Electric Tiple!

("Tiplista" Timmie Rogers & band... Photo from YouTube post)

https://youtu.be/Z1RCRIgiqak?si=gWcT3Jk70khYwZ4G

A decade or so after this recording, Timmie Rogers appeared singing duets with Redd Foxx on Sanford and Son, and playing that 10-string tiple -- the only time I've seen one on television.

The career retrospective in still images accompanying this YouTube video show more of his tiples, even if the amplified 10 string instrument isn't very audible over piano, drums and horns of the band in this recording.

Technical note.. I'm posting this with my phone and the Android Blogger app doesn't show me an obvious way to embed the video rather than just present a link. I'll come back with a computer later and edit this. For now, the post begins the link address simply paste it as text, and it ends below with the same link activated as an "open in a nw window' link using the app. I'm curious what the difference will be, and whether one or the other is easier to turn into an embedded video on the page.

https://youtu.be/Z1RCRIgiqak?si=gWcT3Jk70khYwZ4G

Another Tiple player from the 1920s!

 I thought I'd written about Frank Crumit before, as a prominent vocalist and ukulele player a century ago... but it looks the site "OldTimeBlues" beat me to it, so here's what they have to say, with a picture of Crumit holding a tiple, and two recordings of his singing with other instruments.

Another YouTube user has built a 30-song Frank Crumit playlist, so I'll be listening to his great old-time songs -- and for the jangly sound of the tiple! (What's a tiple?)

I think "Ukulele Lady" was the first Crumit classic I ever heard... and I think my mother sang "What Kind of Noise..." On both, it sounds like Frank and accompanists used uke, maybe a mandolin-family instrument, and other backing instruments, but I don't hear a tiple... and the image with the second video looks to be another member of the ukulele family, an eight-string "taropatch."

Tiple and mandolin, together at last

I didn't find these recordings earlier in my searches for players of the 10-string Martin-style tiple... but now I have!

The Golden Melody Boys, who I've read about at Discogs and OldTimeBlues, were also The Georgia Melody Boys -- perhaps a case of using different names for different record labels, since they were from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, not Georgia.  I'm glad that 78 RPM record collectors have preserved some of their recordings.. and have even put them on youtube.

Here are a few, starting with an embedded video of the most recent I've heard...

Goin' to have 'lasses in the morning (an Old Dan Tucker variation?):

https://youtu.be/-yaSvXgBCoE?si=JLCAaZC60UjeUted

When the Goldenrod is Blooming Once Again:

https://youtu.be/FkF9RCMyhJU?si=J8RSiTZrdHn6G2JF

Maybe Some Lucky Day
https://youtu.be/fnrDcwngWkk?si=SJqla4CVbJyee9h2

Blushing Bride
https://youtu.be/fkVOLhg_dac?si=3Tc3FjJo6iTnJMAy

I'll continue adding their recordings to a Golden Melody Boys YouTube playlist as kind souls share songs from old 78s there! At first I was surprised that YouTube's nine songs seemed to be more of their recordings than the Discogs record-collector database for the Georgia Melody Boys -- but then I discovered the two-names situation and saw that Discogs lists them separately, with four two-sided records as "Georgia" on the Broadway label, all duplicates of songs from their seven two-sided records as "Golden" on Paramount. YouTube has some catching up to do; nine down, five to go, and maybe one of those five is already there -- since whoever uploaded Side A probably did Side B too, unless it was too damaged to digitize.

Discogs identifies the singers and players as Phil Featherstone on mandolin and sometimes harmonica, and Dempsey Jones on tiple, and as writer of their two-part dialog, "Uncle Abner and Elmer at the Rehearsal." 

I hope to find more and better (less scratchy) transcriptions eventually, but from my early listening, the duet neatly illustrates my feelings about the two instruments... that the mandolin is better suited to melody or chord-melody playing, while the Tiple works best as a rhythm-chord instrument, given its doubled and tripled strings in ukulele tuning. 

