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Great tune composed by Chirps Smith. He has a version on his "Down in Little Egypt" CD, a great collection of tunes. He also has it on his multi-cd collection of home recordings. It's a heck of a good tune for a dance. I'm leaving out some of the notes. You can see Chirps playing it on an episode of Listen Up, Illinois. He is with his band, The New Bad Habits, Dave Landreth, Chirps Smith and Andy Gribble.

I've heard this before, but I learned it from Billy Mathews' collection.

This is an Illinois tune, collected from Pete Priest by Garry Harrison & Co in the 1970s or 80s. I've been hearing it at jams over in Champaign/Urbana for many months, and each time I loved it and asked what it's name was; "Run Down Boot" they would say. And each time when I got home I would think "what was that tune; something about a possum?" Well, I finally got the name and the tune fixed in my head. I was with a group that played it for a dance and apparently it is common to mess around with starting-and-stopping the tune without tripping up the dancers.

I've been working on this for quite a while, having first heard it on Billy Mathews' collection. I think that it is originally from Art Galbraith, and it is included in the "Ozarks Fiddle Music Book & CD" by Drew Beisswenger & Gordon McCann. I'm not really doing it well yet, but it's still fun.

Recorded as a potential TOTW on fiddle hangout.

Recorded for a potential TOTW on the fiddle hangout. I'm including a copy of the Illinois version of Lost Indian from a fun campfire session at Gilman, IL in September of 2009.

This is from Billy Mathews' 500 tunes.

Another Tune of the Week, from 5/21/2010. This needs to be sung to be interesting, so I sang. I'm not sure that I'd sing it in front of real live people.

Here is part of the the information on this tune from the tune of the week The song “Booth Shot Lincoln” aka “Booth Killed Lincoln” was originally a broadside ballad, probably written within days of the actual event. There are more verses than I would care to count in the version Bascom Lamar Lunsford sang for the Library Of Congress in 1941 and (perhaps fortunately) I can't find a lyric sheet for that version, but I do have a link to the shorter (seven verse) version Cisco Houston sang in the late 1940s.

A couple of weekends ago I attended a workshop by David Landreth. Great workshop, and if I think of it I actually use some of his fingering. A middle-aged dog can learn some new tricks.