Most of today was driving. It takes a long time to get through Kansas, but we did stop for a short hike at the Flagler Reservoir in eastern Colorado. We saw one peak in the distance, and Travalon wondered if it was a fata morgana, since we were too far east to see the Rockies, but it was Pike's Peak. Finally we did see the Rockies in the distance, just as the sun was going down. We hit Denver right at rush hour, but once we got to our hotel and unpacked a bit, my aunt and uncle came and picked us up. I brought the mandolin so we could jam.
My cousins made us pizzas - they were so tasty! We all sat around talking until we were done eating, then my uncle and I jammed. I had two songs I wanted to do, "Fat Man" by Jethro Tull (since it has a mandolin part) and "John Barleycorn" by Traffic, which is actually an old folk song. Travalon really wanted us to do "The Ballad of Curtis Loew" by Lynyrd Skynyrd, since we had done an okay job on it back in May when my aunt and uncle came to our town. I had not practiced any of these songs, but this is what I gleaned from this jam session:
"Fat Man" is in C minor. Why would a mandolin player write anything in that key? It's got flats! But he isn't playing chords, so I just played the riff he keeps playing over and over.
"The Ballad of Curtis Loew" is in E, which has too many sharps, but at least it doesn't have flats. I figured out where to play the E, the B7, and the A (1, 4, and 5 chords), but there was some chord in the bridge that I never got right. We looked it up, and turns out it's an F#. This is not a hard chord to play, but somehow I never figured it out.
"John Barleycorn" is by far my favorite of the three. I love the slightly creepy words about how everyone is torturing John Barleycorn, as if he were a person and not barley. I read about the song on Wikipedia, and it's a very old English/Scottish folk song, the point being that people are cruel to the plant when creating beer, but the plant gets its revenge by getting people drunk. One woman speculated that it was based on some pagan myth about the plant being killed by people, resurrecting (i.e., the seed germinates), and then people drink its blood. Huh... is Jesus actually a plant who was incarnated as a human? I could see God being a tree. That's no weirder than his being an old white guy with a beard. Anyway, the song is in E minor, which is super easy to play on the mandolin because it's basically G, only minor. However, some of the chords didn't seem straightforward, so I'm wondering if it's actually in the Dorian mode. Old tunes often are.
Feel free to correct me in the comments if I am off-base about any of these songs. Or feel free to suggest other songs my uncle could play on the flute while I play on the mandolin.
Famous Hat
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