The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Running a bit late on this quarterly report. September closed out a rollercoaster of a Q3 on a high note. The Happy Hollow Old-Time Music Gathering was a particular highlight of the the last three months, and perhaps the most fulfilling musical event I've experienced this year. After writing a preview about the event last time, I embraced an opportunity to drive three hours south to Nelsonville, Ohio, to camp and play tunes for a delightful weekend to end the month.  From Thursday through Saturday, Sept. 24-27, I attended several workshops and jams. Two of workshops I attended focused on Ohio tunes, presented by Whitt Mead, one for fiddle and the other for banjo. Coincidentally, two of the tunes taught appear on my " Ohio Dozen " list that I compiled in 2023, and another I included on my list of common tunes from Buckeye State fiddlers .  Two of the workshops I attended were hosted by fiddler Rhys Jones, one on bowing fundamentals and another on old-time fiddle standar...

Grab those banjos and head for the hills of Southeast Ohio. The  Happy Hollow Old-Time Music Gathering will provide a weekend full of jamming and workshops, Sept. 24-27, at Snow Fork Event Center in Nelsonville, Ohio. Formerly known as the Happy Hollow Hootenanny, the event is entering its fourth year, and the organizers have pulled out all the stops to provide programming led by some of the top old-time musicians in the country.  For banjo players, there are several workshop options for musicians of all levels. There are beginning workshops by Janie Rothfield and Hilarie Burhans, an intermediate program by Whitt Mead, and an advanced course on crooked tunes led by Mark Olitsky . Plus, there are daily open jam sessions where banjos are always welcome.  As a proponent of Ohio old-time traditions , there's a workshop on Ohio Fiddle Tunes conducted by Mead, who will also be teaching Ohio tunes in the banjo workshop mentioned above.  Vibe check Happy Hollow is a relaxe...

C hange is the only constant. This past weekend was the  Music in the Valley Folk & Wine Festival , a local folk music festival dating back to the 1970s that was paired with a wine tasting event a little over a decade ago. For whatever reason, the festival has undergone some head-scratching changes over the past few years, which have directly impacted the folk music aspect of Music in the Valley. However, the tradition endures.  Last year was the 50th anniversary of Music in the Valley, which is free for musicians entering with an instrument. Located at Hale Farm and Village in Bath, Ohio, the event is typically held on the second weekend in July. Saturday is usually the busiest day, but I went on Sunday last year. Sadly, nobody I recognized was there and no one was playing old-time music. I walked through the grounds and right back to my car. What a bust. However, what stands out from that milestone year was how the Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS), which operat...

June coming to an end brings a close to the second quarter of the 2026. As mentioned in March, I decided to bring back my quarterly reports to stay accountable to my yearly playing goal progress and ruminate on whatever banjo-y things I did over the last three months.  April was a bit of a struggle. I came down with an illness and wasn't able to play for more than a week, and I had already gotten out of the strong groove I was in during Q1 . To make matters worse, I ended up not playing at all in May, the second straight year that the fifth month has ended with double zeroes. I finally got back on the horse in early June. However, I'm sad tot say I didn't make it down to the Banjos & Bigfoot festival on June 6. One of these years!  Vinyl Hunter 24.5 One banjo-related highlight from Q2 was picking up the My Soul Is Lost compilation from Jalopy Records on Record Store Day in April. However, I neglected to share four other banjo records I had picked up earlier this year....

This month has been a bit quiet. I haven't played a whole lot of music in May. I had hoped to go to a couple jams, but my plans fell through. However, the weather is finally starting to turn summerlike, and that means music festivals are on the way.  I know lots of folks travel far and wide to places like Mount Airy, Clifftop, and Galax to get their banjo and fiddle groove on, and there are several smaller, regional events like the Indiana Fiddlers' Gathering, Rockbridge, Brandywine and more. Here in Northeast Ohio, we have a small slate of banjo-friendly music festivals that I try to attend every year.  Coming up next month, in fact just nine days from now, is Banjos and Bigfoot 3  at Salt Fork State Park  in Cambridge, Ohio. I wrote about this festival a couple years ago, and I just love the concept. It definitely seems to lean more toward bluegrass, but I'm hoping there'll be some old-time picking represented. I'm not sure if there is any jamming involved, or wh...

