All posts tagged: Bluegrass Music

Old-Time for the New Year

Published by

The coming of the New Year is always a time to look back and look ahead.  I’ve done both the past couple of days as I’ve enjoyed seeing some new video of the “progressive” old-time banjo work of my buddy John Balch. John and I played together in high school and college under a couple of band names – the best one being The Fiery Gizzard String Band (which we used about 20 years before another band from the area took it up).  The name comes from a beautiful and wild area in the South Cumberland region of Tennessee that I’m pleased to say has recently been saved by my friends at the Land Trust for Tennessee (winners of a 2010 National Trust for Historic Preservation Honor Award). But I digress.  I’m talking about new style old-time music. John is a terrific clawhammer banjo player, with two stellar CDs out under his own name.  Clawhammer is known as an old-time style, but John’s music sounds as fresh and current as anything coming out in the …

Running Dog Guitar Ought-3

Fretboard Journal: The 20th Issue

Published by

The 20th issue of The Fretboard Journal showed up in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago.  Any time a big package shows up in the mailbox these days, the kids get excited as they wait to hear back on their applications to college.  But I’m the one who shouts for  joy when I see the package that turns out to be my favorite magazine. I’m glad to see The Fretboard Journal make it to 20 issues, as I wasn’t sure they could sustain this model.  But the editors keep putting out the best guitar porn on the planet, with stories about both players and builders. Readers who like North Carolina’s Avett Brothers will want to check out this issue.  As always, there are great introductions to builders and players I’ve never heard of (see the Joe Veillette article and his beautiful creations).   I enjoyed a Bobby Long piece about how Dylan’s Gibson J-200 on the front of Nashville Skyline (see photo at the top of the post) inspired a life-long passion.  Paul Mehling, founder …

Bluegrass in the Barn

Published by

There are many great places to hear bluegrass – heck, just about any place will do.  But Candice and I have found a spot that’s become a favorite:  the barn at Evensong Farm. Which is how we came to listen to live bluegrass on 10.10.10. Evensong is a farm we support at the Silver Spring farmers market.  Here’s how owner Julie Stinar  describes their work: Heritage. Health. Harmony. These are the chords of Evensong Farm in historic Sharpsburg, Maryland, growing natural foods that sustain our land, our neighbors and our souls. Healthful, heritage foods cultivated at nature’s pace without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides or genetically modified inputs. Heirloom vegetables and herbs, pasture-fresh eggs, grass-raised poultry, pork and beef – healthful food grown to the rhythms of the seasons, to the patient melody of time. We’re just glad that part of the rhythms of the season includes hearing great bluegrass by Darren Beachley and Legends of the Potomac on the Columbus Day weekend in Evensong’s historic wooden barn. Beachley is a fine tenor singer who has played …

Economic meltdown, transitions, and roots music: Recent books on the nightstand

Published by

My last post said More to Come… was going on sabbatical, but in cleaning up the  nightstand today I realized I’d been holding four recent books that I planned to review on the blog.  These represent my eclectic interests (which is what More to Come… is all about) as well as priorities in my life at the moment.  So in the hope that I can now hold to my promise to take the blog on sabbatical,  I’ll pass along thumbnail reviews of the four and put them in my mental “checked off” category. The first is Michael Lewis’ terrific (as in well-written) and sobering (as in scary) The Big Short:  Inside the Doomsday Machine. This is, by far, the best known of the four and much has been written about the story of three small hedge fund managers and a bond salesman who knew what was coming before the economic meltdown of 2008. I don’t need to elaborate because Steven Pearlstein said it all in a Washington Post review I highly recommend.  As Pearlstein  writes, …

Why I Feel Lucky…With a Snowstorm on the Way

Published by

As we await our second snowpocalypse in two months here in the Washington area, I was fortunate enough to read Dr. Tom Bibey’s Stories of the Bluegrass Music Road blog this morning.  It reminded me of how your outlook affects so much in life. My favorite story from Dr. B’s blog this morning: I began to write in 2000.  I’ve had the same game plan since 2002; write a bluegrass based book, have it out in 2010, then travel a little with my wife for a couple years before we get too old to go.  Our goal is to meet the best people, play a lot of music, learn a bunch of new songs, and sell enough books to make the trip break even.  A buddy of mine said he toured with a bluegrass band and made it to California and back.  He had a great time and met all kinda folks.  After it was over he had ten more dollars than he started with.  He is my hero. So I’m approaching the snowpocalypse with the idea that I’ll …

