Saturday 13 February 2016

Follow Me Down

A couple of weeks back I suddenly got the urge to do a song using the melody from If It Wasn't For Dickie by Leadbelly. No real reason, except I find the song (which I only discovered about a year ago) haunting and compelling. It's not so much the lyrics, which I can only half make out, as the way the melody keeps taking unconventional twists and turns.



Anyway, I worked out the tune on my melodica, put some chords under it, and let it rest while I got on with Bourgeoisie. Then yesterday and today (while recovering from a mercifully short bout of flu) I started working on it seriously and it quite quickly became Follow Me Down. As usual it's not finished, but I quite like what's there so far. I hope it doesn't trample too much on the original.

By the way, the line "follow me down" isn't in Dickie, but I took it from another Leadbelly song:


3 comments:

  1. I had not heard that Leadbelly track either, really odd timings even from someone who is shit at click tracks. Of course when you play your track next to it you do hear certain intervals, so what. Again, this is really great stuff Philip

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    1. Yeah, I found two different chord sequences that more or less fitted. One was mostly the three major chords of Eb and sounded fairly close to the original. The other was still in Eb but had lots of minor chords - deffo not what Leadbelly's playing. Both sequences get used in my song, but it's tough to spot them because that "wacha" organ (which is where they appear) sounds more like percussion.

      As for tuning, it sounds like he's open-tuned it to Ab and is cross-playing in Eb. Of course he could just be tuned to A and the tape's running a semitone flat...

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    2. Sorry, I mean tuned to G and the tape's running sharp.

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