The Glory-Beaming Banjo

June coming to an end brings a close to the second quarter of the 2026. As mentioned in March, I decided to bring back my quarterly reports to stay accountable to my yearly playing goal progress and ruminate on whatever banjo-y things I did over the last three months.  April was a bit of a struggle. I came down with an illness and wasn't able to play for more than a week, and I had already gotten out of the strong groove I was in during Q1 . To make matters worse, I ended up not playing at all in May, the second straight year that the fifth month has ended with double zeroes. I finally got back on the horse in early June. However, I'm sad tot say I didn't make it down to the Banjos & Bigfoot festival on June 6. One of these years!  Vinyl Hunter 24.5 One banjo-related highlight from Q2 was picking up the My Soul Is Lost compilation from Jalopy Records on Record Store Day in April. However, I neglected to share four other banjo records I had picked up earlier this year....

Last Saturday was Record Store Day. There were a few albums I wanted, so I set my alarm for 6 a.m., which doesn't even seem that early compared to how early some people line up outside local record stores for this annual event. I saw a couple people camped out at one local store at 8 p.m. on Friday, choosing to spend all night in a shopping plaza in hopes of finding that sweet, sweet vinyl treasure.  My alarm went off, and I hit snooze. It went off again, and I turned it off. Getting up early to wait in line for hours is a younger person's game. I didn't leave the house until 7:30. The shop I visited first opened at 8 a.m. There was a line, but it didn't seem too crazy. However, it took almost an hour for me to get my turn to enter the fray to search for the records on my wish list.  There were three albums that I considered "must have," and I knew Big D's Records at Summit Mall, in Fairlawn, Ohio, had at least gotten copies of each of them. There were tw...

Making music has taken a back seat to buying music lately. I haven't gotten much playing time in over the last couple months, but I have another stack of records to share with you. That is, if you're willing to take a peak at the latest additions to my collection.  While I do have a cool vintage vinyl release to share, it seems that 2025 has become the year of 78 rpm records for me. I've added another 10 shellac records to my collection since my previous post , although not all of them fall into the old-time / hillbilly realm.  Let's start with the vinyl. I saw an online listing for the two-LP set of The Hammons Family, A Study of a West Virginia Family's Traditions, released by the Library of Congress in 1973. The exciting thing about this particular copy was that it was still sealed! The box set includes two records and a 36-page booklet about the Hammons family of Pocahontas County. This collection features music by Burl Hammons, Maggie Hammons Parker, and Sherma...

Leave it to me to write a whole big "Vinyl Hunter" post about records that aren't vinyl, and then forget about the newest additions to my old-time music collection that ACTUALLY ARE vinyl.  First up is an album released earlier this year. I had my local record store pre-order me a copy of Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow , which was released in April on Nonesuch. The album features two-thirds of the original Carolina Chocolate Drops lineup and arrived shortly before the band's reunion concert at the inaugural Biscuits & Banjos Festival , April 25-27, in Durham, North Carolina, and it also preceded the release of a new documentary about the band that you can watch now on Amazon Prime.  The Giddens-Robinson duo provide a dozen North Carolina fiddle and banjo tunes. The entire album was recorded outdoors at Joe Thompson’s and Etta Baker’s North Carolina homes, as well as the former plantation Mill Prong House. In the bac...

For whatever reason, I called my record collecting posts "Vinyl Hunter" back in 2016. I had just gotten back into collecting vinyl records , and at the time I didn't really think about the possibility of adding 78 rpm records to my collection. That all changed a couple years ago, when I shared my copy of Uncle Bunt Stephens, "Sail Away Lady" / "Louisburg Blues" (Columbia, 1926), which I got off eBay. However, that wasn't even the first piece of shellac I bought. But, we'll get to that.  First, I wanted talk about my most recent 78 haul. Earlier this year, I stopped into an antique store in South Carolina while traveling for work and walked out with four shellac records. Awhile back, I joined a 78 rpm collecting group on Facebook, and someone posted some records that had just been put on the store floor at Catnip Antiques in Simpsonville, S.C. It just so happened that the store was on my way back to the airport, so I decided to check it out. ...

Travel interrupted my playing time in May, but at the same time it afforded me a chance to build on my collection of vintage old-time records. While out of town for my job, I located a nearby record store that turned out to be a bit of an old-time music honey hole. I actually had to put back a couple albums because my wallet wouldn't allow them to come home with me. But I was very happy to snag three awesome records that have been on my want list for a number of years.   Wilson Douglas, The Right Hand Fork of Rush's Creek (1975, Rounder Records): The first album I found in the folk/bluegrass section of Electric Fetus in Minneapolis was this excellent collection of fiddle tunes by Clay County, West Virginia, fiddler Wilson Douglas. He is accompanied by Roy Tolliver on banjo and Douglas Meade on guitar. Douglas came from a musical family, which also had ties to the Carpenter and Morris families in the region. This album is jam packed with 24 tracks, including some brilliant re...

March has been a relatively quiet month. However, I've maintained my pace to achieve this year's playing time goal so far. Aided by a jam in January and a festival in February, I've actually managed to stay ahead of the curve. With a few days left in March, I have amassed a total of 42 hours of playing time (21.5 banjo, 20.5 fiddle). If I keep this up, I'll reach 168 hours, exceeding my stretch goal of 150 hours.  Of course, a lot can change between now and December, but it's encouraging that I've maintained such a steady pace of playing banjo and fiddle these past three months.  As a reminder, I played 41 hours on each instrument for a total of 82 hours last year, so my minimum goal is to reach 42 hours on each instrument (total: 84 hours) in 2024, and I'm already halfway to reaching that goal. However, my primary goal is to surpass my 2022 total by playing 62 hours on each instrument (total: 124 hours). As I already mentioned, I'm currently on pace to...

