Why did it choose to confuse its instrumentalists with a ‘Foggy Mountain Special’ and a ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’?

There is one problem with songs that have limited chord structures and basic melodies, and that’s that they can start to sound quite similar. It might have been easier to tell the songs apart – and therefore play the notes in the right order – if they hadn’t, many of them, had such similar names, or covered such similar ground. For instance, there wasn’t just one song about someone ‘going down the road feeling bad’. There were dozens. Every other song seemed to be a hard-luck story about a man who’d worn out the soles of his shoes, and had no money to buy a new pair. Within a couple of hours, I had compassion fatigue. And why did a single musical genre require songs about a ‘Little Cabin Home on the Hill’, a ‘Blue Ridge Cabin Home’, and a ‘Cabin in Caroline’? Why did it need to pay tribute to both a John Hardy and a John Henry? Why did it choose to confuse its instrumentalists with a ‘Foggy Mountain Special’ and a ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’? There weren’t even lyrics to help you tell those last two apart. At one stage I mistook one for the other and caused the musical equivalent of a ten-car pile-up.

E. John, Wayfaring stranger (2019), loc. 343