The Glory-Beaming Banjo

This month, I received two bits of good news related to my local old-time music community. The news has led me to find a decent groove this month playing banjo and fiddle.  Two of my favorite local festivals announced they will return this year after having been canceled the last two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  First, the Lake Erie Folk Festival (LEFF) announced it will return to the Shore Cultural Center in Euclid, Ohio, on April 30. This festival was actually the last musical event I attended before everything shut down . I had interviewed organizer Laura Lewis prior to the festival for its fifth anniversary.  LEFF only missed 2021, due to the pandemic. Usually held in February as a way to scare away the winter doldrums in Northeast Ohio, the organizers moved the event to April to avoid spikes in pandemic numbers.  Second, the Raccoon County Music Festival announced it too would be coming back this year, returning to Century Village in Burton, Ohio,...

Tradition states that I provide a summary of my banjo and fiddle playing over the past year. Give you a glimpse at how I did regarding my goals . What I learned. The things I did. The places I went. You know, the normal stuff.  In a year that saw the worst global pandemic in more than a century, there's not much to say about the places I went. My goals went out the window. I changed course on what I had planned to learn . Nothing was normal.  This year has been a rollercoaster. My motivation has risen and fallen on a week to week basis. Mostly, my aim has been to keep my daily streak going and just get to the end of the year. Goals be damned.  Fourth Quarter Review While I'm recapping 2020, this post also serves as my final quarterly report. Here are my previous 2020 quarterly reports:  First Quarter Second Quarter Third Quarter The fourth quarter was highlighted by a virtual fiddle lesson with Michael Ismerio (not to be confused with the workshop I attended earlier...

On Nov. 8, 2019, I returned from a work trip and began a new playing streak. Until then, my longest streak was 100 days . Now, partly thanks to the global COVID-19 pandemic canceling any travel I normally would have had this year, my new streak has surpassed the year mark.  Having played every day for 368 days and counting, I wish I could say my playing has advanced by leaps and bounds in that time. However, I'm not sure I can sure I can say that. There have been days where I only played a 5-10 minutes. A lot of times, my practice time comes at the very end of the day, and I just don't feel like logging a long session of banjo and fiddle playing.  The pandemic has made for a strange year in all aspects of life, and my attempts at musicking are no different. As I mentioned earlier this year , I felt stagnant and lost my motivation to practice. Despite those mental hurdles, I'm proud to have been able to keep playing every day, no matter how brief.  Since the end of July, I...

It's been five months. That was when my son's school decided to transition to online learning for the remainder of the school year. That was when I started working from home full time. That was when the quarantine began.  I'm not telling you anything new. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything for everyone. Wearing masks, social distancing, staying home. Every day feels the same, like we're stuck in the movie Groundhog Day . Wake up. Find my son on the couch watching videos. Log in for work. Make coffee. Answer emails. Sit in on video conference calls. Complete tasks. Log out. Endure.  Wash. Rinse. Repeat.  My wife is unable to work from home. After being furloughed for about a month, she has returned to work. She wears a mask all day, but she also gets to interact with people face to face. I never thought I'd be jealous of being able to socialize at work.  I never truly knew the meaning of "ennui" until now. In fact, I didn't even know how to pr...

Things have really gone downhill this quarter. My progress over the first three months was strong. In the last three months, however, my playing time has slowly dwindled to the point that after June was over, I was 10 hours behind on my goal progress on fiddle and one hour behind on banjo. I'm still playing every day, but only the bare minimum to keep my streak going. Although, I am excited to have reached 200 days in a row . Otherwise, my motivation and enthusiasm is lacking, and I'm just not excited about the music. With jams and festivals cancelled, there's nothing to pull me out of this malaise. As I reported back in May, I attended a couple of workshops and a virtual jam, but otherwise I'm feeling very disconnected from my old-time community. My to-learn list hasn't inspired much joy, and I'm just not sure what to do about my current state of affairs. I've thought about taking some lessons, but I find it difficult to follow along through video ...

Let's play show and tell. If you've been reading me for any length of time, you know that the Glory-Beaming Banjo home office is in Northeast Ohio. As such, old-time music from the Buckeye State is of particular interest to this author. Without much to report on during these days of COVID-19, it seemed like a good time to show off my Ohio old-time music collection. Many of these items have appeared on this blog in the past, but I've never shown everything all in one place. Most of these albums are solely by artists from Ohio, with the exception of the two Young Fogies volumes and Visits , each of which feature only a couple of Ohio musicians. A couple of these musicians are not native Ohioans, such as Ward Jarvis, Rector Hicks, Cecil Plum and Dan Gellert, but they lived here for a significant period of time. Gellert apparently no longer lives in Ohio, but he did when his Old-Time Tiki Parlour album came out. The following is a rundown of the collection ... Bad D...

One upshot of the coronavirus quarantine is that I've been able to push my playing streak to new heights. Usually, I would have had to travel for work by now, forcing me to take a break for a day or two. Not so in these days of COVID-19. Yesterday, my string of consecutive days playing banjo and fiddle reached 200. That means I haven't taken a break since November 8, 2019. It seems incredible. Despite being able to play at least a little bit every day during this pandemic, however, I've actually been falling behind the pace of my playing goals the last two months. With all of us stuck in the house all the time, I'm having trouble finding time to play for extended periods. When I was going to the office for work, I would take my fiddle to play during my lunch break. It was easy to get at least 30 minutes per day. Now, I'm working from home while also trying to manage my son's time, with school work and other activities so he's not staring at a scree...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on every aspect of our lives. For those of us who enjoy playing old-time music, opportunities to play our instruments with others has been severely limited. No more going to jams at bars or coffee shops. No more festivals. No more workshops. No more lessons. Just sit at home and play alone. Thankfully, technology can ease some of that pain. In the last couple weeks, I participated in a couple of online fiddle workshops and a virtual old-time jam. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, video conferencing has hit the mainstream. People using the technology for everything from remote work meetings to virtual cocktail hour with family and friends. Zoom has become the technology du jour. The online conferencing platform seems to have materialized out of nowhere with the advent of social distancing, stay-at-home orders and mass quarantines. While some old-time musicians have been offering lessons through Skype for years, many are...

This month sure has changed the outlook on my yearly goals for banjo and fiddle. While I'm able to keep up my playing at home, getting out to play with others this year has been interrupted. I only made it to one old-time session and one festival before Ohio was ordered to stay at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. Recent estimates show that we'll likely be asked to continue social distancing until May. That means no playing with others for at least another month, and it wouldn't surprise me if that lasted longer. The pandemic has changed my music-making activities in other ways too. Since I'm now working from home, I'm not taking my usual lunch break to play fiddle in the park. Instead, my playing time is typically relegated until the evenings, when everyone else has gone to bed, or other spare moments. The good news is that the weather is starting to warm up, and I've gotten to play outside on my porch a couple times in the last couple weeks. ...

Local old-time sessions have been canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and I suspect festivals will start feeling the effects soon as we move toward summer. For instance, organizers have recently announced that the John Hartford Memorial Festival  has been postponed until September. My local festivals don't start rolling along until July, so hopefully they'll still be able to continue. Chances are I won't be hauling my banjo anywhere soon. However, I did get chance the last two months to test my new Boulder Alpine gig bag . I lugged my banjo to the Lake Erie Folk Festival in February and to a local jam at the beginning of March before Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine closed local businesses and issued a stay-at-home order. Now, the only place I take my banjo is to my front porch. And I don't need a gig bag for that. In my two experiences using it, however, I was very pleased with the results. The Boulder Alpine gig bag is lightweight and comfortable to carry. There are a se...