Hobo's Lullaby - Live at the Yellow Door Hootenanny - Marc Nerenberg - 30 May 2025

Last week, I arrived home after having hosted Montreal's Yellow Door Hootenanny at around one a.m., and found an apparently homeless man rooting through my garden tools at the back of my driveway. He was taking them out of a disused large garbage bin that I store them in. He would examine each one and then put it back into the bin. I told him to leave my stuff alone and to leave, but he ignored me. Ultimately, when he started rolling the full bin down the driveway, it became clear that he intended to take the whole thing, bin and all, claiming it was garbage. We argued and finally I had to call the police to settle the matter. These days, we call such people "homeless" or "unhoused" but decades ago, we would have called them "hobos".
I recounted the story of this event in some detail a week later, to start the evening at last night's Yellow Door Hootenanny, and used it as a long introduction to my rendering of my latest iteration of the 1930's song "Hobo's Lullaby", and when I segwayed into the song, I explained the latest small changes I had made to the lyrics, part of which description starts the video. (Also new, though unmentioned, are the occasional sound effects made with my mouth.)
This was played on a 1927 Whyte Laydie banjo, tuned dCGCE (a C9 chord), played mostly using old-time thumb-lead two-finger picking, with a few brief allusions to clawhammer style. It was recorded on 30 May, 2025, at the Yellow Door Hootenanny, in downtown Montréal, Québec, Canada.