The Glory-Beaming Banjo

The G.A.R. Hall in Peninsula, Ohio, has been hosting a series of lectures related to the Civil War in recognition of the 150th anniversary of what southerners still call "the war of northern aggression." With "Dixie" being the song of the Confederates during the war and the song's ties to Ohio, it was fitting that last night's lecture should focus on Howard and Judy Sacks' 2003 book Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem,  published by the University of Illinois Press . The Sackses are both affiliated with Kenyon College , in Gambier, Ohio, and residents of Mount Vernon, Ohio, the town where Daniel Decatur Emmett was born and is buried. Emmett was a famous blackface minstrel of the mid-1800s and is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame for such  compositions  as "Turkey in the Straw," "The Boatman's Dance," "Old Dan Tucker" and of course "Dixie." The latter song...

The Kent State Folk Festival will be Sept. 20-22 in Kent, Ohio. The free workshops are always my highlight of the festival, as they offer an opportunity meet and learn from some great musicians. Afterward, you can usually find a good jam to play some tunes. While the official event website remains awful a work in progress, Northeast Ohio-based guitarist, singer and songwriter Kerry Kean has posted on his own site the workshop schedule for this year's festival. In years past, the workshops were held at the KSU Student Center, which was a perfect place for people to meet, attend whatever workshop they were interested in, and then get together afterward to play tunes in the spacious building. This year, however, it looks like the workshops are being held in various locations in downtown Kent. Glory-Beaming Banjo fans will be happy to note that Mark Olitsky will be co-hosting the banjo workshop, as he has done in the past. The session will be at the Downtown Gallery, accordi...

Here it comes again. Clifftop. The Appalachian String Band Festival , Aug. 1-5, at Camp Washington-Carver in Fayette County, W.Va. Ever since becoming enraptured by old-time music I've wanted to make the pilgrimage to this festival, but once again it'll have to wait until another year. Living in Northeast Ohio, I'm lucky in that there are local jams and a few annual events where I can go play and hear the music, but there's nothing on the scale of Clifftop. It has become almost mythological in mind. The white whale of fiddles, banjos, guitars, basses and a variety of other instruments and the fellow fogies who make them sing. While I've never been to the festival, videos posted on YouTube from various years are legion. If I'm trying ot learn a new tune and want to watch a video, there's almost always an example from Clifftop. When I was trying to learn "Half Past Four," I watched this video  over and over and over again. Athens, Ohio-based b...

If you like your old-time music served with lutefisk and sauerkraut, then do we have the album for you. Late last month, Mike Sawyer (aka "Clawhammer Mike"), the author of the blogs Clawhammer Tune of the Day and Minnesota Fiddle , released a CD that culminated from two years of brainstorming, research, tune collecting and recording, The Minnesota Fiddle Tunes Project . The album features 27 tunes played by modernday musicians, but influenced by an earlier generation of Minnesota's great fiddlers. The tunes collected here feature a heavy dose of Nordic and Swedish sounds, but that's Minnesota for you. The Minnesota Fiddle Tunes Project includes tunes from a number of the state's local musicians and bands, including Sawyer's group the Temporary Stringband and our friend Craig Evans' Eelpout Stringers, as well as some who have moved away from the state, such as Adam Hurt and Billy Matthews . Most of the musicians here play in a traditional old-t...

RIP Doc Watson We lost another one. Doc Watson, 89, died Tuesday in Winston-Salem, N.C., following abdominal surgery. Watson was born in Deep Gap, N.C., March 3, 1923, the sixth of nine children, who lived in a three-bedroom house. Although Watson was famous for his guitar playing, he also was an accomplished banjo player , learning to play the five-string as a boy. When he was 11, his father gave him a homemade banjo with the skin of a cat used for the head, according to NPR . GBB has been following the news of Watson's hospitalization after he fell at his home last week. Watson was always one of those musicians whose albums I never owned, but that I keep meaning to buy. His influence on the 1960s folk revival and later generations of musicians is evident in the work of today's bands like Old Crow Medicine Show, whom Watson is credited with discovering, and the Avett Brothers. Over the weekend, my wife wanted to listen to the Avett Brothers "Live, Vol. 2,...