This is a beautiful performance of an old-timey modal banjo tune. Dock Boggs was a banjo player born in Norton, Virginia, a small hamlet in the western tip of the state, near the borders of North Carolina and Kentucky. Like many early country musicians, Boggs was not a full-time professional. He spent most of his working life as a coal miner, and was inactive as a musician from the Great Depression until his ‘rediscovery’ by New Lost City Rambler and musicolgist Mike Seeger.

The tune itself bears a striking resemblance to ‘Darling Corey’. This was recorded in New York in 1927 for the Brunswick company.

Country Blues (MP3)

Courtesy of Archive.org