Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005),
p. 189.
[One of two of Mississippi John Hurt’s songs that were
included on the seminal collection, Anthology
of American Folk Music, was] this
gorgeous piece of fingerpicking called “Frankie’s Blues.” It was a beautiful
arrangement, and when those albums came out in the early 1950s, we all
immediately set ourselves to learn that thing. It was incredibly fast, though,
and after a week or two I dropped by the wayside. A few persisted, and my
friend Barry Kornfeld, for one, disappeared into his chambers and emerged six
weeks later, blinking like a mole, and he had it. Note for note, just as clean
and fast as on the record.
When I first saw John at the Café Yana, there he was
playing “Frankie’s Blues.” I noticed that it was a lot slower than on the
record. Of course, he was a good deal older, but it also struck me that it
sounded better at that tempo. I wanted to ask him about it, but I wanted to be
as diplomatic as possible – I didn’t want to just say, “So, Pops, can’t cut it
anymore, eh?” Very tentatively, I said, “You know that ‘Frankie’ thing you
played…”
Apparently, I was not the first person to have asked,
because John intervened and saved me any further embarrassment. He just smiled
and said, “Oh, you want to know why it’s so much slower than on the record?”
I said, “Yeah…”
He said, “Well, you know, that song was so long that
they had to speed it up to get it on one side of a 78.”
All I could think of was Barry, sidelined with acute
carpal tunnel syndrome.
[In his notes in the booklet accompanying the 1997
reissue of the Anthology, John Fahey
writes that it was rumored that when Hurt’s version of “Frankie” “was played
for Segovia, he couldn’t believe there were not two guitars at work” (p. 10).]