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Here's something all of us college kids used to sit around and pick and sing. Blackbird, a Beatles tune. I never could sing it...being in the key of G...hard to sing in that key for me. But an old friend from the good ol' days contacted me a while back and asked if i'd do this one again. So here we go...I got my daughter, the opera singer who can sing in ANY key...lol...seriously...got her to sing it for me while I picked it and thumped along on a separate drum track with grandson's toy drum.
Just musing. Gettin' ready to have a meetup with our old friends from those Blackbird under the huge mimosa trees days...made me think of it. If I had time I'd play that one again...maybe one of these days...
youtu.be/snKDZ1iArNU?si=Fe7st4Bu1oE-Zpu6
Well I've got a lot to do and have to get up and go early in the mornin'-O, but just reminiscing about stuff...that friend who wanted me to play Blackbird also wanted me to play some other Beatles songs...just now listening to this one on my youtube channel from back then...man, I do NOT know how I got that weird chord progression down...lol...groundhog goes beatles...at least back several years ago when my friend from the old days was requesting. I think it was challenging but kinda fun, but honestly, I was glad when she stopped and I got back into just plain and simple Old Time and Ballads again...lol.
youtu.be/He7cvfNNKJU?si=f_msnOGXD9Insbc6
That's all...I'll stop, should been in bed an hour ago...
Well ok...I've played Blackbird since college days...but the Norwegian Wood thing threw me...lol...I mean, I was listening to it last night, just thinking about how great it's gonna be to meetup with old friends who were like family once again...so I picked up the guitar and thought that really sounds hard. To my surprise, that chord progression is really basic, straightforward, easy actually...so I was proud of myself for figuring it out once again, then this video popped up after I was struggling my way through the Norwegian Wood multi track video...so...lol...ok...well it was helpful but too late in coming...lol.
Anyway, if I get time and chance to mess with guitar much these days...I might pick up that tune to mess around with it...maybe some cool fiddling ideas will hopefully surface if I can mess around with it enough...it's actually easy on the guitar...but it sounded hard to me when i was listening to that.
Here's the ghp lesson on how I played it...just sounds harder to play than it actually is to me...
youtu.be/W25LsId2l2k?si=atac3FteW4aWaPqI
Pretty easy. Ok...'nuff of it...I'm done solilioquizing about all that. As I said before, I am really lookin' forward to sitting with our old gang from back home...nobody to talk to here...I haven't had a conversation outside of immediate household for 35 years now, except for when the old friends can manage to get together...and the group is dwindling with each passing year. I'm going crazy...lol. At the moment I really can't play much music.
Edited by - groundhogpeggy on 05/03/2024 05:30:34
I never was much of a Beetles fan back in the day, but some of those ballad tunes they wrote in the late 1960s had catchy melodies. But then you got me to thinking about a ballad tune and what relation if any exists between ballads and stuff we like to call OT music. I really don't know much about either genre, but when I think of those old ballads for some reason those murder ballads come to mind. Seems there was a slew of em. Decided to look this up on the web and came up with this.
Funny. My band writes the vast majority of our material, pirate music being somewhat thin on the ground. We always kid our audience that there are 3 kinds of Brigands songs. Ones where you're about to die, ones where you are dying, and ones where you are already dead. Mostly due to poor captaining, but also the occasional sea monster, bad storm, over zealous British pirate-hunter, jealous lover or eating bad seafood.
Edited by - wrench13 on 05/03/2024 06:18:10
Lol...seems a good ballad has to have its gruesome elements. I mainly like them because of how the music sounds, but yeah...it's weird somebody has to die some horrible death or whatever. Is the human race a sad bunch that thrives on all that or what? I remember Jean Ritchie's story about how when she went to Ireland on a grant to compare songs, and basically every time she did an American ballad, people showed her how it was actually older than she thought...they were all from British Isles, essentially.
