Jambalaya - Bass Cover

This is my bass cover of Jambalaya by Hank Williams Tabs and notation in the link below. ▶️ Please Subscribe:    / @davidmeister_ch  

Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" is a song written and recorded by American country music singer Hank Williams that was first released in July 1952. It is Williams' most recorded song. Named for a Creole and Cajun dish, jambalaya, it spawned numerous recordings and has since achieved popularity in several different music genres.

In 2002, the 1952 Hank Williams recording of the song on MGM Records was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Williams began writing the song while listening to the Cajuns talk about food on the Hadacol Caravan bus. With a melody based on the Cajun song "Grand Texas", some sources, including All Music, claim that the song was co-written by Williams and Moon Mullican, with Williams credited as sole author and Mullican receiving ongoing royalties. Williams' biographer Colin Escott speculates that it is likely Mullican wrote at least some of the song and Hank's music publisher Fred Rose paid him surreptitiously so that he wouldn't have to split the publishing with Moon's label King Records. Williams' song resembles "Grand Texas" in melody only. "Grand Texas" is a song about a lost love, a woman who left the singer to go with another man to "Big Texas"; "Jambalaya", while maintaining a Cajun theme, is about life, parties and stereotypical food of Cajun cuisine. The narrator leaves to pole a pirogue down the shallow water of the bayou, to attend a party with his girlfriend Yvonne and her family. At the feast they have Cajun cuisine, notably Jambalaya, crawfish pie and filé gumbo, and drink liquor from fruit jars. Yvonne is his [ma] "chère amie", which is Cajun French for "my dear (female) friend" or more likely to mean "my girlfriend".

Williams recorded the song on June 13, 1952, his first recording session in six months, at Castle Studio in Nashville with backing provided by Jerry Rivers (fiddle), Don Helms (steel guitar), Chet Atkins (lead guitar), Chuck Wright (bass) and probably Ernie Newton (bass). The recording Williams made differs significantly from Mullican's, which was released in the same month as Williams' version but with a different order of verses and extra rhyming couplets.

Since the original melody of the song was from "Grand Texas", the song is a staple of Cajun culture. However, although Williams kept a Louisiana theme, the song is not a true cajun song, which helped the song gain widespread popularity:

Ethnic music is usually unpalatable for a mass market unless it is diluted in some way (Harry Belafonte's calypsos, Paul Simon's Graceland... the list is endless). The broader audience related to "Jambalaya" in a way that it could never relate to a true cajun two-step led by an asthmatic accordion and sung in patois.

Released in July 1952, it reached number one on the U.S. country charts for fourteen non-consecutive weeks.[7] Williams performed "Jambalaya" at the Louisiana Hayride as part of his "homecoming" in fall, 1952 (after being fired from the Grand Ole Opry). A live recording released as part of a series of Hayride performances includes outbursts of applause. Another unreleased version is included in the 2017 CD set, At the Louisiana Hayride Tonight.

After Williams released his version, Cajuns recorded the song again using Cajun instruments. However, they used Williams' lyrics translated into the Cajun French language. "Jambalaya" remains one of Hank Williams' most popular songs today. International, translated or derived versions exist at least in Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, Italian, Polish, German, Spanish, Estonian and Swedish.

This is a fairly easy bass line to play. It is mostly made of half notes and very few quarter notes. Also the chord progression is very simple, there are only two different chords used in the whole song.

As you might guess, since this song was recorded in 1952 an upright bass was used.

Music notation and tab by David Meister. Please feel free to give feedback in the comments.

Download it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_Fgf...

Gear used:
Fender Precision Bass
D'Addario Strings
Cubase UR 242 Interface
Cubase DAW

Filmed with a Mac Air laptop (not the best quality and framing, I am sorry)

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