Tune of the Week-Alabama Joe

[Tim Twiss]

Anyone feel like reviving the Tune Of The Week?

We pick one....post music, tabs, videos etc. Discuss it.

Anyone up for it?

[Tim Twiss]

How did you all learn the tune? Tab, the original notation..or by ear.

[Al Smitley]

Ear for both fiddle and banjo.

[Leonidas (Lee) Jones]

Its funny, I've played just about all the solos in Briggs, but never Alabama Joe for some reason. I started it yesterday, from the boriginal notation.

[Tim Twiss]

Flesher's tab is real good. Now, the Weidlich has a weird thing in it. Has anyone ever noticed it or been tripped up?

[Christopher Stetson]

I just looked at it, too, with Rob Mackillop's tab.  I don't know the other sources, but recently moved over to playing from the originals, mostly.

[Tim Twiss]

Yes, and look at the Gumbo Chaff version. It is a pretty direct lift and stays in the same key as the sheet music. ( Bb )

[Strumelia]

Tim, where is the 'weird thing' located?

Tim Twiss said:

Flesher's tab is real good. Now, the Weidlich has a weird thing in it. Has anyone ever noticed it or been tripped up?

[Leonidas (Lee) Jones]

I'm going to guess that it's where he moves the slur. Briggs notates a slur/glide stroke on the first two 16ths of the seventh measure, and again in the next to last bar. Weidlich moves the slur to the second and third sixteenths of that beat. morphing it into a hammer-on. Since I didn't learn this from the tab, it didn't trip me up, although there are a couple of similar instaces in other pieces that did.

[Tim Twiss]

Yes. That's it. The slur in the original is on the first 2 beats. Clearly a Rice " pull but never addressed in that book.

[Tim Twiss]

Flesher caught it and transcribed it as such.

[Tim Twiss]

It's a small thing, but the way he ( Weidlich ) notates it ...it loses continuity and is difficult to play.

[Leonidas (Lee) Jones]

Interesting, I did not interpret this as a Rice pull-off from the notation. When Briggs explains slurs on pages 12-13, his third example is slurs on ascending notes of different strings, which he describes as "sliding the first finger over the strings",which is what I meant by glide stroke. To be sure, his example was a three note slur on a D major chord, but when I read through it first yesterday, I saw it as a two string glide, which seems to play very smoothly.