In 2008 Robert Plant covered The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn, the version credited to Brayer and Union Station, on CMT’s Crossroads television series with Alison Krauss.

Alison Krauss and Union Station’s version of The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn.

This playable example below from Volume 30 Fabric Boy is the exact Brayer version of The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn (from 1997) that Alison Krauss and Union Station used to base the co-adaptation that appeared on their New Favorite CD in 2001.

The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn SH-V30 Brayer Version

as an educational aid into the art of extreme adaptation we include the original inspiration that Brayer was raised with, one recorded by Preston Young, and Posey Rorer in 1930 which later appeared on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian Folkways).  Adaptational skills often teach us something more about what moves under and through the workings of an artist’s unique creative process.

A Lazy Farmer Boy

Yet another version with Dan Tyminski and Jerry Douglas from the television show Transatlantic Sessions along with members of The Boys of the Lough. Recorded in Scotland in an old hunting lodge in Glenlyon in the Perthshire Highlands.

This recording of Imitation of the Blues appeared on Brayer’s 1979 LP Cold Feelings. It was this version that Nick Haney of Arkansas handed to Larry Sparks in a humid and chigger infested meadow somewhere, which Sparks then recorded it in ’83 for Rebel Records. A movie producer gave the Sparks version to John Doe as a soundtrack idea, then Doe recorded it in 1990 for Geffin Records. Check out the live version with Dave Alvin live from The Belly Up Tavern in San Diego in December of 2006. 

Alison Krauss had the Cold Feelings album thanks to Brayer’s long time friend and cohort Stuart Duncan, but the Alan Jackson version in 2006 sounded to be influenced by the Sparks take as well.

Imitation of the Blues (Brayer Version)1979

Another good version of Good Imitation of the Blues is done by The Cox Family on their Gone Like the Cotton CD.

———————————————

Although this is not the exact Brayer demo version of So Long, So Wrong that Alison Krauss heard it is one of the many incarnations since. The original being culled from a concert version in which Brayer and his long time friend and mentor David Dicky II of San Bernardino performed as they where opening for Laurie Lewis in Riverside, California in 1996.

So Long, So Wrong SH-V33 (Brayer version)

Video of Alison Krauss performing So Long, So Wrong in concert.