THE RAINBOW SIGN

After several blues tunes we figured it was time to get back to some basic (very basic) hard driving Bluegrass. If you haven’t listened to much or any Bluegrass, after listening you may want to call your local “First Time Exposure to Bluegrass” support group for help!

We based the tune primarily on three old Black Spirituals, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign,” “I’ve got a home in that rock,” and “There’s honey in that rock” including some lyric tweaking of our own. As is, unfortunately, typical variations of the words and melodies were claimed by several artists over the years as their own - most notably the Carter Family. It is really stunning to discover the degree to which so much white gospel and folk music can be readily traced to Black Spiritual tunes. There are several pretty cool websites that help one understand the origins of many of these tunes.

We arranged and recorded the tune on MLK day and I’d hope to post it then but didn't mix it until this morning. There is a famous line in all the versions of this song and it goes “No more water, the fire next time.” James Baldwin used this as the title of his Civil Rights book “The Fire Next Time” published in 1963. Some writers say that the spiritual was a “slavery code” tune and used to communicate with the Underground Railroad. I haven’t verified this. Anyhow, it’s just a couple of minutes long. We threw in a II chord to try and make it a little more interesting than the other renditions. Oh, I did research the phrase “honey in the rock” and it is thought to mean that there is good in the toughest of places.

Bass: RealTrack 427
Guitar: Composite of RealTracks 597 & 431
Banjo: Composite of RealTracks 433 & 426
Fiddle: Composite of RealTracks 430 & 434
Mandolin: RealTrack 432
Vocal USB Blue Mic
Mixing and effects: GarageBand

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