A toast to the New Lost City Ramblers
As our friend Barry Mazor reported this morning, Mike Seeger passed away last night from cancer at age 75. It was Mike’s old band the New Lost City Ramblers who recorded the version of the Carter Family staple “No Depression In Heaven” that a young Jay Farrar later heard and decided to cover as the title track for his band Uncle Tupelo’s debut album in 1990. One thing led to another and, well, you know the rest.
Thought maybe I’d find the NLCR version of the song on YouTube, but no luck. However, there’s a really fine clip of Mike and his bandmates on his brother Pete’s “Rainbow Quest” TV show, with Mike playing autoharp and singing another old song that also had a pretty significant rebirth many decades later. Here it is: