(Photo from BluegrassJournal.com)
I heard Mountain Heart live in my family’s restaurant a few years ago. I even got to check out their tour bus, actually. It was back when Adam Steffey from Alison Krauss and Union Station was touring with them. They performed a song by the Allman Brothers form 1969, called “Whipping Post”. The YouTube video below is the clearest version, slightly differing from my CD where Adam Steffey plays the mandolin and Josh Schilling plays the piano rather than one of the guitars. There is also a link in the paragraph below to a YouTube video that is more accurate to what I saw performed live. That night was memorable for me. I remember Josh Schilling watching our Nickelodeon as it played in our restaurant; when the piano finished its song from someone inserting a quarter, he leaned over it and started mimicking the ragtime melody previously played. It should have taken him 13 hands to reproduce the same sound, but somehow he managed to closely replicate the sound with just his own two hands.
The original version of this song by the Allman Brothers is considered kind of a blues rock song, whereas this Mountain Heart is a bluegrass band performing the same song with an acoustic sound. This song actually has an intro with 11/8 signature time. I just thought it had ¾ meter for 3 measures and then a measure of 2/4 time. I did rely on Wikipedia to help me figure that out. Most of the rest of the song is in 6/8, although there is reference back to the intro with 11/8 time. There is a string base introduction at the beginning, building suspense with each measure as more instruments are added. The form of the popular 32-bar chorus is A, A, B, A; the A sections have strong, driving music emphasizing the first beat of every measure and the bridge slows down and climaxes the suspenseful feeling when the singer is almost shouting and falls into a melancholy feel by the end of the bridge. Then it’s back to a quick intro before repeating the form and adding an instrumental tag at the end that could go on forever. The intro/A section after the first bridge section is entirely instrumental, starting with the violin and then switching to the guitar. The next ‘A’ is back to voice. Other parts to this song other than voice, violin, and guitar include banjo, mandolin, and also string base which drives the rhythm. This blues song does follow the A, A, B lyric pattern for the bridge.
The Allman Brothers sound like they include electric guitars and electric base guitars, an organ, drums, and voice. The pattern is pretty much identical except for that it never slows down from its fast pace; you just choose which video to watch to see how long the Allman Brothers can keep running with the tag for a different length on the song. Before the second bridge, the guitar also screams a high pitched note quite a bit.
Mountain Heart - "Whipping Post" YouTube Video:
Like I said earlier, the video with lesser sound quality has major piano parts and solos, of which the link for the YouTube video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6HLRN67TFk&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL5E834A1FEA0C48E6
A link for the Allman Brothers version is here:
Good start, Dixie. I enjoyed reading your comments.
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