The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Allison de Groot was named a recipient of the 2024 Steve Martin Banjo Prize . She rose to prominence over the last decade playing alongside Bruce Molsky as a member of the Mountain Drifters as well as in a duo with fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves .  De Groot hails from Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Canada, and she has received two Canadian Folk Music Awards and a Juno nomination. She recently launched her online banjo instructional program on the ArtistWorks platform. I've had the opportunity to see de Groot in concert twice, once with Molsky and once with Hargreaves. She is a versatile player, whose style effortlessly balances driving rhythm for raucous dance tunes and breakdowns, while elevating lyrical melodic phrases. She can match the fiddle note for note, but also is adept at exploring harmonic counter melodies. De Groot is well deserving of the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, which has been presented annually since 2010 and has been presented by the nonprofit group, the Fresh Grass Foundati...

Travel interrupted my playing time in May, but at the same time it afforded me a chance to build on my collection of vintage old-time records. While out of town for my job, I located a nearby record store that turned out to be a bit of an old-time music honey hole. I actually had to put back a couple albums because my wallet wouldn't allow them to come home with me. But I was very happy to snag three awesome records that have been on my want list for a number of years.   Wilson Douglas, The Right Hand Fork of Rush's Creek (1975, Rounder Records): The first album I found in the folk/bluegrass section of Electric Fetus in Minneapolis was this excellent collection of fiddle tunes by Clay County, West Virginia, fiddler Wilson Douglas. He is accompanied by Roy Tolliver on banjo and Douglas Meade on guitar. Douglas came from a musical family, which also had ties to the Carpenter and Morris families in the region. This album is jam packed with 24 tracks, including some brilliant re...

There is a new festival coming up that I wanted to put on your radar. I recently learned of the inaugural Banjos & Bigfoot Festival  on Saturday, June 8, at Salt Folk State Park in Lore City, Ohio.  This sasquatch-themed event -- or as we call it, the Ohio Grassman -- will feature music, vendors and food trucks from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Stone House and the surrounding area.  I reached out to the event organizer, Salt Fork Naturalist John Hickenbottom with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, and he said this year's event will serve as a "metric to gauge the success of this event in the future."  While Hickenbottom said the Banjos & Bigfoot Festival  will be small, he added that the event will "have a local bluegrass group and a couple musicians who will be gathering around picking, there is a local vendor and there will be food trucks." I specifically asked if they would have festival T-shirts based on that wonderful graphic above, b...

April seems to have brought a bit of a lull to my banjo and fiddle playing. This blog has also felt a bit stagnant. Is this just the April showers that will bring May flowers?  I hope so.  This month has seen my least amount of hours spent playing music this year. And yet, I'm still on track to reach my stretch goal for the year, thanks to cushion I built up during the last few months . That's the silver lining to this dreary cloud.  And boy, has it been cloudy! While there have been splashes of sunshine in Northeast Ohio in April, it feels like we've gotten drenched with rain. The temperature has varied wildly from highs in the 70s and lows in the 40s. I'm ready for porch picking weather.  That said, I have enjoyed a couple days of playing on the porch, one of which was jamming with my son, who recently started playing guitar. The neighborhood was treated to a duet of clawhammer banjo and electric guitar. (Don't worry, I have the acoustic guitar I'm going to ge...