Waiting For Nancy: A Song History
Many tunes played at old-time jams have no known author, but "Waiting for Nancy" was composed by Curt Bouterse of San Diego, California. The Traditional Tune Archive, citing Susan Songer's Portland Collection, gives the year as 1972 and places the tune's birth in Squibob Square, part of Old Town's historical park, where Bouterse was waiting for the Nancy named in the title.[1] His own website, describing his recording of it, adds that the friend never came. The missed meeting left him with a tune instead.[2] Bouterse told Songer that he wrote it for fretless banjo in the key of C and put it in a short mimeographed booklet of his banjo tunes.[1]
Mary Cassatt, The Banjo Lesson, drypoint and aquatint, 1893. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
Bouterse was born in Kentucky, holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology, and has spent most of his life in Southern California.[2][3] He has made fretless banjos, which he calls "banjers," and as a teenager he taught himself the hammered dulcimer and built an Appalachian dulcimer from pictures.[3] In 2008 he recorded the tune himself as the title track of his CD Waiting for Nancy, with Bob Webb, both of them on fretless banjos. His website calls it the most widely played and recorded of his compositions.[2]
The Traditional Tune Archive gives it as a two-part reel in D.[1] It was printed in Songer's Portland Collection (1997), and the Reed Island Rounders recorded it on Wolves in the Woods the same year.[1] The North Atlantic Tune List also lists it in D.[4] Stephen Seifert included it in his mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[5]
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