Tommy Jarrell

"Drunken Hiccups"

Here is another look at Appalachian music history. This is a clip from a video that can still be purchased from County Sales. I have captured this clip from a VHS tape by the name of  Legends of Old Time Music. The clip I have created is about an 18 meg file so give it couple minutes or so to upload to your system. I really recommend the purchase of this video to anybody who has even a slight interest in "Old Time" music. Here is another tune - Drunken Hiccups that also has to rank up in the top 10 of my favorite "Old Time" tunes. See how many other names you can come up with for this song and drop another name you know this song by in the Guest book. This Legends video has clips of many more of the great old time musicians from Appalachia. For those of you that would like to get a look at this clip in a larger format, you can save the file and play it directly in Windows Media Player at 200% or even fill the screen. It really doesn't look to bad even when enlarged. My Studio8 software seems to be doing a pretty decent job of digitizing the VHS tape to MPEG2 and than converting it to a highly compressed WMV format. I used Dazzle 150 USB hardware to capture the VHS tape to an MPEG file on my computer.

I want you to watch closely at our old friend - Mike Seeger, sitting to Tommy's left. He seems to really be getting a kick out of Tommy's rendition of Drunken Hiccups. I love that old tune as obviously Mike did to. I have to tell you about an incident with Mike that just happened a few months ago at the Louisville Memorial boat trip honoring John Hartford. Most of you probably know Mike from the Retrograss album. Mike is a great musician as well as a music historian. We all should be very thankful for folks like Mike and Pete to have preserved a lot of music that we now get to enjoy that we might not have ever got to hear.

Anyway, I was setting up to do some video taping of the performances that were about to take place on the boat. I had to move way to the back in order to find room and not be disturbing anybody's view. I look over a few seats and a couple rows in back of me and there sits Mike Seeger all by himself. You could tell he was just another fan of the music, preparing to enjoy what was about to come. Mike would later be one of the performers himself but I'm quite certain that very few people recognized or new who he was. Something just swelled up inside of me to look over see a person who is such a great part of the music we all love, taking a moment to enjoy it himself. Not unlike what I see in the video of Tommy. Incidentally, Brad Hefner pointed out a couple other names for this tune - "Jack Of Diamonds" and I believe "Rye Whiskey".

If you are interested in this and more videos of old time musicians check out what County Sales may have. Here is a link to their site for this video. It shows that it is available on DVD. I purchased mine from eBay as a VHS tape. Here is the link to Legends of Old Time Music at County Sales. I have nothing to gain from County Sales and have no affiliation with them. I only provide links to places like them for your convenience.

To download clip just right click on this link and save to a local folder. You can also just left click the link if you would like to view it in your own player.