February Update: A Full House, a Festival and Vinyl Hunter 17

Greetings, glorious readers! It's time for a quick update of my February five-string flings. Since my last update, I had two wonderful opportunities to play old-time music with friends. 

First was a house jam to celebrate the birthday of Stephen Rapp, a regular player in Paul Kirk's Old-Time Tune of the Week videos. The festivities included a great gathering of Northeast Ohio musicians. I mostly played banjo. The group played a couple Ward Jarvis tunes for which I pulled out my fiddle, but I was too rusty to play along, so I went back the five-string. 

Next was the 7th annual Lake Erie Folk Festival in Euclid, Ohio. I sat in on two organized community jams with an impromptu jam in the hallway in between the orchestra-sized sessions. I played banjo for the first couple hours and then switched to fiddle. 

In addition, I finished work on "Hawks & Eagles" from Michael Ismerio's All-Access Online Fiddle Course and moved on to "Sally Ann." Because of some of some work travel, my progress on the second tune has been slow. 

My daily playing streak reached 67 before coming to an end. In total, I logged 14 hours playing banjo and fiddle in January. My February totals are shaping up to be much lower because of the aforementioned travel. 

Speaking of travel, I had the chance to stop into a two record stores while I was attending a conference in Long Beach, California. At Fingerprints Music, I found a 2018 vinyl reissue of the Folkways album The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward, edited by John Cohen, of the New Lost City Ramblers, and Eric Davidson, of the Iron Mountain String Band. It's a European pressing from the Fantome Phonographique label

I sent off a bunch of reviews for the next issue of The Old-Time Herald, which I was told was nearing publication. I could have as many as six writeups in the issue. Be sure to check it out! 

Finally, we lost a banjo legend this month. Dwight Diller died on Feb. 14. He was 76. I corresponded with with Dwight through email a few times, and he was so gracious with his time and full of wisdom. I also reviewed Lew Stern's biography on this blog back in 2016. One of my favorite sayings of his was, "It takes 10 years just to start learning the fiddle." The more I play, the more I find that to be true. He will be greatly missed. 

So long for now, banjo friends...