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James Alan Shelton - Where I'm Bound

(Sheltone SR-1962) 2010

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This CD-R is a pleasant enough collection of home recordings made by James Alan Shelton with fellow CMB's Dewey Brown and Audey Ratliff helping out as needed on fiddle and mandolin(*). In addition to guitars & bass, James also get to dust off his mandolin and banjo on some of the tracks, which is nice to hear. The additional instruments and guitar picking styles which include examples of Shuffler-style cross-picking, flat-picking & finger-picking, helps add variety to the album.

As with most of James' other albums, the tracks are mostly instrumental with James singing lead on Woody Guthrie's Pastures Of Plenty and Tom Paxton's Where I'm Bound. The latter song also features Dan Moneyhun and Audey Ratliff on harmony vocal. (Dan had also some excellent lead vocal on James' Half Moon Bay CD, and both he and Audey who were long time friends of James, would later be pallbearers at James' funeral in 2014).

Donovan's Catch The Wind is the only other vocal number, with 16 year old Savannagh Vaughn from James' home town of Church Hill, Tn. Savannagh was (is?) fiddle player with the Fall Creek bluegrass band.

The uptempo Riding On The Clinchfield which James' wrote for the album is particularly noteworthy. Named after the railroad line that went past his childhood home in Yuma, Va. James plays what sounds like a Stanleytone banjo on this, as well as rhythm guitar and bass. Dewey Brown adds some lovely fiddle and Audey Ratliff is on mandolin & second rhythm guitar.

As with James' previous Walking Down The Line, the song selection is a influenced by a multitude of sources, including folk, pop & country. Featuring tunes written or popularised by The Beatles' (I'll Follow The Sun); Buck Owens (Buckaroo); Flatt & Scruggs' (Home Sweet Home0; and Peter, Paul & Mary's All The Pretty Little Horses; there's also takes on the traditional ever-greens Auld Lang Syne and Danny Boy.

The CD-R comes with a foldout insert with James liner notes providing info on each of the songs & where he had learnt them from. On Home Sweet Home for instance James notes: "I have always wanted to try a crosspicking version of 'Home Sweet Home'. several of my guitar playing friends from Eastern Kentucky play this tune and it is quite a workout, especially for the right hand which must play an almost continuous roll. I also had fun brushing up my banjo skills and playing the banjo break with D tuners. Ralph Stanley told me once that a snare drum is some of the best rhythm you can get. So to add a little extra rhythm with a snare drum effect, I got the percussion sounds by rubbing two emery boards together close to the microphone and adding reverb."

(*) Audey also plays bass on Catch The Wind.