The Glory-Beaming Banjo

This month has been a bit quiet. I haven't played a whole lot of music in May. I had hoped to go to a couple jams, but my plans fell through. However, the weather is finally starting to turn summerlike, and that means music festivals are on the way.  I know lots of folks travel far and wide to places like Mount Airy, Clifftop, and Galax to get their banjo and fiddle groove on, and there are several smaller, regional events like the Indiana Fiddlers' Gathering, Rockbridge, Brandywine and more. Here in Northeast Ohio, we have a small slate of banjo-friendly music festivals that I try to attend every year.  Coming up next month, in fact just nine days from now, is Banjos and Bigfoot 3  at Salt Fork State Park  in Cambridge, Ohio. I wrote about this festival a couple years ago, and I just love the concept. It definitely seems to lean more toward bluegrass, but I'm hoping there'll be some old-time picking represented. I'm not sure if there is any jamming involved, or wh...

March is over, which means we're a quarter of the way through 2026. In the past, I used to provide quarterly reports  on my various musical goals, but I've gotten away from that kind of content over the last few years. You'd have to go back to 2024 for the last one I did, and further back to 2020 for the last time I provided a report on all four quarters of the year .  To keep me motivated and to give me a regular source of content, I figured I'd bring them back this year to see how they go. I'll use these regular posts as a kind of housekeeping and progress report of the last three months, along with any recent trends and happenings I deem important. So, here we go!  The stats Banjo: A strong January helped carry me through a light February. I stayed on target in March. So far, I've exceeded my benchmark for each month this year, and I'm trending in the right direction for this year's goals.  Fiddle:  As reported above, my January numbers helped car...

There is a new festival coming up that I wanted to put on your radar. I recently learned of the inaugural Banjos & Bigfoot Festival  on Saturday, June 8, at Salt Folk State Park in Lore City, Ohio.  This sasquatch-themed event -- or as we call it, the Ohio Grassman -- will feature music, vendors and food trucks from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Stone House and the surrounding area.  I reached out to the event organizer, Salt Fork Naturalist John Hickenbottom with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, and he said this year's event will serve as a "metric to gauge the success of this event in the future."  While Hickenbottom said the Banjos & Bigfoot Festival  will be small, he added that the event will "have a local bluegrass group and a couple musicians who will be gathering around picking, there is a local vendor and there will be food trucks." I specifically asked if they would have festival T-shirts based on that wonderful graphic above, b...