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I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground

from On the Street Again by Marc Nerenberg

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I don't know exactly when or where this song was born. I suspect it was probably in the late 1800s somewhere in Appalachia. It's a song that has bits and snatches of a story, and a number of floating verses that appear in several songs, and is a song that exists in a variety of divergent versions. That seems to me to make it a song that's ripe for new versions, and over the years, I have come up with several different ways of playing and singing it. This time, I’m playing it on a fretless banjo from what I think is the era that gave birth to the song. As is my usual practice, I used the bits and pieces that fit where I wanted to take the song, and made up my own bits and pieces to fill in the rest. In this version, I emphasize some of the darker aspects of the song. The melody I sing has not much more than a passing resemblance to the original melody, based as it is upon my fuzzy memory of how I had heard this song sung when I was a small child. This is generally the way I work - I emulate, but do not imitate, what I have heard. To me, this is the way I feel this kind of music works best, and has led to the great richness of variation in "old time music" - a richness that seems to be gradually disappearing under the influence of mass media, which tends to lead to a greater and greater degree of homogenization of these old songs.

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from On the Street Again, released December 8, 2020

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Marc Nerenberg Montreal, Québec

Marc Nerenberg is a veteran Montreal folksinger who plays old time banjo styles and blues harmonica. He has a narrative- centric repertoire, recounting stories in song and wrapping stories around songs. You may “be drawn in by a combination of Marc’s mastery of traditional banjo styles, his idiosyncratic singing, and [his] richly detailed ballads.” (Mike Regenstreif – Folk Roots/Folk Branches 2019) ... more

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