Taken from his forthcoming sixth album, ‘Shaving A Dead Man’, out October 23 on Bloodshot Records, JP Harris has shared a video for his final album single, Hang Me.
Harris is joined by Chance McCoy (Old Crow Medicine Show) on fiddle and harmonies, who also produced, engineered, and mixed the album. These two go back a long way, having first met at a fiddler’s convention in West Virginia. Maybe at one of these events, during a late-night jam, Harris first heard the tune. It’s a folksong with deep roots, with overlapping variants, as you’d expect from a song passed down through oral tradition. For contrast, check out The Grateful Dead’s rendition of I’ve Been All Around This World – a variant, recorded Live at Fillmore East, New York City, NY, February 14, 1970.
Whilst Harris may have learned the tune and song during rowdy old time jams, this rendition, with his warm baritone and banjo playing and McCoy’s relaxed fiddle playing, has more of a world-weary tone, emphasising the weight being carried by the song’s protagonist in lines like: Working on the railroad in mud up to my knees/Working for John Henry, boys, he’s very hard to please. It’s wonderful work; the song feels lived-in, and it’s so far removed from the sterile, studio-perfect commercial versions out there; they return it to the soil.
Videography is by Tessa McCoy.
Talking about the lifeblood of his new album, Harris says, “Old-time music has been a baseline for me, and I think in getting a little older, a little more comfortable with myself and trusting my intuitions a little more, I’ve realized that one thing that’s never changed in the tumult of launching and trying to build and maintain a music career all these years, the one consistent love and lover that I’ve had has been the old-time community.”
TOUR DATES
October 23 | Nashville, TN @ The Basement
November 7 | Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Folk Festival