I don’t know any history on this tune or if there really was a Little Billy Wilson or not. It sounds like once upon a time it lived in Ireland.
Here are The Knuckle Dusters
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Mountain banjo progress
I got a good start making a mountain banjo back in spring, but I mostly stayed out of the workshop through the summer and and fall. Time to finish it off.
All the major components are now ready to go. The neck is carved and the three pieces that form the pot are cut, filed and sanded. I’ve cut a piece from a stove-pipe, which will be used to stretch the goat skin in the centre of the pot. There is still some work to do. I have to cut and soak the goatskin and sew it around a wire loop, and then stretch the skin and assemble the various parts, turning the banjo into a single unit. That’s not all. A banjo needs to have two nuts – one at the top of the neck, that cradles the strings before they wrap onto the violin pegs on the peghead. The other nut is for the 5th string. I’ll be using bone for both these parts. I have a couple banjo bridges in the workshop. I may use on of those or fashion a new one. The holes for the pegs need to be drilled and reamed, and the ebony violin pegs I use have to be shaped. That’s fairly straight-forward. Finally, I’ll need to fashion a tail-piece. I haven’t decided yet how I’m going to make that. Some people use wood and others use bone. Another option is to use a kitchen fork. I’m leaning toward the fork, which I’ve used on oil can banjos. It’s simple and elegant and fun.
Mountain banjos are typically fretless instruments, and this one will be as well. For strings, I’ll either use Nylgut, or fishing line or light gauge steel banjo strings.
Keep my Skillet Greasy
Keep my Skillet Greasy has to be among my fave song titles. Keep my skillet greasy all the time. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Here’s Frank Fairfield with a killer performance. Mr. Fairfield is a dangerous banjo picker. Keep my skillet greasy all the time time time.
Songcatcher
We watched the film Songcatcher tonight. It’s a 2001 flick directed by Maggie Greenwald and starring Janet McTeer with cameos by Taj Mahal and Iris Dement. The music is mostly good but still this movie was disappointing. Neither the characters nor the story are very convincing, and I didn’t learn anything interesting about life in Appalachia. No wonder I didn’t even know this one existed when it came out a dozen years ago. Let’s call this one an OK Timewaster.
Box of cat
This is Jack Shadbolt (the cat, not the painter), enjoying a box. The best cat toys in existence don’t come from a cat toy manufacturer. They consist of a cardboard box, a string tied to a sick on one end and a crumpled bit of paper on the the other, and the best cat toy of all, a 3 or 4 foot length of craft paper draped over a box. If you want to get fancy, add two doorways to the box or make a castle with 3 or 4 boxes with passageways between them.
Folk music and originality
In folk music, it’s expected that songs get retreaded in all kinds of ways. Melodies get recycled with different lyrics, and similar bits of lyrics find their way into a host of different tunes. How many tunes share “six white horses in a line” or “dig my grave with a silver spade” and so on? When we own songs together, it’s all good.
Woody Guthrie was a guy who freely applied new lyrics to melodies that have been kicking around for a long time. The first example that comes to mind is Tom Joad. It shares a melody with John Hardy. One song is about the Steinbeck character and the other is about an outlaw. Another example I quite like is Grand Coulee Dam, which shares a melody with Wabash Cannonball. One song is about damming a wild river to provide electricity to the Pacific Northwest and the other is about the legendary train that takes hobos to a better life over yonder (maybe that’s the Big Rock Candy Mountain?). Grand Coulee Dam has some great lyrics – In the misty crystal glitter of the wild and windward spray, men have fought the pounding waters and met a watery grave – though she tore their boats to splinters, she gave men dreams to dream of the day the Coulee Dam would cross that wild and wasteful stream. Of course, today we see all kinds of problems with damming our wild rivers, but for now let’s keep this in the context of the times.
Here’s Woody
And here’s Roy Acuff and his Smokey Mountain Boys
In my mind, both are equally legitimate tunes that share the same melody.
Today, this can’t happen without a lawsuit, and in the pop music world there have been loads of them. You stole my tune! Everybody wants to be original, but at the same time, everybody shares the same two or three or four chords. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain illustrate this beautifully with their piece, Fly Me off the Handel…
More examples? Think about how many tunes you know that are really some version of the shave and a hair-cut – two bits rhythm we usually refer to as the Bo Diddley rhythm?
Just sayin’.
So next time you hear about some mega-pop star suing another for ripping off a lick, consider that there may be dozens of tunes going back decades that use the very same melodies, rhythms, harmonies and so on. As someone who is immersed in various folk music traditions I say don’t sweat it. My Sweet Lord and He’s so Fine may share a melody, but in feel and spirit and content they’re miles apart.
Western Country
One of my fave Old Time tunes is Susananah Gal, also known as Western Country and Fly around my pretty little miss. I hope you like this one as much as I do. Here’s a version by the Whiskey Bent Valley Boys…
Here is the Empty Bottle String Band, performing it with the Fly around my pretty little miss lyrics. This group also includes an autoharp in their stringband.
The male cardinal mosaic
Tuffy P was up late last night, finishing up the male cardinal mosaic….
Phyllis (aka Bunny)
Stuff I’ll never learn to do….
Here’s Aubrey Atwater clogging and playing banjo at the same time. As discussed in an earlier post, Johnny can’t dance, so the clogging part is a challenge even without the banjo…..
27th Street 