Home Sweet Home

Leave a reply

Home Sweet Home (MP3)

I came across sheet music for the Victorian cliche classic “Home Sweet Home” in the June 1st, 1898 edition of S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal. It’s an arrangement for guitar and mandolin, and I have an American-made mandolin from 1900 and American-made guitar from 1890, so I took the chance to do a super accurate period recording. Also, I thought that it might be useful to people making videos to have a permissively licensed modern recording of this instantly recognizable number.

I found it in this publication:

The magazine had been in circulation for 14 years, but would only last a few issues more, because it carried sad news:

I didn’t know how to mourn the late founder, who I had just met and who had just died, 114 years before:

If you want to play it yourself, the guitar part is at http://soupgreens.com/wp-content/uploads/HomeSweetHome-guitar.png and the mandolin part is at http://soupgreens.com/wp-content/uploads/HomeSweetHome-mandolin.png.

The version I’m hosting above is MP3. If you prefer WAV, it’s on Freesound. You might also find the Soundcloud version useful.

In hope that my recording will be useful to other people, I have put it under a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons License
Home Sweet Home by Lucas Gonze is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://soupgreens.com/wp-content/uploads/LucasGonze-HomeSweetHome.mp3.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:lucas@gonze.com.

Antique machine music by Plinth

Leave a reply

I love this calm thoughtful ultra-retro neo-victorian music by Michael Tanner.

All music within is sourced and reconstructed from the creaking,
winding, piping, chiming and wood-knocking of several Victorian
parlour music machines, wax cylinder recordings, a French carillon and a seafront calliope.

They make me think of the Musee Mechanique in San Francisco.

Via boingboing

Brooklet Schottische

Leave a reply

[soundcloud id=’56802682′ color=’#ff7700′]

Here’s a slow rag I played on bottleneck guitar. I picture sitting on the porch with a lemonade on a day when it’s too hot to move fast.

There are plenty of blemishes left in the sound. Most recordings try to isolate the music and eliminate background sound. I am experimenting with doing the opposite, because being able to hear the moment and the context gives the music emotional kick. But I don’t know if that is distracting and annoying.

I learned it from Turner’s Banjo Journal No 10. The original was probably perky instead of slow. You can find the sheet music I worked from here: http://www.classicbanjo.com/tutors/TBJ/TBJ-10.pdf. This is probably from the early 1880s.

Here’s the sheet music for those who are inclined that way (chords added by me to make it easier to jam on):

I was inspired by “Dark Was the Night” by Blind Willie Johnson, the Ry Cooder soundtrack for “Paris, Texas”, Ben Harper’s and John Fahey’s weissenborn playing.

This recording is permissively licensed under Creative Commons Attribution. Have at it as long as you give credit. The best type of credit is to link back to this post, at http://soupgreens.com/2012/08/22/brooklet-schottische/ ‎.