“Rebecca” is a composition by Herschel Sizemore (1931–2019) of Roanoke, Virginia, one of the most influential post-Monroe mandolinists in the Virginia bluegrass tradition. Sizemore said he composed the piece in 1979 while preparing to record his debut solo album Bounce Away (County Records, 1979): the tune arrived fully formed one evening, and he initially couldn’t categorize what kind of piece it was — its unusual key and irregular phrase lengths didn’t fit the standard breakdown or waltz templates he worked in. He named it for his mother, Rebecca Sizemore, who had been an old-time guitar player.
The B-major key is the piece’s most immediately striking feature. B major is almost unused in the old-time and bluegrass canon — its five sharps place it outside the open-string comfort zones of fiddle and banjo — but that key is precisely what gives “Rebecca” its unusual brightness and tension. Sizemore’s irregular phrasing — an atypical measure count that refuses standard four- or eight-bar resolution — is equally deliberate. Despite those unconventional features, the tune became what Sizemore’s obituaries called “perhaps the most popular mandolin contest song on the fiddler’s convention circuit,” and Sizemore himself particularly admired Butch Baldassari’s cover version.
The featured recording is from Back in Business (1993), a later Sizemore album that revisited the piece after its convention-circuit success. The tune’s circulation through the convention world — where pickers compete on the very qualities of originality and difficulty that “Rebecca” embodies — reflects the paradox that a piece with no traditional antecedent can become a defining standard of a tradition-focused community.