Norman Blake's Hand Me Down My Walking Cane

Norman Blake’s “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane” (and How to Play It Carter-Style)

If you want one record that shows what an acoustic guitar can do with old songs, start with Norman Blake’s Whiskey Before Breakfast. It came out on Rounder in 1976, and the very first track is “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane.” It runs about three and a half minutes.

The record

Blake produced it himself. It’s just two guitars: Blake on guitar and vocals, and Charlie Collins on second guitar. Collins was Roy Acuff’s rhythm player in the Smoky Mountain Boys from 1966 until Acuff died in 1992, so Blake had about the steadiest backup you could ask for.

The rest of the album is mostly fiddle tunes and a few Blake originals, like “Church Street Blues” and “Slow Train Through Georgia.” AllMusic gave it five stars and called it a mix of “relaxed subtlety and eye-popping virtuosity.” That’s a pretty good description of the opening track too.

Where the song came from

The song is usually credited to James A. Bland, a Black songwriter and minstrel performer, with a date of 1880. Bland also wrote “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” and “Oh! Dem Golden Slippers.”

That credit isn’t settled, though. Some sources say the song is older than Bland, and that he may have pieced it together from spirituals he heard laborers sing on the Howard University campus. Nobody really knows for sure. That’s pretty normal for old songs like this.

Here’s the Georgia part. The first recording came from Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers with Riley Puckett, cut in Atlanta in 1926. Blake grew up listening to the Skillet Lickers on the radio, along with the Carter Family and the Monroe Brothers. So when he opens his album with it, he’s playing a song he heard as a kid.

Plenty of other people have recorded it. Jerry Lee Lewis did a version at Sun in 1956, and so did Robert Earl Keen and Jack Rose.

What Blake does with it

Peghead Nation’s Norman Blake course calls it a signature piece for him. On the record he plays it in the key of A, and that course describes his style as coming out of Maybelle Carter’s playing. He mixes picking and strumming, plays harmonized melody lines, and adds syncopation and fretting-hand embellishments.

This next part is just my take from listening. What gets me is how little he forces it. The melody sits right in the middle of the rhythm, and Collins keeps everything steady underneath. It doesn’t sound like showing off. It sounds like a guy playing a song he loves.

How to start playing it

It’s a three-chord song (I, IV and V), so it’s a great first flatpicking tune. Here’s how I’d teach it:

Learn the chords first. In Blake’s key of A, that’s A, D and E. If A feels awkward, put a capo on 2 and play C-position shapes, the way Greg Schochet does in his Peghead lesson.
Hum the melody, then find it on the bass strings, one note at a time. Don’t worry about strumming yet.
Add a Carter-style strum: pick the melody note on a low string, then brush down across the higher strings. Bass, strum, bass, strum.
Once that’s smooth, add an up-strum after each down-strum to fill the gaps.
Then go back to the record and listen for the little things he adds between lines. Pick one and steal it.

Go slow. Getting the melody to come through clearly matters more than speed.