The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Leave it to me to write a whole big "Vinyl Hunter" post about records that aren't vinyl, and then forget about the newest additions to my old-time music collection that ACTUALLY ARE vinyl.  First up is an album released earlier this year. I had my local record store pre-order me a copy of Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow , which was released in April on Nonesuch. The album features two-thirds of the original Carolina Chocolate Drops lineup and arrived shortly before the band's reunion concert at the inaugural Biscuits & Banjos Festival , April 25-27, in Durham, North Carolina, and it also preceded the release of a new documentary about the band that you can watch now on Amazon Prime.  The Giddens-Robinson duo provide a dozen North Carolina fiddle and banjo tunes. The entire album was recorded outdoors at Joe Thompson’s and Etta Baker’s North Carolina homes, as well as the former plantation Mill Prong House. In the bac...

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...

This is not a new book, but I finally read it during this pandemic. Originally published in 2010 by the University of Illinois Press , Ray Allen's Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers & The Folk Music Revival is a biography that looks at the history of the band and its impact on the folk revival period and continuing legacy through an academic lens. Allen paints a portrait of a band that rode the wave of the commercial folk revival of the 1950s and '60s and weathered the storms of scant financial gains, public perception and personal conflicts to leave a lasting legacy that has influenced legions of old-time musicians since their inception in 1958. John Cohen, Tom Paley and Mike Seeger — the original lineup of the band — first played together on a radio show in Washington, D.C., in May 1958. After that performance, Cohen took the initiative and spoke to Folkways Records founder Moe Asch about making a recording and then to Izzy Young of the Folklore Center...

The old-time music community lost one of its great champions yesterday. John Cohen died at the age of 87. He was a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, singing and playing guitar and banjo. Cohen was also a photographer, filmmaker and musicologist. From 1972 to 1997, he was a professor of visual arts at SUNY Purchase College in Harrison, New York. In addition to his notable work as a musician, Cohen was instrumental in documenting old-time musicians through his photography and films. He is credited with "discovering" Roscoe Holcomb and featured him in his 1962 documentary, The High Lonesome Sound . He co-produced the influential album High Atmosphere in 1975, which included Cohen's field recordings of Dillard Chandler, Wade Ward, Gaither Carlton, Frank Proffitt, Fred Cockerham, Estil Ball and others. His photography has been published in numerous books over the years, including one just released on Sept. 10, called Speed Bumps on a Dirt Road: When Old Time...

Maybe it's because I've been thinking of Spencer & Rains since my last post . Maybe it's just because I simply don't know many G tunes. But "Stumptown Stomp" has been on my mind recently. "Stumptown Stomp" comes from the playing of Eck Robertson , who many consider to be the first commercial country musician. He first recorded for Victor in 1922, with "Sally Gooden" and "Arkansaw Traveler" being the first two sides released. Between 1922 and 1930, Victor released a total of 16 sides of Robertson's fiddling. He wouldn't be recorded again until 1963, when Mike Seeger, John Cohen and Tracy Schwarz of the New Lost City Ramblers paid him a visit. Those recordings were later released in 1991 on County Records 202, Famous Cowboy Fiddler , which included Robertson's playing of "Stumptown Stomp." The tune seemed to bubble to the surface in my local old-time circles after it was included on Spencer & R...

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...

Mining the depths of experience for a solution to my lack of banjo-related posts, I remembered my last hair cut. As it is nigh time for another, this was a couple months ago. My barber, a short walk from my house, had closed his shop for his lunch break. Not wanting to give up and go home, I killed time at my local record store . I only had a $20, and my hair cut would take up most of that, so I wasn't expecting to purchase anything. Flipping through the "Folk/Misc." section, though, something changed my mind. It is pointless to resist. The cover was a wreck, held together with yellowed tape. But the sleeve had done its job, keeping the vinyl clean. For $2, I couldn't resist the lure of Mike Seeger, leaning against an old GMC truck parked inside the pitch black confines of a red barn, wearing jeans and a blue work shirt, above the words " The Second Annual Farewell Reunion " and featuring such old-time luminaries as the Highwoods, Roscoe Holcomb, Kil...