The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Hello, is anyone still with me? This is not the publishing schedule I envisioned for this blog's 10th anniversary . Somehow it's been eight months since my last post . Even worse, after ending my epic streak of playing my instruments every day for almost a year and a half, my practice time lost all sense of consistency.  In fact, I have barely played music at all since July. Without open jams or local festivals, I seem to have lost my motivation to practice. I used to take my fiddle with me to the office and play in the park down the street during my lunch break. Now that I only go in once a week, I just don't feel like dragging along my gear to work anymore.  Being at home so much the past two years, you would think that I'd find more opportunities to pick up my banjo or fiddle. That has not been the case. I think last year, there was more focus on staying connected to the old-time community virtually, through online jams, workshops and performances. After another yea...

Last month I ended my 500-day streak of playing banjo and fiddle. I followed that with two and a half weeks of not playing banjo or fiddle. It seems during my break that my fingers have lost almost all of their calluses. They haven't been this tender in a long time.  During the past week, I've been getting myself back in the habit of playing music on a semi-daily basis. I've been focusing on playing for longer stretches, rather just a few minutes to keep a streak alive like I'd gotten used to doing.  It feels good to be out of that rut.  The biggest thing I want to get back to is learning new stuff. I'm continuing to work on Michael Ismerio's online fiddle course , and I've been revisiting Ken Perlman's Clawhammer Style Banjo , the book that helped get my started on old-time more than a decade ago. I'm also thinking of digging out Mike Seeger's Southern Banjo Styles videos.  I've been trying to approach my instruments with a beginner's ...

Thanks to the pandemic, my daily playing streak has reached an unbeatable (for me) 500 days in a row. With typical yearly travel obligations for work on hiatus since a year ago, I pushed my record to height that would have otherwise been impossible.  Quite frankly, over the last few months, my streak had started to almost feel like a weight on my shoulders. I've hardly played for longer that 5-10 minutes per day for a few weeks. I've been putting in the bare minimum to keep my streak alive.  In January, I decided I would make it to the nice round number of 500 and then take today off. Today, is that day off.  The idea of trying to play banjo and fiddle everyday, even if just for five minutes, came in 2018 . The merit of short bursts of practice was inspired by Tom Collins of Banjo Blitz fame (now Banjo Quest). I used to feel like if I couldn't fit in at least 30 minutes, then it wasn't worth it. When I reduced that threshold to five minutes, I suddenly found myself str...

David Brose died in January. I didn't know the man personally, but he had a significant impact on my journey into learning old-time music. Through his work as a folklorist, Brose was responsible for the bulk of the available recordings of Ward Jarvis, a fiddler and banjo player who lived in Athens County, Ohio.  While I was introduced to Ward Jarvis through the Field Recorders' Collective , the world of his fiddling and banjo playing really opened up to me when I received a copy of Brose's field recordings made in the mid- to late 1970s. Brose went on to produce two albums released in 1979 that featured Jarvis for Ohio Folklife and the Ohio Arts Council, Rats Won't Stay Where There's Music with his sons and Traditional Music Music From Central Ohio with a variety of other musicians from the region.  Thanks to these recordings, I was able to learn tunes like "Icy Mountain," "Tomahawk," "Pretty Little Indian" and others as part of my Ye...

The short version of the story is you have until Feb. 28 to purchase a $20 raffle ticket for a chance to win a Pisgah Banjo. Buy tickets at the Pisgah Banjos website .  That's the banjo-----------------> Here are the Banjo specs: Scale: 25.5 inches Rim: 12-inch walnut, wooden tone ring and heart pine rim cap Neck: Heart Pine Fingerboard: Persimmon Peghead: Slotted, persimmon veneer Head: John Balch goatskin Tailpiece: Pisgah Hawktail Bridge: Walnut/persimmon Mulheron Hardware: Aged brass Tuners: High-quality brass Gotoh Strings: PBCO clawhammer medium gauge The longer version of the story is that  Pisgah Banjos is raffling off what company founder Patrick Sawyer calls a "very unique and historically significant custom banjo." Raffle tickets are $20 each and all proceeds will benefit the Arnold Shultz Fund . The IBMA Foundation established the Arnold Shultz Fund in 2020 to support activities increasing participation of people of color in bluegrass music. Arnold Shultz ...

Collecting records has been one of the ways I've coped with the pandemic. Whether at local shops or through online vendors, I bought a lot of — my wife might say too many — albums in 2020.  You saw some of my banjo-related purchases in my posts from June last year . However, as I mentioned in my 2020 recap , there were a few others that for whatever reason I didn't share on this blog.  Perhaps I feared you were sick of seeing my vinyl collection. Whatever the reason was, we'll make up for lost time with this post. The following are the four other LPs featuring our five-stringed friend that I picked up last year that you didn't see.  Dock Boggs In July 2020, I took a drive out to Blackbird Records in downtown Wooster, Ohio. This cozy little shop is about an hour away from me. Among the six albums I picked up that day was The Legendary Dock Boggs on the Verve Folkways label. This is a 1966 reissue of the 1964 album that was originally released on Folkways Records. S...

Continuing the celebration of the first 10 years of this blog, I thought I'd share the posts that you have liked most since 2011. I did something similar at the end of 2019 for the end of the decade. I almost copied and pasted that post here, but there has been a surprising amount of movement within and additions to the Top 10 since then.  One thing that struck me was how many posts from the first year of this blog remain on the Top 10. I'm also happy to see some posts highlighting my local banjo and old-time music community in Northeast Ohio. Without further ado, let's take a look at the most viewed Glory-Beaming Banjo posts of all time.  10. Sustainable Banjos: An Interview with Pisgah Banjos Founder Patrick Sawyer (2020) Our first post is the newest one to make the all-time list. I suspect it'll be climbing the ranks as time goes on and as Pisgah continues to produce excellent and affordable banjos. This post came out right as the pandemic was forcing shutdowns acr...

Back in February 2011, I decided to start a blog. This is it. A decade later I'm still writing about my journey learning to play the banjo and exploring old-time music. That wouldn't have been possible without YOU, yes, you the one reading this very sentence.  I started playing banjo in March 2008, fueled by my interest in such disparate artists as the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Sixteen Horsepower, Old Crow Medicine Show, Earl Scruggs, the Avett Brothers, Great Lake Swimmers, Roscoe Holcomb and Chatham County Line. What I didn't know then was that all the banjo playing by those musicians was of a different style. I started with Scruggs' style, but started flounder. However, by the end of the year, I discovered clawhammer and found my path forward.  That same year, I met my wife.  Three years later, I decided to start this blog as a way to share what I had learned, banjo things I was interested in, interviews with various banjo luminaries and otherwise flex my creative w...

Happy Inauguration Day! Here is your inaugural Glory-Beaming Banjo post of 2021. Usually, I start the New Year with a post about my goals for the following 12 months. So far, I've been dragging my feet when it comes to figuring out exactly what those goals should be.  After a difficult and stressful year that forced us all away from our typical social and communal interactions, I often found myself sapped of motivation to practice and ended up falling short of last year's goals. Quite frankly, I'm not especially interested in coming up with new bars to meet ... or not. Sure, I want to get better and learn new tunes. Sure, I will continue to log my playing time and keep striving for that mythical 10,000 hours benchmark. But I don't want to feel beholden to a specific set of parameters right now.  I think my biggest goal this year is to reconnect with the old-time community in Northeast Ohio and beyond. I want to be able to attend an in-person jam. I want to go to a festi...