If it Ain’t Here When I Get Back cover

If it Ain’t Here When I Get Back

Bruce Molsky

Album · 2013 · TF 1301

If It Ain’t Here When I Get Back is a solo album by Bruce Molsky, released on Tree Frog Music in 2013 (TF 1301). He plays fiddle, banjo and guitar, sings, and produced it himself. It was his first album in seven years, and it has 15 tracks, roughly half of them instrumentals.

The album opens with “Wreck of the Dandenong,” a 19th-century Australian ballad that Molsky learned from Kate Burke and that her mother Mary had recorded in 1954; he accompanies himself on fiddle. Elsewhere the fiddle takes tune sets such as “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “Growling Old Man and Grumbling Old Woman,” the banjo takes “New Cut Road,” “Johnny Booger” and “Sally Ann,” and the guitar carries the blues and ragtime pieces, among them Joseph Spence’s “Bimini Gal” and Glenn Ohrlin’s “The Cowboy.” “Piney Mountains” is a song by Craig Johnson. The last track, “Cumberland Gap,” supplies the album’s title in a line of its lyric.

Tracklist

  1. 1 Wreck of the Dandenong 4:37
  2. 2 Bimini Gal 3:12
  3. 3 Rattle Down the Acorns 2:08
  4. 4 New Cut Road 2:37
  5. 5 Johnny Booger 2:51
  6. 6 Kentucky Blues 3:16
  7. 7 Bonaparte's Retreat/Piney Ridge 2:55
  8. 8 Piney Mountains alt version 3:10
  9. 9 Paddy Sean Nancy's Favorite/the Graf Spee 3:56
  10. 10 The Cowboy 3:26
  11. 11 Sally Ann alt version 3:01
  12. 12 Growling Old Man and Grumbling Old Woman 2:35
  13. 13 Shady Grove alt version 2:59
  14. 14 Last of Callahan 2:23
  15. 15 Cumberland Gap Source Recording Traditional · key E · 125 bpm 3:06

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