Banjo Hangout Newest 100 Clawhammer and Old-Time Songs

Sawmill tuning, two-finger thumb lead. From the singing of Aunt Molly Jackson.

For the old-time Tune of the Week, 10-28-16, New Yorker Ira Bernstein wrote this tune in the 80's. He is known most famously as a dancer, specializing in Appalachian flatfoot, clogging, and tap. I was quite surprised this week when I learned he wrote a fiddle tune, which is also his favorite instrument to dance to. The A part begins with a minor and the B part modulates, so it's not a common fiddle tune. It's catchy and was actually played in my neck of the woods when Earl White played at a bluegrass festival in Grass Valley, California. However, I admit I'd have learned the tune if it wasn't for this week's TOTW.

... bring along a demijohn.

CH take on trad reel. Wildwood. D tuning

I just worked this out from the Shades of Death Creek album by New Bad Habits (Chirps Smith, Dave Landreth, Tim Foss, and Andy Gribble). They play it much more up tempo and in key of D. I played in the key of C (gCGCD) here. This is played on a 1903 Fairbanks Whyte Laydie #2.

Simple multitrack version of the tune "Needlecase" (fiddle, clawhammer banjo, guitar, hammered dulcimer, bass).

For the old-time Tune of the Week, 10-22-16. Dock Boggs and Ralph Stanley are the two seminal examples of this song. Dock Boggs played it picking style and gave us the common verses we hear and Ralph Stanley's best version was a capapella heard in Oh Brothers, Where Art Thou.

I've attempted Oh Death in clawhammer style here on cello banjo, tuned in sawmill, thinking Dock Boggs' words as I play. Its lyrics are an icy portrait of death that could help lead a personal to repentance, as it did the original writer, Lloyd Chandler, a Free Will Baptist minister in the 1920's, after he dreamed it. Check out this week's TOTW for more info.

This is a sound comparison (limited by recording abilities) of three banjos. I play Twin Sisters twice through on each. In alphabetical order by builder (but not necessarily playing order), they are Enoch Dobson, Fairbanks Whyte Laydie #2, and Ome Flora.

Do you have a preference? Can you guess which is which?