Coloured Aristocracy Taj Mahal's version

Taj Mahal's adaptation of Coloured Aristocracy has always been one of my favorite tunes. To understand it better, and to understand how he created it, I found the sheet music for the original 1890's cakewalk. It turns out that Mahal's tune and the original are quite different.

Anyway, I decided to record both. Hopefully you'll find them as interesting to compare/contrast as I did.

The banjo is a 12" Chuck Lee Glen Rose model, tuned to open Bb.

[kerthialfad]

I found that Taj recorded it in an open C tuning. Double-C and bring the first string from D to E. Do you agree? He does it the best