As far as Norwegian Wood...I can't make any sense outta those words those Beatles put in there. Makes no sense to me at all. I met this girl, she had to go to work, I slept in her bathtub and woke up and lit a fire while she was a work...lol...ok...ballad worthy stuff I guess. But the music...although really repetitive, strikes me as deeply moving and beautiful. I hope somehow I can get the Beatles out of my mind on this one long enough to conjure up my own thoughts on how I would want to play it...especially if I could get some fiddle and banjo going in there and Old Timey it up some. Back when I was in the little local amateur BG band for a few years we Bluegrassed up Monkey songs...well I didn't do that, but they had done that so I played them with those guys. I didn't know they were monkey songs...I just know those guys would giggle and think it was so cool...then I found out it was because they took Monkey songs and made them into passable Bluegrass...lol. Well maybe I can do that with this N. W. song and make it into something more my style. I did a handful of Beatles tunes for this friend, who for whatever reason, just started throwing in the requests...lol...I found them challenging for me, but a fun thing to work on. Kinda like when i did the Purcell opera with daughter...whooo boy...that was TOUGH. But it was fun...although more work than I ever dreamed. Still...we got 'er done...and we were amazed we did. It was definitely amateurish...but we did the whole dang thing by ourselves.
Edited by - groundhogpeggy on 05/03/2024 07:04:51
It's good to remember that the old songs aren't just about violence or random violence, but deal with the same issues we deal with today... things like pregnancy, abortion, class/abuse and exploitation of the poor by the rich etc. Sometimes in full length where they reveal more of these issues and the "spin offs" like our modern tv shows and movies that don't always have the back story!
I don't know how this thread drifted from Beatles songs to murder ballads, but it did. I know two definitions of "ballad" - one the old meaning of a song that tells a story, and the more modern meaning of a slow, lyrical love song. I read somewhere that a "ballad hunter" found that the term was unknown to his "informants," but if he asked for "love songs" he heard plenty.
As far as origins, Francis James Child titled his collection "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads," I think because he believed they mostly came from the Border region between England and Lowland Scotland. Cecil Sharp's classic book is titled "English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians" and he makes a distinction between "Ballads" and "Songs." In the introduction he describes the people he visited as of English origin, but he suspected many were actually of Scottish ancestry (probably correct), but many of the people didn't know beyond their earliest ancestors in this land.
Peggy, "Norwegian Wood" is a pretty simple song - the trick is that it modulates to the parallel minor for the bridge. I play(ed) it in D, but I think the Beatles recording is in E. I agree that the words are enigmatic, and somewhat mysterious, but that's part of its charm. You may not be aware of the "Bluegrass" record "Beatle Country" en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatle_Country
This was a time when folk, country, and rock music were all bubbling together, and they weren't the only ones to try this. I remember playing with some friends at a fraternity gathering and singing "I've Just Seen A Face" to a beautiful girl I noticed in the audience, which led to a fairly brief, but intense romance. That was in the Fall of 1965, before the Charles River Valley Boys record came out.
Some Monkees songs work too, like "Last Train to Clarksville." For some reason the song "I'm A Believer" has been stuck in my head lately, even though I don't know the words (written by Neil Diamond).
Well as I said before...I played Blackbird with other college fingerpickers sittin' around under the big shady trees. But...I woulda never played Norwegian Wood without my friend having asked me to play it and send her an mp3. I don't know what she did with those mp3s...lol...could be the subject of some clown parties or something...lol. Just to drift a little more, like some ol' cow puncher or something...I guess I did 6 songs before something interrupted that whole thing going back and forth...I put them in a playlist called "Beatles for Barb," as they were for my good friend, Barb...lol. Makes sense, hey? Well I had unexpected fun playing them, because i'm not really into Beatles, Monkees or any of that...I've always been a real square... but it was fun... here's an attempt to link to that playlist...probably won't work since it was done by an old cranky grownup instead of a kid...but here's an attempt to link anyway... youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo0...Z1F2ae57_
Blackbird must've circulated among fingerpickers quite a bit back in the early 70s, sounds like....maybe right up there with Freight Train...lol.
I always thought of a ballad as a true tale from the old broadside tradition of the town criers reading off the broadsheets and ringing the bells on the town corners...lol.
I come from Liverpool, my family are Irish and come from Scotland road, hence the name I changed to, in Liverpool its known as Scotty road.
Ringo said when asked that he missed nothing at all about Liverpool, for which the people never forgave him. In a park near lime street they had hedges cut to look like the beatles and someone chopped ringos head off, lol.
Scousers, as Liverpudlians are known, are the salt of the earth, great people, who would give you the coat off their back, but most people in other parts of the country think they are thieves and rogues.
Edited by - Scotty road on 05/04/2024 09:09:35