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.)

When the blues hit the mountains...

 Oldtime music crossover...

While looking for the words to a less-often-heard "shindig in the barn" verse to "Blue Ridge Mountain Blues," I found several "discography" lists, including the two recordings as "Blue Ridge Blues" below... George Reneau's was apparently the first recording of the song. And Lulu Jackson's version gets left out of some of the "country music" or "oldtime music" lists, maybe because it crossed boundaries, but I'd love to read a history about how she wound up recording the song! Her "recitation" of the "There'll be a shindig in the barn" verse is, well, very special.

The song (credited to Cliff Hess under the alias Roy B. Carson at https://secondhandsongs.com/artist/84608) certainly was popular. Other 1920s recordings were by Riley Puckett, Ernest V. Stoneman, The Blue Ridge Duo (Gene Austin and George Reneau), Vernon Dalhart and more. (Hess was a prolific songwriter and pianist who had played on Mississippi riverboats, wrote songs with "blues" in the title as early as 1916, and eventually collaborated with Irving Berlin.) The song also mentions an even older "oldie," "Where is My (Wandering) Boy Tonight," published in 1877 and recorded by many artists from the dawn of cylinder and disc recordings.

"Blue Ridge Blues"

George Reneau , guitar and harmonica, from April '24

https://youtu.be/EwSaYwoZHZU and again with Reneau and Gene Austin:

Al Hopkins' Bucklebusters / The Hill Billies, 1926 or '28 (including fiddle, guitar, banjo & banjo-ukulele!, and 3-or-4-part harmony singing!)

https://youtu.be/a3QxAYItsZM

Also as "Blue Ridge Blues"

Lulu Jackson (vcl/gtr) and piano.

https://youtu.be/L5lBfwWoGpg

December 21, 1928, rec. in Chicago, Vocalion 1242

Enough computer for today... but tomorrow (or someday soon) I'm going looking for more about Lulu!
I'm afraid she gets left out on both sides of the recording-industry color line, even by scholars. I just found a blues discography note from a major reference book: "This artist was of African-American ancestry, but her recordings are essentially in the hillbilly idiom and of little blues interest." (Blues and gospel records 1890-1943 (1997), p. 430) Her versions of "Little Rosewood Casket" and "Careless Love Blues" are very nice too, and available on YouTube. Apparently enough of her 78s have been collected to be reissued in compilations like this one found at the discography website, discogs:

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.

1924 mountain ukulele?

This YouTube clip of a 1924 recording of Ida Red by Fiddlin' Powers and Family is accompanied by a photograph showing a young lady in the band holding a ukulele, so off I went searching for written sources about the group and the ukulele player in particular.

Success! This article by Rene Rodgers at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol answered my question as fast as I could type it into Google. The youngest sister's name was Ada, and there is another picture of her with her ukulele at the Museum website! Alas, the article mentions that she moved on to the Autoharp, and doesn't say much about her ukulele playing, so maybe she only played ukulele during her early days as a musician. That was true for me too, as I moved on to guitar and banjo and mandolin and didn't get back to the ukulele for about 30 years!

 It looks like the young women of the Powers family were progressive in other ways too... those bobbed hairdos look pretty modern. But that's a topic for a different kind of blog.

See my previous posts, "In search of the mountain ukulele," and "Dr. Bates ukulele playing daughter."

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

Speaking the old-time language

Heather Rousseau, a new photo journalist at the Roanoke Times, dove right into local culture with a photo and video story from the Sunday afternoon old-time jam at the Floyd Country Store

It was the first Sunday that I'd made it to the jam in weeks of bad weather and/or bad timing. She caught me playing the Firefly banjo-ukulele I've already written about here.

Surprises: Session leader Mac Traynham playing rhythm guitar instead of his usual fiddle or banjo, and my arriving in time to catch a seat between Mac and Radford neighbors Linda Frank & Chip Arnold.

I will send the photographer a note asking permission to "reprint" her close-up of the guy in the NPR cap playing a not-so-traditional banjo ukulele... But since it is property of the Roanoke Times, you might as well just go there and enjoy the whole presentation... if you haven't already been there via the flurry of posts on Facebook.

(note: this is my first attempt to use an Android phone app to post to blogger. I may have to come back and fix the link, edit embarrassing autocorrect errors, or something.)

