Gentle on my Mind is a great song. I have loved it for a long time. It's notoriously challenging to play and it's one of those American classics like Paul Simon’s Graceland and Woody Guthrie’s This Land.
It repeats funny. It's irregularly regular.
I had learned the shapes and the changes and got part way through learning the words then quit.
The guy that plays the mandolin parts is great and he probly recognized the changes as some cropped and regularized version of Gentle on my Mind. But, as is my way after I'd quit trying to learn John Hartfords words I started some of my own.
Later, after the record this song appears on was out and I decided to learn Gentle on my Mind as a sort of consolation I had a conversation about the song itself with my girlfriend, who said, “That song has always struck me as one of those seventies chauvinistic, I-can-f**k-whoever-want, rambling man ballads” which before our conversation I hadn't realized was a category, but it is.
I know someone who spent part of a summer working on fiddle tunes with John Hartford on the Julie Belle. When I mentioned the conversation I had had with my girlfriend to the woman who spent a summer with him, she said, “Oh, that sounds about right. When I first met him he tried to kiss me on the mouth. I was 17 years old.”
I never did learn Gentle on My Mind, but I don't feel as bad about it as I used to.
When you're walkin’ on home, you think of me and you want to let me know, and you're touchin’ your phone, smile baby, I'm already gone three miles further down the road toward that place that I call home where all of my good things are stowed and the nights are always warm.
I'll be walking all night down roads where no one ever goes. I won't need nothin where I'm gone. It's a place that no one knows. So, if you sleeping by the road it's toward that place that I am bound. From you I will need nothing more and you know where I'll be found.
It might seem like it ain't time to go, but everybody leaves at the end of the show. At the end of the show I will be already gone.
Buy a download of Donkey Island
Here:
And there's a video with some trout fishing spots on it here:
https://youtu.be/GFlVMOBAmfU?si=jmx5UmTmYIZypqDD
I play tenor guitar on this one.
The mandolin player is Joe Peterson
Banjo is handled by Matthew Wilburn Skinner
Ryan Bernemann plays upright bass
Andrew Brockman was the recording boss and master of the tapes and boards.
