Huck's Tune: Is this the same tune as...

[rephs]

I just got a CD by Dave Alvin called West of the West. Bob Dylan played a song by him (Surfer Girl) on TTRH and I really liked the version.

Anyway there is a song on the CD called Tramps and Hawkers. The tune sounds so much like Huck's Tune.

Has anyone else heard this similarity?

[rephs]

I looked up Tramps and Hawkers and it is a Scottish Traditional Ballad.

[Copper Kettle]

and shelter from the storm sounds like "that's about the biggest thing that man has ever done". he loves resurrecting old folk.

[MThockey36]

Anyway there is a song on the CD called Tramps and Hawkers. The tune sounds so much like Huck's Tune.

wow that really does sound like the same melody! weird

[muleskinner_blues]

Since you mentioned that, I listened to a version by Jimmy MacBeath, and it's the exact same tune as Dylan's Ballad of Donald White.
Cool song too.

[PSB]

Yes it is based on that melody and it is the third time Dylan has used it for an original. The first as noted above was "Ballad Of Donald White," except Bob's source for that (according to him) was "The Ballad of Peter Emberly," as sung by Bonnie Dobson. (Dobson wrote "Morning Dew" which became a Grateful Dead classic.) The second time Dylan used it was "I Pity The Poor Immigrant." It is also the same melody as a song he covered during the N.E.T,, "Lakes of Ponchartrain." There are a whole lot of songs that share that melody. On the Shane MacGowan and the Popes (not Pogues) album, "The Snake," there's at least three of them.

If the original "Tramps and Hawkers," had lyrics, they have yet to surface. The late folksinger and songwriter, Jim Ringer released an album of that name, and wrote words to the melody. His version was based on a little known recording by a group from New England called The Arwen Mountain String Band who recorded it an album called "Five Of A Kind" on a now probably extinct label called Chelsea House. It's a beautiful instrumental, and it sounds to me that Stu Kimball's finger-picking part is based on that recording.

[rephs]

Thanks so much for your information. I did not realize that BD had used it for other songs. Very interesting.

It is a beautiful tune. The words for Dave Alvin's Tramps and Hawkers are different from the words I found listed for the Scottish Tramps and Hawkers. There were several different sets of lyrics listed.