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“Won’t You Come and Sing for Me?”, like much of the Hazel & Alice repertoire, opened space in bluegrass for women’s voices. Laurie Lewis followed them into that space. Lewis speaks to that influence in the middle of the clip below, after which she sings the song.

My favorite recent performance of the song in the bluegrass vein is Molly Tuttle’s. Tuttle won a 2016 Momentum Award (Instrumentalist) from the International Bluegrass Music Association. Tuttle is more “Hazel” in range, and more “Alice” in polish. She sings lead with a pristine clarity and a trace of Downstate Illinois twang. She also does some excellent flatpicking, following in Sawtelle’s expert ways. Her supporting cast at the Augusta Heritage Center’s Bluegrass Week in August 2016 provides solid backing. Kathy Kallick knows her way through this song, providing warm and measured harmony.

Hot Rize and Hazel & Alice’s performances made this song a bluegrass one for me from the start. Their arrangements contrast the bright instrumentation and mortal content in evocative ways. Anna & Elizabeth’s recent recording of the song takes a different approach, with more spare instrumentation, and a slower, more somber, old-time feel. Anna Roberts-Gevalt’s fingerpicked guitar has no counterpoint in dancing mandolin riffs like David Grisman provided on the original. Elizabeth LaPrelle’s harmony line provides an Appalachian feel, without the boost provided by a larger vocal ensemble.

The playlist below rests heavily in the bluegrass, but includes a few other genres. You’ll also find some of the stylistic permutations described above playing out in further directions. One version you might want to check out in particular is the one by Jerry Middaugh and Orville Murphy. It is not long on polish, but alters the lyrics so that all the references are secular—the “plain little church” becomes a school. This also makes the treasured community of memory one of children, something Dickens’s version doesn’t do.

The playlist includes most of the versions above, as well as the other songs mentioned so far.

Passing through

One rough metric of the distance between an amateur musician and a performing/recording one might lie in the ratio between one’s own enjoyment of making music and others’ enjoyment of listening to it. I “play in” far more than I play out. I can think of only one instance when I felt I had meaningfully narrowed that ratio: a performance of “Down in the Willow Garden” for a group of people assembled in Ida Noyes Hall during the workshops at the University of Chicago Folk Festival. My ability to do this stemmed, no doubt, from the strong feelings that tie me to that song.

photo by K. Bigger

Success on either front likely depends on the extent the song comes from you vs. through you. We often hear stories songwriters saying the song came “through” them, seemingly unbidden. A similar experience can emerge in playing songs written by others. Your abilities as a performer and the power of the song make the music feel that it is emanating from deep within. This can happen a lot more often, but you have to give yourself to the song.

That power of art to burst forth into something meaningful and beautiful happens still more often in groups. The whole becomes greater, indeed transcends, the sum of the parts.

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