Club Q Update #95 - The Ballad Of Dee & Delta

If I had to choose the best songs I think i’ve written, this one would be up there.

We were filming the Island Bound documentary, and had come back over to the States, and to Eastern Tennessee, where we were looking at how folk songs from the Isle of Man, Scotland and England had emigrated with people, and how these songs had been passed down, preserved (sometimes better than in their original countries), and what other musical styles they had contributed to the evolution of. It was a really fascinating leg of the documentary, and we were lucky enough to cross paths with a musicologist in the area called Bobby Fulcher.

Bobby had such a calm, gentle voice, it was just such a pleasure to be in his company. He was so eager and excited to show us the musical world that he plainly adored. The first stop we made with him was to the house of an elderly fiddle player, Charlie McCarroll, who lived in heartbreaking squalor in the hills. He was frail, and had the onset of Alzheimers, but ask him to play a tune on the fiddle that he hadn’t heard in 30 years and he launched into it with vigor, and with character only mustered by the best Appalachian musicians. We were supposed to stay an hour but we spent the whole day. That experience changed my life. I took the photo in this post of Charlie in front of his house.

After we left Charlie’s place, we all went to go and find something to eat. I told Bobby how meeting and hearing Charlie had affected me, I was emotional. I could tell he was pleased to see how this experience had touched me, and he proceeded to tell us an experience that happened to him when he had worked in the field collecting Appalachian folk music while he was working under Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress.

This song is the story he told. When he was done, myself and the film’s producers, Christy DeHaven and Dave Armstrong, were all in tears. When we arrived back where we were staying, I wrote this.