The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Thanks to the pandemic, my daily playing streak has reached an unbeatable (for me) 500 days in a row. With typical yearly travel obligations for work on hiatus since a year ago, I pushed my record to height that would have otherwise been impossible.  Quite frankly, over the last few months, my streak had started to almost feel like a weight on my shoulders. I've hardly played for longer that 5-10 minutes per day for a few weeks. I've been putting in the bare minimum to keep my streak alive.  In January, I decided I would make it to the nice round number of 500 and then take today off. Today, is that day off.  The idea of trying to play banjo and fiddle everyday, even if just for five minutes, came in 2018 . The merit of short bursts of practice was inspired by Tom Collins of Banjo Blitz fame (now Banjo Quest). I used to feel like if I couldn't fit in at least 30 minutes, then it wasn't worth it. When I reduced that threshold to five minutes, I suddenly found myself str...

David Brose died in January. I didn't know the man personally, but he had a significant impact on my journey into learning old-time music. Through his work as a folklorist, Brose was responsible for the bulk of the available recordings of Ward Jarvis, a fiddler and banjo player who lived in Athens County, Ohio.  While I was introduced to Ward Jarvis through the Field Recorders' Collective , the world of his fiddling and banjo playing really opened up to me when I received a copy of Brose's field recordings made in the mid- to late 1970s. Brose went on to produce two albums released in 1979 that featured Jarvis for Ohio Folklife and the Ohio Arts Council, Rats Won't Stay Where There's Music with his sons and Traditional Music Music From Central Ohio with a variety of other musicians from the region.  Thanks to these recordings, I was able to learn tunes like "Icy Mountain," "Tomahawk," "Pretty Little Indian" and others as part of my Ye...

The short version of the story is you have until Feb. 28 to purchase a $20 raffle ticket for a chance to win a Pisgah Banjo. Buy tickets at the Pisgah Banjos website .  That's the banjo-----------------> Here are the Banjo specs: Scale: 25.5 inches Rim: 12-inch walnut, wooden tone ring and heart pine rim cap Neck: Heart Pine Fingerboard: Persimmon Peghead: Slotted, persimmon veneer Head: John Balch goatskin Tailpiece: Pisgah Hawktail Bridge: Walnut/persimmon Mulheron Hardware: Aged brass Tuners: High-quality brass Gotoh Strings: PBCO clawhammer medium gauge The longer version of the story is that  Pisgah Banjos is raffling off what company founder Patrick Sawyer calls a "very unique and historically significant custom banjo." Raffle tickets are $20 each and all proceeds will benefit the Arnold Shultz Fund . The IBMA Foundation established the Arnold Shultz Fund in 2020 to support activities increasing participation of people of color in bluegrass music. Arnold Shultz ...

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...

Continuing the celebration of the first 10 years of this blog, I thought I'd share the posts that you have liked most since 2011. I did something similar at the end of 2019 for the end of the decade. I almost copied and pasted that post here, but there has been a surprising amount of movement within and additions to the Top 10 since then.  One thing that struck me was how many posts from the first year of this blog remain on the Top 10. I'm also happy to see some posts highlighting my local banjo and old-time music community in Northeast Ohio. Without further ado, let's take a look at the most viewed Glory-Beaming Banjo posts of all time.  10. Sustainable Banjos: An Interview with Pisgah Banjos Founder Patrick Sawyer (2020) Our first post is the newest one to make the all-time list. I suspect it'll be climbing the ranks as time goes on and as Pisgah continues to produce excellent and affordable banjos. This post came out right as the pandemic was forcing shutdowns acr...