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The Lucky Thirteen
If you or I sit up in a bonus room or down in a living room and only play for ourselves, jams are pretty darned intimidating to go to. Most likely everyone there knows all those tunes, except you and me. There is a partial solution for that discomfort besides avoiding jams.
At Spring Thing this year, Dave Roth, Tom Womack, and Sam Greene put their heads together and came up with a list of 13 commonly played, easy-to-learn tunes. They were thinking of ones that people can memorize quickly and find easy to play. One feature that makes the tunes easy to play is that each tune usually has repeated lines. That makes for easy memorization, too. Eight are in the Foothills tab book, readily available to NGFDA members. And you and I will meet them in jams. We may not know every jam tune, but we can know these and even lead the jam in playing them.
So what did Sam, Dave, and Tom come up with? Here is their list, with notations of the page on which DAdd tab can be found on in our NGFDA Tablature Book (denoted as TB):
- Boil Them Cabbage Down
- Soldier's Joy (p.36, TB)
- Whiskey Before Breakfast (p. 38, TB)
- Mississippi Sawyer (p. 33. TB)
- Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss (p.28, TB)
- Old Joe Clark
- Cripple Creek (p. 23, TB)
- Angelina Baker
- Wildwood Flower (p. 39, TB)
- Southwind (p. 37, TB)
- Little Liza Jane
- Farther Along (p. 26, TB)
- Grey Cat on a Tennessee Farm
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Most of the songs not in our tab book are probably on sheet music you and I already have. I have my first copies of “Boil Them Cabbage Down,” “Grey Cat on a Tennessee Farm,” and “Old Joe Clark.” These were probably three of the songs we all learned as we became familiar with our dulcimers in sessions led by beginning instructors.
The list isn’t definitive. Sam, Dave, and Tom didn’t intend for it to be such. It is a start.
With your and my lucky 13, jams can become more fun, and as one book title suggests, you and I can join the jam!