You may have voted with your pageviews which posts you liked best over the past year, but a few of my favorites didn't make the cut. Since we looked back at your favorite posts of 2018 last week, I thought it would be fun to revisit some of my pet projects this week.
The following are five of my favorite posts to write in 2018:
1. Sounds of Summer: Beach Boys and the Banjo — My Beach Boys obsession seeped into my banjo addiction with this post. At first I found five songs where they used a banjo, but I have since added two others I discovered after writing this post in July. From 1968 to 1973, the Beach Boys included the banjo on five of six albums. Al Jardine appears to be the only band member to actually play banjo.
2. Mike Seeger's Final Smithsonian Folkways Project — In May, at the behest of Tennessee-based banjo player Clifton Hicks, I wrote to Smithsonian Folkways regarding an uncompleted documentary that Mike Seeger was working on prior to his death in 2009. After some correspondence with Folkways production manager Mary Monseur, I learned that the project would be completed and released next spring. Consider this post a preview.
3. The Legend of John Burke's Book — This long out-of-print instructional book has reached the level of collectors' item, despite often ranking as one of the top suggestions for new players. You can find digital copies in certain regions of the internet, but it seems sad that this highly respected book hasn't been reprinted. If you want a copy, you either have to fork over large sums of money or wrestle with the morality of downloading an unofficial copy.
4. Vinyl Hunter 8: The Edden Hammons Collection — My old-time on vinyl collection continued to grow in 2018. This was a great find through an online source. Hitherto this purchase in April, I typically saw this record going for over $100. It was also exciting to have the source for "Washington's March," which I learned from Bruce Molsky's video a couple years ago.
5. Review: Anna & Elizabeth, The Invisible Comes to Us — A review of this genre-bending album by Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle, who present traditional folk songs, mostly collected from Vermont and Virginia. The use of Moog bass, vocoder, organ and other atypical instruments gives the album a haunting and ethereal atmosphere. "Mother in the Graveyard" is a crowning achievement.
Although these posts didn't get as many clicks as I had hoped, you can help fix that by clicking through to each of the above articles to boost their numbers. Thanks again for your dedicated readership this year.
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