On the headland there was always a wind to blow away the mosquitoes and so he played for himself in blessed solitude those songs he loved that nobody cared to hear. He explored the strange modal scale of “Down in the Tennessee Valley,” which some called “A Man of Constant Sorrow” or “The Farewell Song.” It could lead you astray. It could abandon you in a thicket of sharps and flats, far from the major scales and utterly lost. He retuned from the standard GDAE to a cross-tuning in GGAD that gave him a drone. He paused, a redheaded fiddler poised with his bow on the strings but taut and still.
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