Old Joe Clark (1991 4-Track Cassette Edition!)

As a middle-schooler, I was really into bluegrass music. The love started for me by playing guitar, but heated up to an incredible degree once I got a banjo for my birthday. (I think I was 12?) Within a year or so, I was actually playing banjo so much that I injured my right arm and had to all but give it up. That led to me taking up the mandolin and for a short while, the fiddle, too. That’s the silver lining part, I guess you could say.

Anyway, one summer (1991 to be exact) I saved up enough money to rent a 4-track cassette recorder for a couple months. It was a huge deal to me, because this was the closest thing a person could get back then (before GarageBand, at-home digital recording, and the like) to professionally recording and producing music on your own. I was so stoked! (I don’t personally know any other kids my age who did that, so looking back I think it’s kinda extra cool.)

I plugged in the two old microphones that had belonged to my grandfather, placed one on my chest of drawers (conveniently the right height for guitars and the like) and hung the other from the Nerf basketball hoop on my closet door (just right for recording vocals and fiddles), hit record and started laying down tracks and having fun. I recorded mostly on my own, layering tracks of me playing banjo, guitar and mandolin, and sometimes singing. Several of the songs I also invited my band-mates from The ‘Possum Ridge Pickers (more on them in a future post) to join me. All in all, I put together a 10 - 12 song album, created the album artwork myself (see above), the liner notes, special labels for the tapes themselves, and hand-numbered each copy. Probably only made eight of them or so total, but man, it was so much fun!

This song, Old Joe Clark, is a bluegrass standard that basically everyone in the genre knows. On this version, I play banjo, mandolin and guitar. The mix and timing aren’t perfect, but I think it captures my enthusiasm for pickin’ at that time in my life. I’ll probably share other tracks from this album at some point in the future, but this one is my favorite so I selected it first. I hope you enjoy it! Please let me know whatcha think!