rare mfers
season 1
card 10

artist notes:

“once i had a fortune, i locked it in my trunk,
lost it all a gamblin, one night when i got drunk
fortune i had it, fortune i lost it,
fortune i lost it all, one night when i got drunk”

-traditional

no one knows who actually wrote this tune - old time fiddle tunes are kind of like memes - they are proliferated and played and enjoyed and reworked or given a different flavor or style depending on who plays them and generally speaking their origins are quite obscure - we do speak of “sources” in old-time music but that hardly qualifies as anything like “authorship” - in this case, for instance, the earliest source recording of “fortune” comes from a fiddler from galax, WV named john rector recorded 1926, but of course thats only the first documented recording; mfer probably learned it from his grandpa or something who also likely couldnt really say with any certainty where he learned it either! the ethos of traditional music is about communal experience and generally speaking “authorship” is either heavily deemphasized or even a foreign concept all together

"I can recollect hearing my daddy play it as far back as I can recollect. I don't know where that started from... it was more just an old, well, a flat foot dance tune I'd say..." -mfer Tommy Jarrell

on reflection, it occurs to me that in the context of first dipping my toes into the world of nfts, encountering mfers was like an epiphany for similar reasons and much of why i found the cc0 ethos that mfers is built on so appealing (even profound)...

this particular recording comes from my archives from a trip i took many years ago out to the big bend in west texas where an old fiddler and musical mentor of mine lived “off the grid” to camp and play tunes - i used to somewhat obsessively carry around a handheld recorder to in those days and capture all kinds of things - as a matter of fact he explicitly told me at the time if i ever wanted to use any recordings with him on it “idgaf go right ahead” (like a real mfer), so i’m really pleased to have found a use for this one i think works quite well and i think is pretty special

as to the visual art, i’ll just comment that it’s sort of a culmination of a series of pieces i did featuring musicians as subjects in my first efforts at learning animation/glitch techniques (and really visual art in general) over the past months - i had had the notion that it would be really cool to do a final version based on them with the full band all together and it came together perfectly for my opportunity to do a rare mfers card - and being able to include audio on it the icing on the cake

qjivwnywkixxmrwxevxih O-'

-sartocrates