The Glory-Beaming Banjo

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...