The Making of High Wide & Handsome Part 2 - The Buskers

Towards the end of the recording process, one last time going through the collected works of Charlie Poole, looking for songs to do, this one jumped out at me. It was published in 1902 by “Will Handy,” which was a pseudonym for the songwriting team of James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson. Oddly enough, It is obscurely related to a far older British song, “The Derby Ram,” a nonsense ditty about an enormous sheep, which is where the butchers came in, not to mention all that 'ram'bling. Anyway, the Johnson brothers’ refashioning was a popular sensation and it eventually became a New Orleans brass band standard. But, back to the Poole recording, what particularly caught my ears was a moment when the fiddler missed a change, and there were, briefly, two chords at once. And I wondered what if an entire arrangement were built around that “mistake.” I put together some words and devised a guitar tuning and chord diagrams working in the fiddler’s miscue and shot it over to Loudon. Almost immediately he found a way in and was performing it as part of his regular show. Then he announced that he was so happy with what he had going that he wanted to record the song solo. Next time he was in NYC, we did a session and he killed it. When I asked him how come it came so fast and strong for him, he simply said, “The song spoke to me.” Yes, indeed!

- Dick Connette

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