New to the tiple? Being tuned like a ukulele (gCea or aDf#b) means that when played at the same fret, the three lowest-pitched double and triple-string courses make a major chord (C for some players, D for others), while the three highest pitched make the relative minor chord. Sliding those positions up or down the neck can be very satisfying.

Since a ukulele playing friend of mine is learning the mandolin, and I have mandolins, ukes and a tiple, maybe we can work up such a duet. 

Reminder to self: Put new strings on the tiple!  When the steel string bronze windings wear out, leaving little gaps, those nice sliding chords you hear on this recording slice through the calluses on my favorite left hand fingertips and can leave behind little splinters of bronze wire. Ouch!

(Yes, I've replaced the strings since writing the first draft of this. Added that YouTube playlist too.)

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

Four Virginians with a Tiple

Recordings from the days of 78 rpm phonographs continue to find their way to YouTube, where my latest discovery touches three issues that interest me: 

 Old time string band music from Virginia (where I've lived for the past decade);

 The "Martin tiple," a 10-string instrument I have been playing for a few years, related to the ukulele and South American instruments, made in America for half a century and used for a variety of musical styles; 

And the often racist minstrel-show roots of some of the old-time string band music repertoire. In this case, the latter is only present in the form of a fiddle tune title, without the original 1880s lyrics, which mocked a well-to-do gambler and ladies' man.

The "All Music" (http://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-four-virginians-mn0001387068/biography) and "Martin Tiple" (http://martintiple.blogspot.com/2011/12/four-virginians.html) history blogs both have pages about the band in question, The Four Virginians, from the Danville area. They were active from 1925 to 1935 and reportedly recorded only six tunes, all for the Okeh record label.

Accompanied by a picture of the band, with the tiple used as a rhythm instrument, YouTube has five of the recordings: three square dance tunes with dance calls (one of them with a nineteenth-century minstrel show "coon song" title), and two sentimental songs.

You can hear the jangling treble sound of the tiple (not as high or clean as a bluegrass mandolin "chop") on most of the recordings. It plays full chords while the fiddle plays the melody and the two guitars play rhythm and bass runs. Unlike many old time string bands, the four Virginians did not include a mandolin, banjo or bass. 

"Two little lads"
https://youtu.be/RInuYDVVIlU

"One is my mother"
https://youtu.be/yypYMo6Zm80

"Promenade all"
https://youtu.be/VOxIZ9FMOxE

"Swing your partner"
https://youtu.be/j0P82u-R42E

"New coon in town"
https://youtu.be/w0d7XNl8KoY

Jennings Leonard is identified as the tiple player by numerous websites, including a discography of historical records at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

http://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/talent/detail/99938/Jennings_Leonard_instrumentalist_tiple

The other published sources identify the remaining band members as:
Fiddle – Richard Bigger
Guitar – Fred Richards
Vocals and Guitar – Elvin Bigger

Google search reveals several books that mention the band, including these:

Title one : Virginia's Blues, Country, and Gospel Records, 1902-1943: An Annotated Discography, by Kip Lornell

Title two : Linthead stomp: the creation of country music in the Piedmont South, by Patrick Huber

(The first draft of this post was made with an Android smartphone and its Blogger app. I should eventually get back to edit it and make the web links more attractive and functional.)

It's a tiple

I finally made a short video of my other ukulele-family instrument, a 10-string "tiple." I'd like to think it was by popular request... a request usually phrased as "What the hell is that thing?"

The Martin guitar company made tiples for 50 years or more, using the same combinations of woods they used for guitars -- all mahogany models (15 or 17), or mahogany or rosewood tiples with spruce tops (18 or 28) -- but I see no immediate threat of a revival in tiple playing... However, something inspired the Ohana ukulele company to produce this version. In Colombia there is a larger instrument by the same name, with some marvelous players. Other Latin American countries use the same word to describe somewhat different instruments. YouTube may find you examples. Here's mine:

(Video oops... for some reason, when I talk about the tuning and play the four open notes, I say "from top to bottom" while picking the strings from bottom to top! Sorry if that confuses anyone. More on tuning below.)

