Maybe it's the 105-110 degree heat keeping us from playing outdoors, e.g., kayaking and mountain biking. Maybe it's being retired and having too much time on our hands. Whatever the reason my wife and I embarked upon an effort to take a song we performed for years in our bluegrass band and set it to a Reggae rhythm.

The tune is based on a 250 year old English murder ballad called Pretty Polly or The Gotsport Tragedy. There are literally 100's of verses and variants so we chose the ones to tell the story the way we envisioned it which also included re-writing several verses. We also changed the melody somewhat to make it work with the dramatically different rhythm. Needless to say, years of Bluegrass picking made this effort, to say the least, challenging as we had listened to but never arranged a Reggae tune.

We used the BIAB for Mac slow Reggae RealTracks package and added to it a solo fiddle and rhythm mandolin from RealTracks. Finally, I used a RealTracks solo guitar track for fills and the outro. All tracks are BIAB RealTracks with the exception of the vocal that was recorded in GarageBand via a Blue mic. Multiple versions of all the tracks "cut and spliced" for the final mix with the exception of the vocal that was done in one take. The mixing was done in Garageband and exported as an AIFF file that I converted to MP3 for this link.

We wanted to make the song sound as haunting and melancholy as are many of the folk and bluegrass versions. Variations of the tune have been recorded in "mountain modal" tuning with the banjo being the prominent instrument. To try and approximate this we tried sustained chords but ended up doing the song in Bbm. We rested the temptation to add chords as it has been performed for hundreds of years with just the two.

I figure all we'll end up accomplishing is POing both the Reggae and Bluegrass folks --- but what the heck it was fun or least it was after we got the hang of the Reggae rhythmic structure.

Pretty Polly - Click Here

If you are a musicologist here is a great history of the tune:
The Gotsport Tragedy

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