Cinnamon Tree cover

Cinnamon Tree

Nora Brown

Album · 2019 · Jalopy Records

Cinnamon Tree is the debut album by Nora Brown, released by Jalopy Records on 25 October 2019. Alice Gerrard produced it at Studio 808a, an old farmhouse in Floyd, Virginia, when Brown was 13. She sings and plays five-string banjo, on both steel-string and fretless gut-strung instruments, and the fiddler Stephanie Coleman joins her on several songs. The eleven tracks include “Buck Creek Girls,” “Hop Light Ladies,” “Hills of Mexico,” “Cumberland Gap,” “Darling Cora,” “East Virginia,” “John Brown’s Dream” and a closing “Shady Grove” paired with “Beautiful Doll.”

Brown learned the songs from elder musicians in her hometown of Brooklyn, in eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia and North Carolina, and from old records and field recordings in archival collections. The label’s announcement credits Shlomo Pestcoe as her first teacher and thanks Lee Sexton, John Cohen and George Gibson among others. The title comes from a misheard lyric: Brown first heard “cinnamon tree” in a song whose words are “’simmon tree,” a short form of persimmon. The cover art is hers, and the first vinyl pressing was a signed and numbered edition of 500 copies made at Third Man Pressing in Detroit.

Tracklist

  1. 1 Buck Creek Girls 2:04
  2. 2 Hop Light Ladies 2:09
  3. 3 Hills of Mexico alt version 4:10
  4. 4 Cumberland Gap alt version 3:06
  5. 5 Darling Cora 4:38
  6. 6 Last Chance alt version 2:08
  7. 7 East Virginia Blues alt version 2:35
  8. 8 John Brown's Dream 3:03
  9. 9 Jay Gould's Daughter 3:56
  10. 10 Old Horse and Buggy 2:13
  11. 11 Shady Grove - Beautiful Doll 5:33

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