More than a decade ago, I stopped into a record store in Ravenna, Ohio, and bought a couple New Lost City Ramblers albums, one of which turned out to be signed by Mike Seeger. I wrote a little bit about that visit in a post titled " Vinyl Hunter: The Origins ."  What I didn't mention was a record that I passed up ... and it has haunted me ever since.  While flipping through the folk/country/bluegrass/misc. of that store, I came across a copy of The Watson Family , originally released on Folkways Records in 1963. The album features Doc Watson and various family members, including most notably his father-in-law Gaither Carlton, son Merle Watson, brother Arnold Watson and wife Rosalee Watson.  You might remember in 2020 that Smithsonian Folkways released a latter day companion album, Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton , featuring concert recordings from two Greenwich Village performances in 1962.  The Watson Family was compiled from field recordings made by Ralph Rinzler, ...

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 s...

Highlights from my vinyl collection have been few and far between recently on this blog. My last entry in this series came back in February last year. Well, I have an exciting addition to share today.  You may recall I had a bit of an obsession a few years back with Ward Jarvis. I dubbed 2017 as The Year of Ward Jarvis . And in that initial declaration, I identified three records I was hoping to track down. I managed to acquire one of them, Visits , by the end of that year. That left two albums on my wish list.  Well, now only one remains. This week I received the long sought after Rats Won't Stay Where There's Music , released in 1979 by the Ohio Arts Council and featuring recordings of Ward Jarvis and his sons, collected by the late David Brose .  I was so happy to find a copy of this album. I was starting to lose hope after a series of near-misses and then seeing some copies being listed online for as high as $200. However, patience paid off. I had set an alert on eBay...

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...

Jake Blount's Spider Tales has come at the perfect time. Exploring historical black string band music and its antecedents and performed by mostly queer musicians, Blount's latest full-length album on Free Dirt Records is an expression of the zeitgeist amid the mass protests in response to George Floyd's killing by Minneapolis police, systemic racism and aggression toward the LGBTQ+ community, and the continued fight for equal rights in the United States. As a gay black man playing traditional banjo and fiddle music, Blount uses his music and voice to bring recognition to the role of people of color, queer people and other marginalized communities in American roots music. In the liner notes to Spider Tales , Blount explains that the album title stems from "Anansesem," the stories of Anansi the Spider, a figure in the folklore and religion of the Akan people of West Africa, who was known for "his wit and wisdom — and his aptitude for weaponizing them a...

Three "Vinyl Hunter" posts in a row, are you tired of these yet? I hope not. I've had a good stretch of picking up some excellent old-time albums on vinyl, and I'm expecting another one soon. For today, however, I received this package from a certain old-time master that contained the 1986 album by Robert Sykes and the Surry County Boys, Black-Eyed Susan .  Released on Heritage Records, the record was still in the shrink wrap. Despite a bit of wear on the corners, the vinyl is in pristine condition. I always find it exciting to break the seal on records that have been sitting around unopened for years. As I mentioned above, this record came from a a well-known old-time musician who has been mentioned on this blog before . I was watching a live broadcast of Paul Brown and Terri McMurray on Facebook  awhile back, and he mentioned having copies of the Sykes LP available. So, after the broadcast, I messaged him and inquired how I could get one. A quick PayPal trans...

We're back again with another vinyl acquisition. After sharing my Ohio old-time collection last week, a friend asked on Facebook why I didn't have any Hotmud Family. He also suggested I check out Van Kidwell. When I said they were on my want list and joked that my birthday was coming up, he decided to send me this album as an early present. Today is HIS birthday, so this is a tribute to my friend, Russ Harbaugh. But first, let's talk about this record. Here we have  Midnight Ride , by Fiddlin' Van Kidwell with the Hotmud Family, released in 1975 on Vetco Records, based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Kidwell lived in the Cincinnati/Dayton area, but was originally from Kentucky. He recorded two albums with the Hotmud Family in the mid-1970s, this being the second. There's also a Field Recorders' Collective release available on CD and digital download. I first heard of Kidwell through Doug Dorschug of the Highwoods Stringband in a post on the Fiddle Hangout , when I...

While I haven't been inside a record store in I don't know how long now, I haven't let the coronavirus pandemic stop me from getting new records. On May 29, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings released a new album of previously unreleased live recordings of Doc Watson and his father-in-law Gaither Carlton ( SFW40235 ). The track list was compiled from two of Watson's earliest concerts in New York City's Greenwich Village in 1962. The album is available in LP, CD and digital formats. I had pre-ordered the vinyl in April, and it arrived on June 1. This is the second time I've pre-ordered something from Smithsonian Folkways, and I've been pleased with how quickly the item arrives. The audio quality on the album is excellent. Watson was in his prime, and Carlton adds understated and exquisite accompaniment. On this album, we get a taste of Watson's banjo playing and autoharp, in addition to his legendary guitar picking and singing. Carlton also plays ba...

Here are a couple vinyl pickups from October that I forgot to post. While digging through the stacks at my local shop, where I've been surprisingly lucky to find decent old-time records over the years , I was shocked to find these two albums. It's not like old-time records are a big seller at this shop, but every so often I find one or two LPs to add to the collection. I couldn't pass these up. The first was a record I've been searching for for a long time, featuring one of my early old-time gateways . Lo and behold! The Iron Mountain String Band, Walkin' in the Parlor , released in 1975 on Folkways Records. Their version of "Sugar Hill," which I first heard on the wonderful compilation Classic Old-Time Music from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings , put a charge in me that helped put me on the musical path I'm on today. This album also features "Down in the Willow Garden," which I've been learning to play and sing on banjo. This i...