I haven’t posted in way too long. My excuse is that I took a nice road trip with my wife Taylor who was reporting a travel story about sustainable farms in Sonoma County CA. It made for a blissful working vacation, which as usual required a pile of work on the front and back end, thus the silence.
The only musical hook of the trip was a visit to Sebastopol, a city that shares a title with a song from the repertoire of my home-area heroine Elizabeth Cotten. I had to look up the connection. The California wine country town was named after Sevastopol, Russia, a city taken by siege in the Crimean War, of all things. An Englishman named Henry Worrall wrote a sort of military march commemorating the battle for guitar that became one of the parlor hits of the 19th century. The open tuning he used would come to be called 'Vastopol tuning.
Libba Cotten was fond of marches (she played a fabulous version of the University of North Carolina graduation song arranged from her memories of listening to the annual ceremony through the football stadium gates with other black children from Chapel Hill in the very early 1900s) and her style had as much parlor in it as it did back porch. Now I say this with no definitive proof that she’s playing exactly the same version as Mr. Worrall’s sheet music, having never heard or seen that early song. But Cotten's version was model enough for folk genius John Fahey. He recorded the song (formally titled “The Seige of Sevastopol”) on his 1964 album “The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites.” How’s that for a cheery title? I actually thought I might own that album, but when I went to the shelf, it turned out that the one LP I own is actually “Blind Joe Death,” which says something about the late great Mr. Fahey’s preoccupations.
One final cool coincidence. On my CD shelf, right next to John Fahey’s slot is Jay Farrar of Son Volt, with a solo album called “Sebastopol.”
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