The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Photo: Down Home Radio Show Joe Thompson, 93, the last known black string band musician, died Monday night. He was born in 1918 in Orange County, in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, and moved near Mebane in 1948, where he spent the rest of his life. Thompson learned to play the fiddle from his father, Walter Thompson, and played square dances with his brother Nate and cousin Odell Thompson for many years. He received the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007 and the North Carolina Heritage Award in 1991. You can view his performance at the Kennedy Center website from the NEA ceremony in 2007. The Carolina Chocolate Drops credit Thompson as an inspiration and mentor for their music, and released a live album with the fiddler from a 2008 performance at Merlefest. The Dust Busters visited with Thompson in 2010 and recorded the meeting for an episode of the Down Home Radio Show (which is where we swiped the photo above). To...

Playing old-time banjo, a lot of the repertoire is fiddle tunes. There's a discussion going on now on the Banjo Hangout about just what's so great about fiddle tunes anyhow? Here is the winning response: What exactly is a fiddle tune? A fiddle tune is a melody that once you hear it, you can't seem to get it out of your head until you can grab your banjo and learn it yourself. A fiddle tune is a living cord connecting us back to long ago generations, to feel deep in ourselves just a fragment of feeling transmitted from across the ages by some plain common folk, our ancestors otherwise long forgotten. A fiddle tune is a kind of tune that has a lot of music concentrated in just a little bit of space, and in that respect it is to notes what poetry is to words. A good fiddle tune you can play for a very long time and not get tired of it. A good fiddle tune is a tune that you can never quite play the same way twice, even when you want to. A good fiddle tune will bring two or m...