Old Time Zen

Published by

A friend from Philadelphia recently sent the following quote to me via email: “A year or so ago on the bluegrass mailing list, one of the bluegrassers was comparing their custom of playing a tune until all the verses had been sung with the old-time custom of playing the same tune ad infinitum. He remarked that the object of old-time music was to bore people. I explained that the object of an old-time jam session is enlightenment (satori, if you will)—boredom is only a means to that end.”  Charlie Bowen This led to a search online (shouldn’t all posts about zen include some reference to a search?) and took me to the original source: an information sheet about a Hillbilly Zen workshop at the 2006 Solfest.  Other bits of wisdom from the workshop: The violin music is important because we play it. Repetition of the tune in the groove leads people to an absorption, a place of clarity which most old-time musicians like. And my favorite: Respect for tradition is a kind of filter. People …

Eighth of January

Published by

For all who love great old-time fiddle tunes, here’s a little luncheon treat. One of my favorites among the old-time tunes is the Eighth of January, which many will remember from the old Johnny Horton country hit The Battle of New Orleans. (The date of the battle was January 8, 1815, and Jimmy Driftwood, an Arkansas school principal who wrote the words to the song to interest children in history, used the fiddle tune for the music.)  The Eighth of January is a sweet little melody that’s relatively easy to play but has lots of possibilities for variations. I found this video by Roland White with a nice short mandolin version.  I wrote about Roland and his brother Clarence back in March 2009 when they were featured in the Fretboard Journal. So, on January 8, 2010, enjoy the Eighth of January in a more timeless mode. More to come… DJB

A Jerry Christmas: Some coal mixed in with the goodies

Published by

Last evening several friends (old and new)  joined me as we caught the last show on the short “Jerry Christmas” tour featuring Dobro master Jerry Douglas along with John Oates and Irish singer Maura O’Connell.  This was my first trip to the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis, and while the room has much to recommend it (especially an intimacy that connects performer and audience), the sound mix wasn’t great and O’Connell’s mic was especially bad, with a buzzing and poor sound quality that should have been fixed after the first song. That sound mix was a bother, but it didn’t stop the musicianship of Douglas and his band from coming through.  The music alternated between seasonal music and “palate cleansers” as Douglas described his regular tunes.  The best of the former was a beautiful In the Bleak Midwinter.  There was a tie for weirdest of the former – between a “spooky” Santa Claus is Coming to Town and a well-named Do You Hear What I Hear where Douglas, after announcing that Christmas melodies were sacrosanct, …

Bush and Skaggs: Coming home, coming full circle

Published by

Two recent releases by Sam Bush and Ricky Skaggs — two superstars of Americana, roots, and bluegrass music — show both artists coming home in ways that bring them full circle with their own artistic travels. Bush’s Circles Around Me is a return to the bluegrass and early progressive newgrass of his youth in Bowling Green, Kentucky.  The album opens with the title track, a tune that celebrates “being thankful that you’re here” according to Bush.  His terrific road band — Byron House on bass, Chris Brown on drums, the amazing Scott Vestal on banjo and Stephen Mougin on guitar — plays on the majority of the 14 tracks, stretching out their musical chops on tunes such as the instrumental Blue Mountain and the old New Grass Revival song Souvenir Bottles. This latter tune, along with Whisper My Name written by original NGR bassist Ebo Walker and featured on their very first album, brings Bush back to the band where he made his name and helped shape a whole new genre of music — Newgrass. …

Ralph Stanley Memoir: The Man of Constant Sorrow

Published by

An American treasure – Dr. Ralph Stanley – has just released a memoir entitled Man of Constant Sorrow:  My Life and Times. Many people came to know Stanley through his haunting rendition of O Death in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?.  But longtime bluegrass and old-time music fans know of Stanley from his days with his late brother Carter when they performed some of the most moving music ever heard from the mountains of Virginia. Mother Jones online has a good review of the book.  Here’s an excerpt of Stanley talking about his childhood: “There were no books I can recall, save for the family Bible,” he says of the home place. “There wasn’t much in the way of toys and playthings like children have today. My parents wouldn’t allow even a deck of playing cards in the house, because it could lead to gambling and all kinds of trouble. For Christmas, we’d get an orange, one for Carter and one for me, and a handful of rock candy. Maybe a cap-gun, too. …