Martin-style tiples were also made by companies from Regal and Harmony to D'Angelico. I haven't retrieved a copy of Mike Longworth's Martin Guitar history recently, but the folks at Mandolin Brothers did -- when they had a tiple for sale some years ago -- and said, "The Martin Tiple, Longworth says, was designed around 1920 from a somewhat larger prototype imported from Argentina by Mr. William J. Smith who owned a New York City music company that bore his name." They also included more details about the specific model, a rosewood-and-spruce T-28. Various folks at Wikipedia have been chronicling a the instruments called "tiple" in the Spanish-speaking world. I've even added some of the information there on the "tiple NorteAmericano." 

For a couple of years while the bookmarking service "Delicious" was in regular operation, I saved almost 50 bookmarks to Web pages about the instrument (including parts of the blog http://martintiple.blogspot.com/) and YouTube videos of tiple players including the Spirits of Rhythm, the Cats & the Fiddle, Ed Askew, and more (at del.icio.us/bstepno/tiple) but the service has changed hands and has gone in and out of operation, while the internet archive preserved only a few of the links. So I have added a few more links below and will write other blog posts about interesting tiples now and then.

Repairman Jake Wildwood in Vermont has posted numerous blog essays on tiples he has patched up and played over the years, including tiples made by Martin, Regal, Harmony and more -- and sometimes he includes audio or video clips. 

Here's my favorite tiple video... How "The Cats and the Fiddle" kept their instruments in tune with all the flipping and twirling in this movie amazes me. Perhaps Ohana needs to study 1930s Martins a bit more. 

https://youtu.be/SEQ9Sz0UCl8

The tuning is similar to a uke (or a guitar capoed at the fifth fret), but in four courses --
Gg-cCc-eEe-aa -- with the big letters indicating strings tuned an octave lower than the ones they are paired or tripled up with.

By the way, the second tune I play on that YouTube demo is one of my favorites, "I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate," using a chord progression folks of a certain age will recognize as pretty similar to Country Joe MacDonald's "Feel like I'm fixin' to die rag."

So far the high point of my tiplista career was in 2015 introducing ukulele-playing songwriter Nellie McKay (be still my heart.) to the instrument in the Abingdon, Va., Barter Theater lobby after a Mountain Stage live-concert recording session. I think I have a picture of her playing it around here somewhere. With luck I'll find it and add it here. With even more luck, I'll get to see her again before long. I haven't seen any evidence that Nellie has acquired a tiple of her own, but YouTube does have a clip of her playing a more conventional 8-string uke, linked here for comparison with the 10-string tiple sound.

In 2017 I added a few links to a Southern Virginia band with a rhythm tiple in a separate post here:

http://boblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/four-virginians-with-tiple.html

Here's another knowledgeable post about tiples, with some interesting discussion:

http://www.homebrewedmusic.com/2013/02/08/ever-heard-of-a-martin-tiple

And a reissue of recordings by "Big Boy" Teddy Edwards, Chicago blues singer who recorded some solo tiple-accompanied vocals in the 1930s:
https://thedocumentrecordsstore.com/product/DOCD-5440/

Here's a sample of Edwards' style on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LL5_NE0cKec

A couple of decades later, Timmie Rogers recorded a couple of TV scenes with a tiple that probably has been seen and heard by thousands, maybe millions, thanks to years of syndicated reruns of "Sanford and Son," where he played Smiley Rogers, a friend and singing duet partner of Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx)... 

https://youtu.be/arWaKKIVaRc

https://youtu.be/sHlNHGb1oAc

Finally, here is the only classical piece of music I've heard orchestrated for an ensemble that includes a tiple: Gymnopédie No. 1 - Eric Satie, arranged and performed by Russick Smith for cello, double bass, mandolin, tiple, resonator guitar, and banjo: https://youtu.be/3rRU6Zs4kIw