"Hustlers and Gamblers"
#597 / Flood Time Capsule: 2008
Eighteen years ago this week, using the new ZOOM H2 digital recorder they had just bought, Floodsters started recording their rehearsals/jam sessions. By year’s end, the recordings became the basis for the new weekly Flood podcasts.
And to celebrate the launch, the late Dave Peyton also brought something new to table, introducing the guys to another old Aunt Jennie Wilson tune. In the video below you can hear Dave teaching the room the song that Jennie called “Hustlers and Gamblers.”
About the Song
Like another Aunt Jennie tune we recently researched, this one is a “folk quilt” stitched with verses from several different traditional songs, migrating from one to another over decades of oral tradition.
Let’s start our inquiry into its origins with a March 1927 Brunswick recording by banjo picker Dock Boggs who waxed what he called “Country Blues,” though Dock told folks he learned it a dozen years earlier from a mentor named Homer Crawford, who called the tune “Hustlin’ Gamblers.”
A quarter of a century later, the Boggs track was featured on Harry Smith’s influential 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music collection, which helped fuel the 1950s/60s folk revival and led to Boggs’ rediscovery. (Boggs re-recorded the song in 1963 for Folkways Records.)
But as noted, Jennie’s tune has many progenitors. Inveterate folkies, for instance, immediately recognize the song’s melody is nearly identical to “Darling Cory” and to “Little Maggie,” classic old-time staples played by everyone from The Weavers to Doc Watson, Bill Monroe and, well, every bluegrass band every weekend somewhere across the country.
Enter Paul Clayton
Folksinger Paul Clayton opened his 1957 Folkways album Cumberland Mountain Folksongs with a tune he called “The Hustling Gamblers.”
In his liner notes Clayton said the song was “widely known throughout the Cumberlands in any of several variant forms. Sometime the song is about ‘Darlin’ Cory’ and sometimes about another Southern mountain gun-slinging, bottle-tilting banjo queen, ‘Little Maggie.”’
Clayton compiled his version from renditions he said he learned from Finlay Adams of Big Laurel in Wise County, Va., and from Clintwood Johnson of Jackhorn in Letcher County, Ky.
More from Brother Dave
Meanwhile, years after Peyton first brought the tune to the band room, “Hustlers and Gamblers” continued to regularly pop up at the weekly jam sessions. Click the button below for a track from Summer 2012:
And if hearing Peyton again has you hankering for more from The Flood’s co-founder, drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and click on the David Channel for a random playlist of Peyton tunes from over the decades.
