Past, Present, Future - Can't You Hear Me Calling

Just recently happened upon the band Crooked Still, a group out of Boston that takes the bluegrass formula and tweaks it ever so slightly to make it something uniquely fresh.  The opening track on their Shaken by a Low Sound album is a Bill Monroe oldie, and one that I thought sounded somewhat familiar to a Ricky Skaggs song that I've loved for some time.


Here's Bill Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys from 1961

And the Crooked Still version from 2006

And finally, the song Another Night from Ricky Skaggs' Bluegrass Rules album released in 1997

While Crooked Still has kept the song largely intact but somehow made it more intimately yearning, Ricky Skaggs has altered the melody, tempo and lyrics to create something hauntingly similar yet very different.

Or at least that's what I thought until I dove into the writing credits and discovered that it was written by someone named Hobo Jack.

Isn't this fun?

So the two songs, Can't You Hear Me Calling and Another Night, are not so much derived one from the other as they are parallel extensions of a fairly common bluegrass chord progression.  That the sentiment of longing and loneliness is the theme of both may be happenstance or may be the nature of bluegrass music.  I don't know and I don't care.  They are both brilliant songs and I welcome further interpretations.