“The Baptistown Crawl” is a delightful and catchy tune, recorded by “Hitch’s Happy Harmonists” in 1924. Historians remember the band as the first that Hoagy Carmichael recorded with. This tune, however, seems to have been written by the leader, Curtis Hitch. I transcribed it, and arranged it for viola and piano, in which form David Gold and I have often performed it. The lumbering piano part is well suited for some of the recalcitrant pianos I’ve faced in those gigs.
Here’s a page of the pencil draft — not inked yet, because I still fuss with it.
