“Rebecca” is a mandolin instrumental by Herschel Sizemore, who was born in Sheffield, Alabama, in 1935. He had played with the Dixie Gentlemen, Jimmy Martin and the Shenandoah Cut-Ups before moving to Roanoke, Virginia, in 1969. He wrote the tune in 1979, when he was preparing his first solo album and had about two weeks to come up with more original material. As he told Chris Stuart of Bluegrass Today, it came to him one evening while he sat in his living room: “All of a sudden I could hear this tune in my head and I started playing it and I thought that’s not a breakdown or anything, what is it?” His mother, Rebecca, had been an old-time guitar player, and the tune’s unusual character made him think of her. His wife Joyce, and then the banjo player Tom McKinney, each suggested the name before he could propose it himself. McKinney had heard it on a tape Sizemore sent him and called it “that tune in B.”
Sizemore recorded it for that album, Bounce Away (County 774, 1979), at Bias Recording in Falls Church, Virginia, with Del McCoury on guitar, McKinney on banjo, Sonny Miller on fiddle and John Palmer on bass. Stuart later pointed out what makes the tune unusual. A few measures in both the A and B parts have three beats instead of four, and part of the melody uses a half-crosspicking pattern, yet the tune flows so naturally that listeners rarely notice the crookedness. Sizemore said the key of B and the timing arrived with the melody, and that he wrote the whole piece in about ten minutes. When David Grisman asked how he had worked it all out, Sizemore replied that he hadn’t: he had just been sitting there when he heard it.
The tune spread widely. The Virginia Folklife Program calls it “perhaps the most popular mandolin contest song on the fiddler’s convention circuit.” Jim Mills put it on his banjo album Bound to Ride (Sugar Hill, 1998). At the 2009 IBMA Awards show, Rob Ickes, Stuart Duncan, Missy Raines, Ronnie McCoury, Jim Mills and Bryan Sutton chose it for their performance. Sizemore re-recorded it in March 1993 for his second solo album, Back in Business (Hay Holler), with David Parmley, Craig Smith, Bobby Hicks and Dale Perry. Of the many versions, the one he especially liked was Butch Baldassari’s. A 2012 documentary about his life and music was titled Mandolin in B. Sizemore died in Roanoke in September 2022.
