The Glory-Beaming Banjo

This year's Lake Erie Folk Festival dedicated a whole track of its free daytime program to Ohio-centric folk music. Two workshops, presented by Columbus-based old-time musician Henry Barnes , focused exclusively on fiddle tunes from the Buckeye State.  Seeking out Ohio-based old-time tunes has been a subject near and dear to my heart, as I've attempted to identify a common fiddle tune repertoire , uncover uniquely Ohio tunes and seek out my state's most influential old-time musicians .  Barnes is much more accomplished in all of these areas, so it was exciting to meet and learn from him at the Lake Erie Folk Festival on Saturday, Feb. 2, at the Thwing Center on the Case Western Reserve University campus in Cleveland.  Barnes presented three workshops during the festival:  Learn Ohio Fiddle Tunes Fiddle Bowing Exercises  Performing Ohio Fiddle Tunes (with Susie Goehring) I attended all three. However, I'll focus on the two presentations related to Ohio fiddle ...

Five years ago, I began a quest to study old-time musicians from Ohio and the tunes they played. I was trying to determine if there was a specific repertoire of the Buckeye State.  In a post from May 2018, I reported on a survey I conducted to find what might be considered the most  common tunes of Ohio fiddlers . I always meant to come back to this topic to discuss some of the more unique pieces that these musicians played, which could be called "Ohio tunes."  Sure, there are tunes like "Banks of the Ohio," "Camp Chase" and "Big Scioty" that specifically reference the state and its landmarks, but these compositions are often attributed to sources outside of Ohio. There also are a number of wartime songs , minstrel tunes , broadside ballads and canal songs that have their origin in the state. However, I wanted to find the more unique tunes played by the fiddlers I surveyed, with special attention paid to those pieces that specifically mention Oh...

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...

Thinking way back to when I started exploring the fiddling style of Ward Jarvis , among the first batch of tunes I learned was "Tomahawk."  Jarvis plays the tune in AEAE tuning, and the Milliner-Koken book includes notation for his version. While researching and learning how to play the tune, I discovered that this fairly recent composition had gone through a few noticeable permutations. To my ear, the so-called "folk process" has yielded five distinct variations of "Tomahawk." Folklorist David Brose recorded Jarvis playing "Tomahawk" in the 1970s, though the tune does not appear on either of the albums Brose produced for the Ohio Arts Council and Ohio Folklife in 1979. The late Red Mules String Band fiddler Jeff Goehring also recorded Jarvis playing the tune in 1977, according to the liner notes of the resulting Field Recorders' Collective (FRC) release. Jarvis is on record saying he learned the tune from Tommy Jackson , a fiddl...

Since the beginning of my journey into old-time music, I have sought to find a connection to my home state. After studying the recorded repertoire of a dozen old-time fiddlers who spent a majority of their lives in Ohio, I have compiled a master list of more than 300 tunes. By cross-referencing this list, there were 12 tunes that I identified as “common,” based on their appearance in the repertoire of at least three fiddlers. The results of my findings follow. This is far from a scientific method or academic study. I do not claim to be a musicologist or folklore scholar. I welcome any feedback. Common Tunes: Arkansas Traveler  Birdie Cumberland Gap Durang’s Hornpipe Forked Deer Grey Eagle June Apple Leather Britches Mississippi Sawyer Raggedy Ann Turkey in the Straw Wild Horse At some point I would like to put together a list of tunes that are unique to Ohio or have a particular connection to an Ohio locale, such as Lonnie Seymour’s “Chillicothe Two-Step” or ...

Don't you just love tax return season? While the bulk of this year's IRS and state tax refunds went to pay for grownup stuff, I squirreled a little bit away to use on new music. I got my own copy of the new Dan Gellert CD/DVD set from Old-Time Tiki Parlour, and then kept the Ohio old-time connection going with four albums from the Field Recorders' Collective , referred henceforth as the FRC. Great Ohio old-time. Those four albums were: Rector Hicks Jeff Goehring Lonnie Seymour Cecil Plum Hicks was recorded by Kerry Blech and Joe LaRose. The Goehring disk includes members of the legendary Red Mule String Band, as well as other notable musicians. The Seymour and Plum recordings come from Goehring's field recording collection. As an Ohio boy, born and raised, these four albums have been on my wishlist for a long time.