This post is a recording of a civil war fife and drum tune called “Frog in the Well.” It’s short and simple.
MP3 version: Lucas Gonze — Frog in the Well (MP3) (1:12)
Lucas Gonze — Frog in the Well (MP3)FLAC version: Lucas Gonze — Frog in the Well (FLAC) (1:12)
As always, this recording is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, and you are welcome to ask for a version under a different license (like a fully commercial license or a CC non-commercial license.
Update: for tablature and sheet music, see the followup post to this one.
Wow. That’s terrific! You always do these soulful things that just cut right to my heart. Very nice. I wish I had some great little piece of video to overlay that in.
Nice!
I know this tune as “King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O” by Chubby Parker & His Old Time Banjo from the Anthology Of American Folk Music
Thanks mary! Soulful is the ultimate compliment.
Jay, I’ve been reading up on the folk lineage and I think it’s related to a family of tunes usually referred to as “Kimo Kimo.” “Froggie went a courting” is in there somewhere. Never heard of “King Kong etc.” Great name — that’s a cool little branch of the family tree. I’ve never heard “Kimo Kimo,” by the way, just seen it referred to a bunch of times.
Lucas, I’m only guessing, really, but I just posted a bit more about this – see Roger McGuinn’s post on the history of King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki Me O, and listen to ,a href=”http://ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden/php/music/King_Kong_Kitchie.mp3″>this mp3.
Wow! What a great reference! All I found were academic references that I couldn’t figure out.
I could picture what singing would sound like, but not what “froggie went a courting” would sound like in there.
That’s great! 1:12 is a perfect length, too–a taste of something very sweet, ending before it becomes a pattern or a “groove”.
The way you play this one is particularly expressive. A solid listen.
This is as close as I know how to get to a trackback on Livejournal:
http://gurdonark.livejournal.com/744645.html
That’s really great, gurdonark. Thanks, man.
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Hey Luke,
My kids could sing the lyrics for you (and so can I!) Dan Zanes recorded it on his album Rocketship Beach although on the web site it says he thinks it’s a bit too bloody to perform for kids any more. For what it’s worth, I think Dan has done a great job of introducing children to traditional American music.
http://www.danzanes.com/songs/king_kong_kitchie.shtml
Rock On!
Hey Mary, that makes me think about doing a version with just the chords so that kids can record their own singing. That would be a cool way to enable interaction.
Continue to rock. 🙂
> It’s short and simple.
Simple for you. I had to slow it down quite a bit to keep up with you!
But, it’s the perfect kind of thing for me to work on learning. Thanks for doing the complete package!
Really happy to hear that you’re playing it, Jon. The whole package is pointless without participation. If you do your own recording I’d love to point to it or even host it here.
FWIW, I played this song for many months before it sounded like music and not just notes.
> FWIW, I played this song for many months
> before it sounded like music and not just
> notes.
I am a very slow learner of such things.
You have no idea how encouraging it is to read that it took you that long to really inhabit the tune!
I like your use of threading in these comments.
It would be good to have better support for conversations in comment threads. Some features I’d like to have —
Threading. Ability to reply to a specific message.
Ability to move a comment to the front page and make it a blog post.