The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Over this past weekend, I learned that old-time musician Christian Wig died on April 21. Born on Dec. 12, 1949, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, he became immersed in the folk music scene in Northeast Ohio during the 1970s. Throughout the next few decades, Wig would play in a number of folk and old-time bands, including the Blue Eagle String Band, North Fork Rounders, Boiled Buzzards, the Mustel House Muskrats (a reference to the Mustill Store in Akron) and others. Wig also released a series of solo albums.  Known more for his fiddling, Wig actually started on banjo. According to his website , he got a Bacon resonator banjo in 1969 and began learning from Pete Seeger's book. He later got an album by Art Rosenbaum, which inspired him to learn clawhammer style. However, he had trouble figuring it out until he met Stan Werbin, the future proprietor of Elderly Instruments . Wig wrote that Werbin was a friend of his cousin's at the University of Michigan, where Wig was visiting in 1971....

Let's play show and tell. If you've been reading me for any length of time, you know that the Glory-Beaming Banjo home office is in Northeast Ohio. As such, old-time music from the Buckeye State is of particular interest to this author. Without much to report on during these days of COVID-19, it seemed like a good time to show off my Ohio old-time music collection. Many of these items have appeared on this blog in the past, but I've never shown everything all in one place. Most of these albums are solely by artists from Ohio, with the exception of the two Young Fogies volumes and Visits , each of which feature only a couple of Ohio musicians. A couple of these musicians are not native Ohioans, such as Ward Jarvis, Rector Hicks, Cecil Plum and Dan Gellert, but they lived here for a significant period of time. Gellert apparently no longer lives in Ohio, but he did when his Old-Time Tiki Parlour album came out. The following is a rundown of the collection ... Bad D...

Earlier this month, an old friend re-emerged from the ashes of oblivion. County Sales was once the foremost vendor of old-time and bluegrass music. The Floyd, Virginia-based store was where I purchased most of my CDs when I first latched onto this music. My copies of the Clawhammer Banjo Vols. 1-3 , the Killer Grits' Midnight on the Run, Christian Wig's Gate to Go Through and pretty much the rest of my Mark Olitsky album collection  were all ordered through the County Sales website . Unfortunately, longtime owner David Freeman closed the store in January this year upon his retirement. Freeman started the business in New York City in 1965 and then moved it to Floyd in 1974. He also launched two record labels to provide musicians a broader avenue for releasing their music. His son Mark Freeman now runs County Records (old-time) and Rebel Records (bluegrass) from Charlottesville, Virginia. For nine, sad, long months, old-time and bluegrass fans has to scrounge the depths o...

Read part 1, " The Banjo Wizard of Cleveland " * * * A small part of Mark Olitsky’s distinct sound comes from how he sets up his banjos. He says he likes a deep, bassy sound from a banjo, and he uses heavier strings, a relatively loose head, a low tension tailpiece, and “things to keep as much towards the low end as possible.” You might notice some duct tape if you look at his banjos closely. Olitsky usually plays one of two banjos. His “jamming” banjo is a Vega Little Wonder with an 11 13/16-inch diameter pot, Fiberskyn head, and a partially fretless neck he says was made at Goose Acres by Bob Smakula and Kevin Enoch . “At the time that I was buying this banjo, I couldn't afford to buy two banjos and I wanted to try playing a fretless,” Olitsky says. “A fretless plate was put over the fret slots already put in the new neck. My plan was to try my new banjo out as a fretless for a month or two, and then when I was ready, have the plate removed and frets put ...