The Glory-Beaming Banjo

You may have voted with your pageviews which posts you liked best over the past year, but a few of my favorites didn't make the cut. Since we looked back at your favorite posts of 2018 last week, I thought it would be fun to revisit some of my pet projects this week. The following are five of my favorite posts to write in 2018:  1. Sounds of Summer: Beach Boys and the Banjo — My Beach Boys obsession seeped into my banjo addiction with this post. At first I found five songs where they used a banjo, but  I have since added two others I discovered after writing this post in July. From 1968 to 1973, the Beach Boys included the banjo on five of six albums. Al Jardine appears to be the only band member to actually play banjo. 2. Mike Seeger's Final Smithsonian Folkways Project  — In May, I wrote to Smithsonian Folkways regarding an uncompleted documentary that Mike Seeger was working on prior to his death in 2009. After some correspondence with Folkways p...

When you think of the banjo, you probably don't think of the Beach Boys. However, we're smack dab in the middle of summer, and I can think of precious few things that sound better during the sunny season than the banjo and the Beach Boys. My love for the Beach Boys has snuck in at times on this blog before. In fact, my love for music pretty much started with the Beach Boys. Their songs are among the earliest I can remember falling in love with, as my parents played their records in the house as I was growing up. I remember being excited to get the Cocktail soundtrack in 1988 so I could play " Kokomo " non-stop. It was the only Beach Boys song that became popular in my lifetime. The Beach Boys were also my first concert in 1991, after a baseball game. As grunge music exploded in the early 1990s, and as I started to get into punk and my local music scene  during high school, my Beach Boys fandom lay dormant. However, they slowly started to worm their way back i...

My old-time music on vinyl collection has grown exponentially over the past two years. As I mentioned last time , this aspect of my collection has been one of the primary targets in my own resurgent interest in buying records. I started buying vinyl in high school. Having grown up in the 1980s, my music consumption started with cassettes and then moved to CDs. Vinyl was the media of my parents' generation, and they played plenty of it in the house. I was raised on the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Mamas & The Papas and others from the 1960s and '70s. My first piece of vinyl was the 1993 split seven-inch of Velocipede and Kill City Babies . My mind had just been blown after seeing Velocipede play at an Amnesty International benefit concert at my high school. I went to check out the merch table, and the only recording they had were the three songs on one side of this dual album. These were both local bands active in Northeast Ohio in the 1990s. An upp...

Considering more than a thousand people viewed my last post in the span of a few days, it seems Tom Collins is a popular guy. He provided some great answers to my questions, so inevitably there were some responses that didn't make it into last week's post. As a bonus, here are some highlights from the cutting room floor. On Collins' favorite banjo player If I had to pick one, it would be Fred Cockerham. He’s a big part of the sound I have in my head. I spent the first several years chasing his sound like some kind of mad dog. His style is spare, but can drive real hard. He also wasn’t afraid to get weird. Some of his renditions of tunes are downright experimental. He can hew to tradition, but has these moments of leaving it behind and soaring into the unknown. That’s exciting to me. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Walt Koken. Such a different player than Fred, but has that same spirit: spinning the old melodies and taking them into the unknown. Walt’s exuberan...

Earlier this month, I was in New England for work. As has become my custom, I scoped out a couple record stores to seek out some vinyl for my collection . I visited two stores in Portland, Maine: Strange Maine and Moody Lords . I walked away with two albums from each store. Strange Maine had a huge inventory and fairly cheap pricing, mostly specializing in rock, punk and metal. This is your typical crate digger's paradise, with albums crammed tightly into dozens of bins around the store. I picked up two post-"Pet Sounds" Beach Boys albums. But you probably don't care about that. Moody Lords had a much smaller selection, but it was well-curated and very clean in terms of decor and vinyl condition. The shop also doubles as a vintage clothing store. There, I stumbled upon two nice old-time compilations: " Echoes in the Ozarks, Volume 1: Arkansas String Bands 1927-1930 " (1970) and " More Clawhammer Banjo Songs & Tunes from the Mountains "...

After finishing my three-part series " Tracing the Banjo Addiction ," I decided to compile my musical listening timeline to show all my shifts in taste over my lifetime. These date ranges are as accurate as I can remember and include my favorite artists at the time. 1979 / I Am Born: Disco tops the charts, New Wave emerges, and Bob Seger pleads for that "Old Time Rock and Roll." 1979-1987 / The Early Years:  Memories of popular hits like the Police's "I'll Be Watching You" and Hall & Oates' "Private Eyes," going to my first Kent State Folk Festival , and my parents' influence of the Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, and the "folksingers" of the 1960s. 1986 / First Album: Bon Jovi, "Slippery When Wet," a Christmas gift from my uncle. 1986-1992 / Hair Bands:  Poison, Gun N' Roses, and Aerosmith. 1991 / First Concert:  Beach Boys at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, June 1, 1991. 1992-1993 / Blowing in...