Old-time, country and bluegrass music in the big city.
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55 posts tagged banjo
William Sydney MountThe Banjo Player in the Barn 1855.
Glenn Jones: Tiny Desk Concert
Instrumental banjo and fingerpicking guitar. I might try and learn a bit of what he plays.
Glenn Jones has only taken up the banjo recently, but it’s as if he’s been inside the instrument for a lifetime. At least that’s how it felt when he opened his set with a modal piece that might have felt more appropriate played next to a quiet creek than behind our desks at the NPR Music offices.
Jones’ most recent album, The Wanting, is a compelling work of American folk music that tells stories without a single word. When he introduced “The Great Pacific Northwest,” he said that if he played it right, “Mt. Rainier should burst right through the floor of this room.” Heaven help us if it didn’t seem like it might.
There’s a genteel physicality to Jones’ playing that counters the raw, bear-trap-like style of his old friend and collaborator, the late Jack Rose. That comes out in the closing song, “Of Its Own Kind,” which captures the kind of faraway melody that’ll have you humming for days.
As boys in the little community of Flint Hill, near Shelby, North Carolina, Earl and his brother Horace would take their banjo and guitar and start playing on the porch, then split up and meet behind the house. Their goal was to still be on the beat when they rejoined at the back. Momentously, when he was ten years old, after a fight with his brother, he was playing his banjo to calm his mind. He was practicing the standard “Reuben” when found he could incorporate his third finger into the picking of his right hand, instead of the his usual two, in an unbroken, rolling, staccato. He ran back to his brother, shouting, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” He was on the way to creating an entirely new way of playing the banjo: Scruggs Style.
Bill Keith & Mark Patton- a great banjo version of Auld Lang Syne. Happy New Year everyone!
Note… We have no enthusiasm for stars and bars at Bluegrassnyc, but we sure like the banjo.In and around Appomattox, VA.
Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers—“Please Papa Come Home”
Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers, Volume 2 (JSP 2005).
60 Plays | Download
Around this time of year I like to pull up Emmett Otter’s Jug Band Christmas on Netflix.
workingmans-blues: William E. Whitmore. This dude is legit.
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