Choctaw Hayride

Album: New Favorite (2001)
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Songfacts®:

  • This instrumental bluegrass stomper was written by Union Station dobro player Jerry Douglas. "That was three different songs that I put together," he told Songfacts. "I had the basic melody for the big body of the song - I had that together, but I had to throw in a few surprises so there are some dropped bars. That is a very uneven-bar song. Two sections of it have uneven bars and the end of it is even crazier."
  • Jerry Douglas had a particular motivation for writing this song. "I wanted to hear Alison play fiddle," he said. "She was going farther and farther into just being a vocalist and holding the fiddle, but she's such a good fiddle player and I thought for our show we needed to showcase that too.

    I wasn't asking her about it. I was just going to write these things to force her to play it and that's what I did. I wasn't there when she put her fiddle part on because she didn't want to do it in the studio while we were cutting the track. She told me she threw her bow across the room a couple of times. She said, 'Why did you add that part? You didn't really need that part. You just added that part because you could.' And I said, 'No, no, it's an essential part of the song. You'll see by the time you get to the end of the song, and you learn the song, you'll understand why it's there.' And she did. But at first listen, it's like, why did you do that? But after you've heard the song a few times, you would miss that part if it wasn't there."

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