
They say Bascom Lamar
Lunsford got the banjo song "Dry Bones" from an itinerant black preacher named
Romney traveling through South Turkey Creek, North Carolina.
Lunsford recorded it in 1928.
I hitch hiked to Abbey
Feale, Ireland in 1978 and drank poteen with my grandmother's brothers and sat
in a circle with the locals and people sang and told stories and shared
music.
Well it wasn't until years
later I had a pocket full of crumpled bills from bartending tips that I walked
into Lark Street Music in Albany, N.Y. and bought a banjo off the wall and
took it back to my one room apartment thinking maybe I could do what my Irish
uncles had done -- play traditional music, share music.
But it takes a long time to get the
instrument to start to sound right and to start to match the words and voice
to it. By dumb luck I found old
LPs of the Anthology of American Folk Music at the Schenectady County Public
Library and studied it and pondered it. So the great Anthology became a
principal reference in a particularly American library - a library of songs
and instruments, unpolished singing styles and poetry. Blind Lemon Jefferson singing of death
on a pale horse and AP Carter bringing forth songs of outcasts and the
down-trodden two outstanding poets along with many others helping keep the
past alive -- giving me an idea --