening to other versions while writing this post, I noticed that pretty much everyone plays this with their own variations, possibly because it’s not a very common jam tune and so a “festival” version hasn’t really crystallized like happens for more popular tunes. James Bryan himself plays it with a lot of variations and flexibility in which parts are played how many times and when:

Here’s a lovely arrangement from Tashina Clarridge on five-string fiddle (which allows for playing a part lower than you could on a regular four-string) and Jefferson Hamer on guitar:

And here’s a kind of trance-y jam at Clifftop:

(The image on the homepage for this tune is a mill in Trion, Georgia, circa 1895.)