The Amazing 90 Minute Sextet

Just had to share this after writing it for a Facebook post ... 

Wow! Last Saturday, Feb. 10, 2024 -- Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco  show 1190 happened while I was off playing for the Floyd Contra Dance... 

A whole week went by before youtube offered me this recording as Saturday breakfast music! 

https://www.youtube.com/live/jZ7YR5PxzHU?si=x19pnnOlI_dw7yA7

An amazing 90-Minute Sextet (band name potential there!) with Meredith & Craig, in the bigger Bay Area  living room of Eric (off camera, but i hear his mandolin at times) and Suzy Thompson, and duo Valerie Kirchhoff (vocals) and Ethan Leinwand (piano), a.k.a. the StLouisSteadyGrinders (dotcom). 

Meredith, Suzy and Valerie ragtime-era blues harmonies are wonderful... but it's all wonderful...

Another vintage mountain ukulele player

Just discovered both "The Syncopated Times" and -- in passing -- Iver Edwards, ukulele and harmonica player from Galax, Va., in the 1920s, pictured holding what looks like a soprano Martin ukulele in a band photo accompanying this article about vintage recordings:

https://syncopatedtimes.com/fred-hager-and-the-birth-of-country-music/?fbclid=IwAR0MxtZjyRCAoleqof-W7AUnmx_bUmYGn3ZKy9xsUDSXLZvksBY9Lrv6BFI

Discogs says of Edwards, "(1906 - 1960) American old-time musician (harmonica - ukulele). Recorded with Ernest Stoneman on the Victor label c.1927-28."

Now I'm going through Ernest Stoneman records on YouTube listening for telltale ukulele plinking in the background. Easy to loose it in the similar-octave strumming of the autoharp and mandolin, such as that heard on Stoneman's famous Titanic recording...


https://youtu.be/skSUX7pNmSU 

Hop Light Ladies may have been one where Iver put down the uke and played the harmonica...
https://youtu.be/boE8U3wAUC4

New River Train might have a ukulele in there, mostly smothered by the banjo...
https://youtu.be/nQzRrLuWOE0

I'll keep listening.

Heavyweight Tiple

A few years after starting to play the tiple, an unusual 10-string ukulele-tuned instrument, I am still curious to learn who played tiples during the 50 or so years that the Martin Guitar Company made them. 

I have found recordings by jive bands in the 1930s and '40s and an old-time string band from Virginia in the late 1920s.

Today, I stumbled on the biggest surprise yet: this YouTube clip of boxing champ Jack Sharkey singing and playing tiple -- and saxophone -- with Abe Lyman's Orchestra at a 1932 training camp. 

Was the instrument his or something regularly used by one of the band members? 

Now I guess I'll be listening to other Lyman recordings to see whether I can hear that distinctive jangly sound in the band when the boxer isn't around.

The movie clip:
https://youtu.be/nJHa7pA-5cQ