I've Got the Worried Blues - Marc Nerenberg - live at the Yellow Door Hootenanny - May 2024

Indirectly, it was the playing and singing of Samantha Bumgarner, the first woman to be recorded playing the banjo (which recording took place 100 years ago, in April 1924) that led me to taking up the banjo in the first place. My direct influence was seeing Pete Seeger singing and playing the banjo, when I was a small child in the early 1950s, that caused me to determine to follow this particular musical path. But it was in the summer of 1936, that the then 17 year old Pete Seeger saw Samantha Bumgarner playing the banjo and singing at Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, where Pete was completely, and unexpectedly, captivated by the blend of rural showmanship, musical intensity and sheer drive of the 5-string banjo, and he determined to follow that musical path - a path that was originally launched by those hundred year old original Samantha Bumgarner recordings.
A few days ago, I watched a little mini-documentary about Samantha Bumgarner (that has no doubt recently re-surfaced on social media because this is the hundredth anniversary of her records). In the background at one point in that video, you can hear her playing and singing the first few lines of the song "Georgia Blues", one of the dozen or so recordings she made at that historic recording session. It was so old and scratchy, that the lyrics were almost indecipherable, and I mistakenly thought she was singing "I've got the worried blues" when she was actually singing "I've got the Georgia blues". The terrific melody of those couple of lines, however, was clear enough and it really stuck firmly in my mind.
That melody and those mis-heard lyrics were both still rattling around in my brain when it came time for me to sing the opening song of last week's Yellow Door Hootenanny, which I host, Atypically for me, I had nothing at all prepared in advance for that evening's opening song. But with that mini-documentary still on my mind, I found myself just talking about Samantha Bumgarner for a little while to the small group that had assembled at the Yellow Door,. Then I just launched into this completely improvised song, using that fragment of the melody still stuck in my head as a point of departure
I started and finished the song with the lyrics as I had misheard them, and filled in the rest of the song with some related floating verses (that float in and out of a whole lot of old songs). I really didn't know where it was going to go when I started out with only a vague idea of what I would do on both the banjo and singing. but now I'm really quite happy with the way it turned out - actually, a whole lot better than I had expected it to be.
This was played on a 1910 Fairbanks Banjo strung with synthetic gut strings tuned eAEAC# using a mix of old-time thumb-lead two-finger picking and clawhammer style playing, along with a low D harmonica (an octave lower than usual), played cross-keyed in A. It was recorded at the Yellow Door Hootenanny of 31 May 2024, in downtown Montreal.