Mountain Home Music has a fun, summertime song from banjo player, songwriter, and vocalist Gina Furtado, one called Pigtails and Sugarcane, recorded with her two sisters.
The song comes from a real experience Gina had, which brought to mind the time she had spent in Central America as a girl. It tells a lovely story, in waltz time, of an imagined conversation of which she had only heard one side.
As she recalls…
“The idea for this song came when I used to sit on my back porch in the evenings and hear my neighbor chatting away on the phone each night in Spanish. He and his housemates were immigrants from El Salvador. I wondered what it was like on the other end of the line; where he was calling home to, and how hard it must be to only be able to talk to your loved ones on a long distance phone call.
I was reminded of my visits to Honduras years before, and how common it was for young men to be missing from the households there, having been sent to the US to find work and support their families from afar. Also common was for kids to enjoy a tasty treat by cutting a section of sugarcane and chewing on it! Pigtails and Sugarcane is what I imagined my immigrant neighbor’s stories might be.”
With sisters Malia on fiddle and Lu on bass, Furtado plays a lovely, low-tuned banjo, with Wayne Benson on mandolin and Drew Matulich on guitar.
It’s a charming song that is sure to win your heart.
Check it out…
Pigtails and Sugarcane is available now from popular download and streaming services online, and to radio programmers via AirPlay Direct.