July 2 is exactly the midpoint of the year, with 182 days preceding and 182 days to follow. It seems like a good time to reassess my goals for 2025. In years past, I would post my goals in January. This year, I didn't even bother doing that. I figured you probably get tired of constantly hearing how I'm behind on my playing goals, so guess what?  I'm behind on my playing goals this year.  I totally missed two months of playing, not playing at all in March and May. However, I started to get back into a groove in June. I'm hoping to use that momentum for second half push to get back to playing music regularly.  I typically set three playing time goals each year: a primary goal, a minimum goal and a stretch goal. I was hoping to reach 100 hours of combined playing this year, with a minimum goal of beating last year's total of 85 hours and a stretch goal of 124 hours.  Having missed two whole months and topping out at a combined 5.5 hours in February, the only goal ...

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...

This year's Lake Erie Folk Festival dedicated a whole track of its free daytime program to Ohio-centric folk music. Two workshops, presented by Columbus-based old-time musician Henry Barnes , focused exclusively on fiddle tunes from the Buckeye State.  Seeking out Ohio-based old-time tunes has been a subject near and dear to my heart, as I've attempted to identify a common fiddle tune repertoire , uncover uniquely Ohio tunes and seek out my state's most influential old-time musicians .  Barnes is much more accomplished in all of these areas, so it was exciting to meet and learn from him at the Lake Erie Folk Festival on Saturday, Feb. 2, at the Thwing Center on the Case Western Reserve University campus in Cleveland.  Barnes presented three workshops during the festival:  Learn Ohio Fiddle Tunes Fiddle Bowing Exercises  Performing Ohio Fiddle Tunes (with Susie Goehring) I attended all three. However, I'll focus on the two presentations related to Ohio fiddle ...

Every year, I start out the same way. Here are a list of goals. And when December comes, I look back on how it all went off the rails. With a mental cocktail mix of imposter syndrome and an inferiority complex, I've developed an ethos of constant improvement when it comes to playing old-time music. However, as a working stiff and a family man, I've come to accept the ebbs and flows of available bandwidth to focus on the banjo and fiddle.  Last year, was a down year. So naturally, I want to do better this year. However, I also want to be realistic. In the past, I've set somewhat rigid goals, and when I miss my target, I feel disappointed in myself. With the Super Bowl just around the corner, perhaps a football metaphor is in order. While the endzone never moves, sometimes a team winds up getting farther away from the goal line, rather than moving closer. Luckily, there is more than one way to score points. Of course, sometimes you might have to punt.  With that garbled messa...

Like last year, I am finishing 2023 on a high note. However, my playing time will fall well short of my goals this year with even fewer hours than 2022. And yet, I've been on a role since November, logging my longest streak within the year, which was only surpassed by the streak that had begun in 2022 and carried over until the end of January.  Other than not playing enough, I managed to do OK with some of my other goals this year. I'm happy to say I made it to some jams and local festivals this year, but I'd like to get into a more consistent routine of playing with others in 2024. It was a sad year for the old-time community. We lost some great people who left an indelible mark on the music and the people who knew them. Their memory will continue to live on in those whose lives they touched. Rest in peace, Kerry Blech, Robert Anderson and Bob Miller.   Got Back to Jams (A Couple, Anyway) Thinking back on 2023, I thought I went to more than just two jams. I attended a b...

Despite the proliferation of local music festivals, my banjo and fiddle playing time always seems to drop off during the summer. Perhaps it's having my son around all the time during the break or just the general glut of increased family activities, but I barely played music at all from May to July, and that includes attending a festival last month .  However, as August is coming to an end and as school has started back up, this month's tally exceeds my playing time for the last three months combined. Hopefully, that trend will continue as autumn approaches.  I'm happy to report that I did get to attend the Raccoon County Music Festival earlier this month in Burton, Ohio. Long-time readers likely know that this annual festival is one of my favorite events of the year. The Century Village is just a great place to host various pickup jams, as well as stage performances and workshops.  This year's event had to battle some serious thunderstorms in the area, but they were a...

More than a decade ago, I stopped into a record store in Ravenna, Ohio, and bought a couple New Lost City Ramblers albums, one of which turned out to be signed by Mike Seeger. I wrote a little bit about that visit in a post titled " Vinyl Hunter: The Origins ."  What I didn't mention was a record that I passed up ... and it has haunted me ever since.  While flipping through the folk/country/bluegrass/misc. of that store, I came across a copy of The Watson Family , originally released on Folkways Records in 1963. The album features Doc Watson and various family members, including most notably his father-in-law Gaither Carlton, son Merle Watson, brother Arnold Watson and wife Rosalee Watson.  You might remember in 2020 that Smithsonian Folkways released a latter day companion album, Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton , featuring concert recordings from two Greenwich Village performances in 1962.  The Watson Family was compiled from field recordings made by Ralph Rinzler, ...

