Carve Dat Possum

Comment by Joel Hooks on August 19, 2014 at 6:25pm

One of my favorites! Well done!

Comment by Paul Draper on August 19, 2014 at 7:25pm

Thanks Joel.

Comment by Wes Merchant on August 19, 2014 at 7:26pm

Makes me hungry just listening!

Comment by Strumelia on August 30, 2014 at 12:52pm

Great job, Paul!    :)   I loved Dave's performance as well.  Sort of a spooky song.

You need to bring the vocals up somehow though?- the banjo is not letting the voice lead.

What is the percussion you used?

Comment by Paul Draper on August 31, 2014 at 3:41pm

Thanks Lisa. I'm camped right next to Dave here at Genero. We've been playing some 19th c. chestnuts into the wee hours of the morn and have had some nice fiddle collaboration.

Comment by Strumelia on August 31, 2014 at 8:08pm

Oh wow, I totally forgot that Dave goes to Genero!    =8-o   D'OOOOHHH!!  

I had spoken briefly with Dave at his site there at Genero a couple of years without learning his name, before I ever met him at Antietam, and I totally didn't make the mental connection that it was the same person!  (I havent been to Genero in a couple of yrs) Now the foggy brain memories are coming back, I remember looking at his great banjos at Genero a few yrs ago and asking him about them!   I remember that greyish one with the star was so huge that I was too intimidated to even try it when he offered to let me play it.   lol!  

Comment by Paul Draper on September 2, 2014 at 9:04am

Strumelia - percussion is tambo and aspirin bottle. You're right about the vocals being too weak. I'll try augmenting the volume a bit on my recording.

Comment by Charles Edward Lee on October 2, 2014 at 11:25pm

This puts me in mind of one of my favorite one-stanza poems. Published in the Washington, Arkansas newspaper The Washington Telegraph in 1841, the anonymously-penned poem says only:

O possum and potatoes,

Ye are delicious food;

And your squeamish-stomached haters

Do not know what is good.

Thanks for taking the time and effort to record this song, so we might all enjoy it with you!

Comment by Paul Draper on October 3, 2014 at 7:27am

Thanks for sharing that, Charles! Yum!

Comment by Wes Merchant on October 3, 2014 at 3:11pm

In the early 1980's I had a banjo playing buddy in Kentucky tell me the story of being in New Orleans for a reenactment of the battle. He was camped with some fellow "buck-skinners" on the National Park property with a possum on a spit over the fire, when the Ranger came by he graciously averted his eyes and merely said, ''I didn't see that..."

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