Alison Brown is an incredible progressive banjo player, right up there with Bela and a few others. I first saw her in the 1990s when she was accompanist for Michele Shocked, and her reputation led me to a Michele Shocked concert in Victoria, B.C. Brown lived up to expectations, and in the process I discovered the delightful Michele Shocked. In addition to her progressive and jazz playing, Brown can rip off a straight-ahead bluegrass tune. Girl’s Breakdown is one of her originals that makes good use of Keith/Scruggs tuners, hence her clever play on the title “Earl’s Breakdown.” The tune is on her wonderful 2000 recording “Fair Weather.” I have posted my interpretation of the tune in the Tab Archive.
When examining the tab, you will be able to hear the note changes in the MIDI file -- and you will need to listen to the MIDI, to hear the tune's melody -- but these are not reflected in the frets indicated in the tab, which show the string going from 0 to 0. This is because I employed the pitch change function to achieve that sound (also, how would TablEdit depict detuning the second string from B to A --- e.g., 0 to -2?). The actual notes played are shown in text above the appropriate section of tab. And I want to thank Jack Baker for alerting me to the pitch change function. Through the years Jack has been generous and accommodating in helping me to understand the subtleties of TablEdit and of musical notation in general, and I gratefully acknowledge his guidance here. His contributions to BHO have been very significant.
On the recording, Alison really burns it up; hence the MIDI is high-speed. But you can slow the MIDI down, to hear it better. And if you find the TablEdit file to be too long to print, with both musical notation and guitar accompaniment displayed, you can go into “Print Preview,” then “Print Setup,” then “Multitrack” to suppress the musical notation, and you can delete the guitar by clicking on the green bar above track 2 and deleting.
The structure of Girl’s Breakdown is AAB.