For enthusiasts of early banjo
Backside Albany
This tune (an adaptation of a 17c. Irish ballad about the 1690 Battle of Boyne Water) is from Micah Hawkin's song "Backside Albany" or "The Seige of Plattsburg" written in 1815 for the play, "The Battle of Lake Champlain", first performed in Albany in 1815. Told from the point of view of an American Black sailor, the song recounts a naval battle between the Americans and the British that took place on Lake Champlain on 11 Sept. 1814. For more on this song, please see William J. Mahar's essay: "Backside Albany" and Early Blackface Minstrelsy: A Contextual Study of America's First Blackface Song (in American Music, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 1-27.)
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Comment by Wes Merchant on April 26, 2014 at 7:07am
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From Andrew Kuntz Fiddler's Companion "Micah Hawkins played piano, flute and violin, and was the uncle of Long Island painter William Sydney Mount. Mount was musically influenced by his uncle and was himself a fiddler who often depicted fiddlers in his paintings. “Backside Albany” was learned by 'revival' musician John McCutcheon from fiddler Lotus Dickey (Paoli, Indiana), who learned it from a brother who in turn claimed to have gotten it through a book from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue."
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