There’s a new downloadable track from Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals on our music page for your downloading pleasure. It’s called ‘Pick Poor Robin Clean’, an old raggy blues tune that we like a lot. It’s also up on Tangleweed’s MySpace page for your streaming pleasure.

I learned it from an old Luke Jordan record, but Geeshie Wiley also recorded an excellent version of the tune for Paramount Records, which I featured on the blog a while back.

The tune is a fairly straightforward circle of fifths ragtime progression, except that it aborts the progression midway when it repeats, resulting in this:

F#7 | F# 7 | B7 | B7 | E7 | E7 | A | A
F#7 | F# 7 | B7 | B7 | A | E7 | A | A

For the solos, we split the progression in half, with the first soloist taking the front eight bars, the second soloist the back eight bars. There are two mandolin solos on the recording, and they give a pretty good sense of the tone of the resonator mandolin I used on the recording. The resonator tone works well on this kind of tune — it’s louder, fatter, and raunchier than what one gets from a traditional mandolin.

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Apropos of nothing, I slipped a gratuitous Ohio reference into the tune, replacing an off-color lyric in the original with a reference to the endemic poisonous nut of my home state.

Visit our music page for a download link.

I just finished rereading Eward Berlin’s excellent Scott Joplin Biography, King of Ragtime. Only two of Joplin’s rags were recorded commercially during his lifetime, and the first piano recording of his most famous composition, Maple Leaf Rag, was not made until 1923, six years after his death.

More typical is this arrangement by banjo virtuoso Vess Ossman. The ubiquity of the banjo and relative scarcity of the piano in early recorded music has more to do with the limitations of early mechanical recording technology than with the popularity of the instruments. The volume and focused, directional sound of the banjo, combined with its lack of sustain, made it ideal for early mechanical recordings. Instruments like the piano and violin, however, tended to sound weak and warbly.

Maple Leaf Rag (MP3)

Courtesy of Archive.org