Things got busy. That's why you haven't heard from me. That's also why my banjo and fiddle have sat dormant for about two months. All of a sudden I feel the urge to get back into the musical habit as several local festivals are on the horizon.  Between family, work, kids activities, a vacation, a death in the family and just the general schedule glut of summertime, I haven't found the time to play music lately. But I'm itching to get back to it. Thankfully, the upcoming Music in the Valley festival provides some much-needed motivation to resharpen my skills.  Music in the Valley The first event on deck is the annual Music in the Valley festival July 8-9 at Hale Farm in Bath, Ohio. This has been an excellent opportunity to play old-time music with others from my region. However, this year is getting a boost with Cleveland-based fiddler Paul Kirk assisting the programs manager to add instrumental highlights for banjo, fiddle and mountain dulcimer, as well as a fiddl...

Greetings, glorious readers! It's time for a quick update of my February five-string flings. Since my last update, I had two wonderful opportunities to play old-time music with friends.  First was a house jam to celebrate the birthday of Stephen Rapp , a regular player in Paul Kirk's Old-Time Tune of the Week videos. The festivities included a great gathering of Northeast Ohio musicians. I mostly played banjo. The group played a couple Ward Jarvis tunes for which I pulled out my fiddle, but I was too rusty to play along, so I went back the five-string.  Next was the 7th annual Lake Erie Folk Festival in Euclid, Ohio. I sat in on two organized community jams with an impromptu jam in the hallway in between the orchestra-sized sessions. I played banjo for the first couple hours and then switched to fiddle.  In addition, I finished work on "Hawks & Eagles" from Michael Ismerio's All-Access Online Fiddle Course and moved on to "Sally Ann." Because of s...

Planning for the future. It's an exercise many like undertake at the beginning newly minted years. Last year was a bit of a down year. My music playing didn't measure up to the plans I had made last January. This year is one I hope that ends with better results. So far I've managed to keep my daily playing streak alive. The problem is one I've had before. For the most part I'm only doing the bare minimum to mark off each day as one that I've played banjo and fiddle. Longer practice sessions have eluded me.  Despite the minimal playing, my logged time has still outpaced last year's results. So there is good with the bad. While I want to play more often this year than I did in 2022, what I really want to achieve is getting back into situations where I can play with others more often. Getting Back to Jams One way to play with others is to attend regular jam sessions. The ones I used to attend went away with COVID-19. There are two monthly jams I am aware of tha...

Music Along the River, Aug. 12-13, in Harpersfield, Ohio, proved to be a fun time. However, it turned out to be my only opportunity to play old-time music with others this month. Parking challenges canceled out one event and a scheduling conflict eliminated another.  As I mentioned in my previous post , August was a busy month. There was the aforementioned Music Along the River, the Raccoon County Music Festival in Burton, Ohio, as well as a new jam in Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood that offered ample opportunities to play banjo and fiddle with other likeminded folks.  On Saturday, Aug. 13, I drove north to the site of the Harpersfield Covered Bridge , which has been removed and will be rehabilitated as part of a construction project approved earlier this year that is estimated to cost more than $6 million and be completed by Dec. 31, 2023.  In past years, Music Along the River (or MATR, as it's affectionately referred to by festivalgoers) spans both sides of the Gra...

Summer brings festival season. Clifftop and Galax are just around the corner, but there are a slew of events coming up that are closer to home where there will be plenty of old-time jamming to enjoy. Meanwhile, I'm still struggling to find time to play music amid other summertime activities.  July and August are especially busy for Northeast Ohio's old-time music community, with a full slate of events packed into a tight window. I'm sad to say I missed Music in the Valley earlier this month, but there are two more festivals to look forward to next month. Following the disruptions to events the last two years from the COVID-19 pandemic, this seems like especially challenging time for organizers. It was such a welcome experience to return to the Lake Erie Folk Festival in April. I hope the rest of the local events experience plenty of success to bolster them for the future.  This is a good reminder to show support for the things you enjoy, or they might not be around muc...