“Hand Me Down My Walking Cane” is a signature piece for Norman Blake. Some people attribute the song to 19th-century Black composer James A. Bland, a noted minstrel performer, but others claim it predates Bland. The first and perhaps the most influential recording of the song was by Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers with Riley Puckett in 1926. Blake himself recorded a terrific version in the key of A on his 1976 Whiskey Before Breakfast album (Greg will teach you that version in a future lesson). In this lesson, Greg teaches you the song in the key of D, but with the capo on the second fret using C-position chords. In Part 1 of this lesson, Greg shows you a basic accompaniment pattern for the song using his preferred chord fingerings for the I, IV, and V chords. Then he walks you through the bare-bones melody played on the bass strings before adding a Carter-style strum and working in an extra up-strum.
