This wasn’t the song I intended to write.  It was supposed to be a song based on Steve Martin’s premise that nobody can be sad while playing the banjo.  But somehow it got pretty twisted.  I stopped it before it got entirely into Columbine territory (“Hey, everybody, I bought a banjo, now somebody’s gonna pay.”)  Long story short:  I was going to buy a banjo, and in connection with considering that purchase, the title and first line of this song occurred to me.  The song I envisioned was going to be a self-writing song about things going to hell (floods, depression, leprechaun uprisings), but hey, it’s all fine, because I have a banjo.  But I didn’t buy a banjo.  That’s the long story part I’ll leave out.  So I didn’t write that song, or rather I didn’t let it write itself.

But Saturday night it occurred to me that it would be funny to write a song about a banjo but not actually have a banjo ever show up.  Why wouldn’t the banjo ever show up?  Because the singer’s just trying to make himself look cool by claiming to be able to play the banjo.  He doesn’t even have a banjo.  (Why?  Maybe because the music store guy he tried to buy a banjo from has an attitude.  Just a guess.)  But what kind of person thinks playing a banjo would impress anybody in the first place?  And who would tell a lie that’s so easily found out?

Then I remembered when I was about ten years old a friend’s half-sister came to stay the summer in my hometown.  I don’t remember where she was from, but she was  a few years older, maybe even a teenager, and I had an immediate crush on her.  So I decided to tell her I was from Vermont. 

This friend’s half-sister was very impressed, I think, that I was from Vermont.  I started talking in some Vermont accent I made up.  I didn’t know what people from Vermont sounded like and assumed she didn’t either.  I remember Wheel of Fortune was on, the Chuck Woolery version.  Wheel of Fortune used to come on in the morning.

I don’t remember how it all turned out.  I know we didn’t get married.  Maybe I let the whole lie kind of die on its own after I realized that I couldn’t sustain it over the whole summer.  No matter what else I knew about the 150 (more or less) people in that town, I knew that the one thing that every single one of them had in common was the knowledge that I was not from Vermont.

But I really can play the banjo, and everything really is going to be okay. 

This one would probably have gone into the vault along with the other likely rejects if it had been recorded earlier.  But in keeping with the “go with what’s freshest” philosophy around here, I went with it:  written Saturday, recorded Monday, video’d Tuesday.  It is unlikely, however, that this song will  appear on any “Best of Nutcracker Buck” compilation.

Antecedents.  The chords/melody of this song are in generic off-the-rack “song” mode.  It’s one of John Prine’s favorite modes and is therefore good enough for me, too.

Video Notes. The opening is from Brian Steger’s going-away dinner on April 1. 

Steger

Steger stopped practicing law to goof around, travel and coach high school football, and now he’s joined the Peace Corps.  I don’t know who the people at that table are–at some point Daniel RoTrock quietly wandered away from our table to sit with more attractive people, and Buck and Steger crashed their party.  None of that has anything to do with the song.  I just wanted to commemorate Steger’s leaving (dark restaurant notwithstanding), and this song is short enough that I could tack that footage onto the beginning without making it a seven-minute video.  The rest of the video is random stuff–a birthday party at Dewberry Farms between here and El Paso (that’s Grady with the bottle sticking out of his shirt), another birthday party at Mount Asia between here and St. Louis.  If anybody wants to use our backyard for any future birthday parties, we’d be more than happy to oblige.  Really.  (I’ll probably need to revise this paragraph later.)

Lyrics Pages.  I’ve added a new page with the lyrics to alleviate enunciation pressure.  Also to help out my Sri Lankan fans.  Judging from my site visitation stats, Buck is really big in Sri Lanka (also in the Russian Federation, where all those fur-hatted Tchaikovskiites are probably sorely disappointed by this result on their “nutcracker” keyword searches.)  Actually it’s not one page but instead a bunch of pages with lyrics.  The page labeled “Lyrics” has no lyrics or anything else.  My plan was for you to click on the page called Lyrics and for there to be links to lyrics there.  I guess I don’t know how to do that. 

John Hartford.  Since we’re not quite out of time, I’ll let the late John Hartford play us out on the banjo.   “Gentle on my Mind” is the prettiest hobo love song ever written and one of those strange songs that seems to have no clear progenitors and to have left no recognizable offspring, though I think you can hear a lot of it in Blood on the Tracks, especially on “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.”   (It’s also, I think, a perfect song.)  Glen Campbell’s cover is better known, and prettier, but it’s John Hartford’s song, and Glen Campbell’s version doesn’t feature clogging. 

If Hartford had had Johnny Cash’s PR man he’d be more prominently recognized as one of the godfathers of the modern awakening to Americana music, or whatever you want to call it–stuff with banjos played by people who maybe don’t sing all that great.  But he was probably happier being a steamboat captain than he would have been pretending to be a messiah.