That’s Joel Zifton on fiddle. He’s great, sometimes plays with Richard Thompson, on the Celtic Connection music. Soaring.

Joel Zifkin

There is a nice ambiguity in the song. Is the narrator missing her actual childhood, playing in the woods of Harlan County, "popping the heads off dandelions (a southern children's game) and resting by the river bank? Or is she missing an age of innocence she wishes she had lived through that is captured in Appalachian ballads like "Shady Grove", "William Moore", and "Barbara Allen"? Also the gallows, the hangman and the Devil are themes in many songs of Appalachia. "Bounce he bow" is a techniques of fiddle players that allows them to play quick staccato notes. A "reel" is a dance from the Revolutionary war era that is still popular with folk dancers in the South. I think both threads that run through the song are true. The narrator laments the passing of her own childhood in Appalachia, and also laments the passing of an age that she never had the chance to live in, an age that she only learned about through either records in her collection, or perhaps through songs she learned at her grandmother's knee. This is best illustrated for me in the line "And if you were Willie Moore And I was Barbara Allen" is much the same as a teenager from a different culture dreaming that she was Juliet and her boyfriend was Romeo. It's altogether a song with marvelous complexity wrapped into a very simple melody. For a similar song of Kate's listen to "Green Rocky road", where she makes the same analogies through children's rhyming games.

Why?

Very well said Perry Lee. Such a strong embodiment of the Celtic Irish / Scot’s folk tradition here. Not just a longing for home, but a deep sense of connection to roots going back generations to another world / continent.