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Will Davenport's Tune

by Joseph Decosimo

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First single from forthcoming album "While You Were Slumbering"

Full Release Notes & Vinyl/CD Preorder here:
www.sleepycatrec.com/scr019-1-will-davenports-tune

I learned this 19th century banjo piece during my visits with the great fiddler and banjo player Clyde Davenport in Jamestown, Tennessee. An unnamed tune from his father Will Davenport’s (1868-1950) repertoire, it existed only in the Davenport family. I began visiting Clyde and his wife Lorene in the early aughts. Clyde was in his 80s at the time, had received a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship, and probably maintained the largest repertoire of old fiddle and banjo music of any traditional musician in Southern Appalachia. It was magical to sit with him and absorb the intricacies of his playing and twisty repertoire. He died in February 2020 at 98 years old, and Lorene died later that October. I miss visiting them. They were profoundly generous people.

Over time, the piece shifted in my hands. I recorded the banjo part in his attic with a beautiful on-loan gourd banjo made by friend and banjo maker Jason Romero. Composer and fiddler Cleek Schrey’s pump organ part, played on a 19th century pump organ offers a fresh take on an instrument that has long been a part of Southern vernacular music. Elephant Micah’s Matt O’Connell adds understated percussion—an interpretation of the finger knocking hand percussion of Eastern North Carolina’s Walter Raleigh Babson, who would rap his knuckles on a table, mimicking the percussive flatfoot dance rhythms that often accompany Southern fiddle and banjo tunes.

www.josephdecosimo.com

credits

released September 16, 2022
Banjo - Joseph Decosimo
Percussion - Matthew O’Connell
Pump Organ - Cleek Schrey
Recorded by Joseph at home in Durham and at Princeton University and by Matthew in Raleigh
Mixed by Alec Spiegelman
Mastered by Mike Monseur

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Joseph Decosimo Durham, North Carolina

plays rare fiddle/banjo tunes and sings old songs, especially fiddle/banjo music from the Appalachian South. Joseph has made a deep study of the the music of the Cumberland Plateau/East TN/Western NC regions and has performed and taught it around the world with the Bucking Mules. Beyond trad music, his fiddle/banjo can be heard on projects by Hiss Golden Messenger and others. ... more

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