In search of the mountain ukulele

This page has been updated many times since 2015, when the announcement of a Blacksburg and New River Valley ukulele get together inspired me to look into the past of ukulele playing in the region's oldtime music communities... My goal was to tell uke players that they didn't need to look for uke-only events, that they would not necessarily be met with scorn and derision at mixed jam sessions in the area, if they were willing to listen, learn some traditional old time string band tunes -- and keep within the style.

As I eventually learned, while they took a minor supporting role, ukes appeared to have been infiltrating old time music recordings in a small way even before John Hopkins' started strumming his triplets on a banjo ukulele loud and clear in the original "Hill Billies," 1926:

Blue Ridge Mountain Blues - The Hill Billies 1926!

Background from...

https://web.archive.org/web/20151005202634/http://www.oldtimemusic.com/FHOFBowman.html

"Al Hopkins ... was the leader of his own band called the Hill Billies (also known as the Buckle Busters). The band members consisted of Al Hopkins (piano), John Hopkins (ukulele), Joe Hopkins (guitar), John Rector (banjo), and Tony Alderman (fiddle).

"The Hill Billies had been discovered by Ralph Peer a year earlier and had made some records for Okeh (a forerunner of Columbia). When Ralph Peer asked Al Hopkins the name of his band, Al responded “We ain’t nothing but a bunch of hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia. You can just call us anything.” Mr. Peer appropriately named them the “Hill Billies”.

Lyrics: http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/american-traditional-chords/blue_ridge_mountain_blues.htm

Tune History: 

http://jopiepopie.blogspot.com/2013/06/blue-ridge-mountain-blues-1924.html

More Hillbillies and Buckle Busters tunes...

"Oh Miss Lisa, Poor Gal..."

"Sally Ann"

"Texas Gals"

"Going Down The Road Feeling Bad"

(I could be wrong. You have to listen hard to be sure the uke is there, especially if the 5-string is playing rhythm on high notes)

Other Oldtime uke players...

Ada Powers (notice her central position, with uke,  in this great old fiddlers convention photo)

Alcyone Bates

The Four Virginians (with a uke-tuned 10-string tiple)

Price Goodson of Da Costa Woltz's Southern Broadcasters was only 12, according to the notes at YouTube, when he accompanied himself on uke and harmonica on Be Kind to a Man When He is Down in 1927, and provided uke rhythms behind the two banjos and fiddle on other songs. I'm keeping my eye open for the 1998 CD compilation of their recordings.

---

Contemporary Neo-Oldtime Power Uke

I first heard the banjo ukulele played with a  fiddle and 5-string banjo in the late 1970s or early 1980s by a more contemporary band, the Horse Flies from Ithaca, N.Y. 

Alternating between guitar and banjo uke, depending on the tune, Jeff Claus provided a rock-solid rhythm for the band. I have seen an interview with him somewhere referring to the instrument as "a drum on a stick."

Another contemporary player, John Kelley, headed his web essay and instructional page about the instrument, "Banjo Uke -- the Tommy Gun of old time music!"

http://bassbox.org/banjouke/index.php

However, not all old time Fiddlers will appreciate having a Tommy Gun in their local jam session. It is best to ask, or be very sensitive to icy stares!

My Firefly & Clawhammer Banjo-uke

First flights with Firefly banjo-uke

Update, August 2021:

This picture turned up in an oldtime radio discussion forum... I had no idea George Gobel started out as an adolescent radio-barn-dance ukulele player during his "Georgie" days! By the 1950s when I first saw him, he was much better known as Ernie Ford's "little bitty buddy" strumming orchestral jazz chords on an oversize Gibson Super 400 guitar along with the jokes and songs on TV.

That big Gibson was almost part of the joke itself, looking out of proportion strapped around the diminutive crewcut Goble. Result: Gibson even named a custom smaller, slimmer jazz guitar after him. (I haven't seen any archival clips showing him going back to the ukulele, but wouldn't be surprised if that didn't turn up in one of Gobel and Ford's TV comedy skits.)

But that's not all... Continued research (OK, a five-minute browse with Google) led to this fascinating claim about the ukulele as a way to dodge musicians' union dues:

"He was one of the favorites, as well as the youngest performer at the time on WLS' National Barn Dance, a homegrown program which was hugely popular from its inception in 1924 and enduring for over 50 years. George's era started with his debut in 1933. George played the ukulele, which was not a union instrument, thereby avoiding paying union dues."

