Banjo Hangout Top 100 Clawhammer and Old-Time Songs

This recording was made in my living room in 1998; we called our trio Wry Whiskey. I'm picking banjo and singing, such as it is. The guitar player was Brian Clancey, who now plays in a duet with fiddler Robin Warren as Spirit Fiddle. Brian is the best back-up guitar player I ever heard, bar none. Here he is fingerpicking; we experimented a lot with the mixing together of finger style banjo and guitar. Tom Speth was the bass player; his knees have given out, and so he doesn't play much music anymore, but we've gone fishing together a few times over the last several years, which is almost as much fun.

The recording was made around 1975, at a concert at the First Unitarian Church in Harvard Square. We called ourselves the Beaumont String Band. The mandolin

player was Rose Zak, a young lady from Buffalo who had learned mandolin, guitar, and classic banjo from an old Vaudeville circuit string man. The guitar player was Merrill "Mickey" Levine, who now lives out on the West Coast and plays keyboard. The lap steel player was the late Robert Gear, who could play like Sol Hoopi, and was also a great country blues guitar player.

Known as the Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers (1897 - 1933) songs are fun to sing, but lyrically a bit sad. His yodel is famous!

A tune I like. A Bob Flesher tune!!

This is a historic marching song for Prussian soldiers. "Plinky and Plunky" are Kit on mandolin and myself, 3-finger picking.

Here's Sally Ann. The first part is from J.P. Fraley. The second is Scruggs. Oh, how he blessed us. The third is simple chording. The other version, Wistful Sally Ann, comes from Pete Wernick.

Allowing myself to get all jazzy and crazy with June Apple, taking it wherever I want to go. Yes, it's over the top. Yes, it's sloppy. Hopefully it's also sort of fun and different and enjoyable in some fashion.

Allowing myself to get all jazzy and crazy with June Apple, taking it wherever I want to go. Yes, it's over the top. Yes, it's sloppy. Hopefully it's also sort of fun and different and enjoyable in some fashion.

Kit and I enjoy this song. Together with mandolin and banjo we're Plinky and Plunky.

James Bryan, the smoothest, greatest fiddler, learned this from Jim Cauthen and recorded it on his recent CD with Carl Jones, Cricket's Lullaby. Another crooked song.