Cover Me: Old Dan Tucker

The “Seeger Sessions” that yielded Bruce Springsteen’s 2006 album were actually three separate recording sessions that spanned a decade.

The project started with a simple request by Appleseed Records for a single cover track they could include in an upcoming Pete Seeger tribute album. Bruce convened a recording session at his home with The Gotham Playboys, a group of musicians he’d met through Soozie Tyrell, who joined the players along with Patti Scialfa and the Miami Horns.

In all, there were twelve musicians there that day, and never before had they all played together. And yet they clicked, recording not just “We Shall Overcome” (which ended up as Bruce’s contribution for the tribute album) but also “My Oklahoma Home,” “Jesse James,” and two songs that remain unreleased to this day.

In recent years, Bruce has become much freer in his recording style (most notably recording Letter To You in four days), but at the time this was pretty much unprecedented.

With five songs in the can, Bruce had almost half an album if he chose to complete it, but it took another eight years before he’d get around to it.

On March 19, 2005, Bruce re-convened the original players from 1997 and added Lisa Lowell and Mark Pender to the mix. This time they recorded nine songs in a single day, and now he definitely had enough material for an album. (He’d still record a few more the following year, however, once he’d finished touring behind Devils & Dust.)

One of the songs recorded during that second Seeger Session was a rollicking cover of the traditional song, “Old Dan Tucker,” first recorded by Harry C. Browne in 1916 (although the song dates back much farther via oral tradition).

“Old Dan Tucker” is a true folk song, its origins unknown and its variants countless. Pete Seeger notably recorded and popularized “Old Dan Tucker” in 1957, just one of many covers across the decades.

If you’re a child of the 1970s like me, you probably learned “Old Dan Tucker” from the television show Little House on the Prairie, where it was sung often by Victor French in character as Mr. Edwards. (It should be noted that French did a pretty great Springsteen impression long before Bruce was even famous.)

“Old Dan Tucker” proved a natural for Bruce to cover; with its humorously surreal lyrics, “Old Dan Tucker” sounds like it might have been written by Bruce circa 1972-73.

Bruce added it to the album in the lead-off spot, and it featured nightly in the opening pack throughout his 2006 tour. In fact, “Old Dan Tucker” is the first song Bruce is known to have rehearsed with the Sessions Band when they started preparing for their tour that March.

When the Seeger Sessions Tour kicked off at the New Orleans Jazz  & Heritage Festival the following month, “Old Dan Tucker” was front and center, providing an immediate spotlight for banjoist Greg Liszt.

And when Bruce wound the tour down, “Old Dan Tucker” was one of the songs captured live at Bruce’s final Dublin show in November 2006.

Curiously, though, while several Seeger Sessions songs have re-appeared in the years since, “Old Dan Tucker” isn’t among them. It remains an artifact of Bruce’s 2006 tour and hasn’t been heard from since.

Old Dan Tucker
Recorded: March 19, 2005
Released: We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006)
First performed: April 20, 2006 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: November 21, 2006 (Belfast, Northern Ireland)

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