(Or maybe that was just a punchline in George's transition from mostly-musician to mostly-comedian?

Accidental Ukulele

I have been going to the wonderful twice-a-year Lake Eden Arts Festival (http://theLEAF.org) for almost 20 years, off and on, and have several ancient T-shirts to show for it. (This commemorative-T-shirt thing may prove embarrassing at a contra dance when one's partner notices a year on a shirt, does the math, and realizes this guy is wearing underwear older than she is.)

This fall I decided to pass up the T-shirt stand and contribute to the support of LEAF by buying some raffle tickets instead. The decision was a very lucky one...

Jay Lichty of Tryon, N.C., (http://lichtyguitars.com) built this one-of-a-kind ukulele and donated it to LEAF for the benefit raffle. He used all-recycled woods... a North Carolina mountain cabin's floor for the back and sides, a retired mahogany bedpost for the neck, and "sunken cedar" for the top.  Because of the instrument's North Carolina roots -- and the underwater cedar -- Doc Watson's "Deep River Blues" seemed an appropriate first tune to play. I gave it a try in the LEAF office when I showed up to claim the prize, and then played it again at home to make this rough little video.

Don't worry, I didn't think my singing would add anything to the ukulele demo. (Incidentally, this is my first experience with a "low-G" tenor ukulele, which seemed especially well suited to a slight adaptation of the guitar arrangement of this tune.) If you'd like to sing along, I found the "Deep River Blues" lyrics over at the Digital Tradition collection at the Mudcat Cafe, a great resource for folksong fans.

Jay himself recorded a few tunes with the uke and put them on his website. They give a much better indication of the range of this lovely instrument. They also may have been recorded with a much better microphone -- or the uke's built-in pickup, which I didn't even notice until I'd owned it for a few days. (Since that page of his was for the raffle -- which is now over -- I don't know how long he'll keep it around.)

I found out later he had posted photos of the uke under construction, and they are still there.

---

Unfortunately, all I had handy was my MacBook with its built-in camera and microphone, which I figured would be fine a test drive at the uploading process. YouTube didn't want to accept the original file, so I uploaded it directly with Blogger -- which may only have a "Flash" player for videos, making the clip invisible to iPads and other discerning devices. Since then, I've tried some file-conversion software, which appeared to solve YouTube's problem with accepting the original file. Using Blogger's "insert from YouTube" setting still produces a rather small display window on this page and still seems to only offer a Flash video player, but the quality of the video itself seems better than the original. I've linked the still image above to YouTube for a larger-format display.
For any Web production students curious about my video problems, I've included both versions below. After years of mostly using WordPress blogs, I clearly have to refresh my knowledge of the current version of Blogger! But playing the ukulele is much more fun. If your device won't play the video in this window, just follow this link to launch the video in YouTube itself: http://youtu.be/0L9PyUTHqlU

---

Earlier upload (Google/Blogger video player):

Yes, it's a ukulele -- and a banjo

My "Firefly" banjo-uke raises a few eyebrows around old-time Appalachian music sessions, so I thought I'd put some links here... And maybe a YouTube video of myself when I get around to it. (This is also my first attempt at posting to this old blogger blog from an iPad, so some editing and correction of  links and players for other folks' YouTube videos may be necessary.)

It has four nylon strings (like a uke) and a drum-head (like a banjo). It also tunes uke style, g-C-E-a, with the two outside strings being the highest pitches. The high "g" is the string closest to the thumb, which is also true of the five-string banjo. That coincidence has inspired me to experiment with playing in a "claw hammer" oldtime banjo style, as well as more traditional uke strumming and picking styles.

In addition to playing it in Radford, Blacksburg and Floyd, I've inflicted it on that old gang of mine in Connecticut in December, strumming along on sea chanteys and drinking songs in the pub:
Http://thejovialcrew.com/?page_id=1475

The Firefly is a modern design from a Massachusetts company called http://MagicFluke.com -- I bought mine from http://MimsUkes.com in Floyd, Va., so that I could try it first. I like it because it is incredibly light and, with an extra-long neck, can be adapted to play in more keys, using a capo for some tunes in the keys of A and D.
Here's "Redhaired Boy," usually played in A on fiddle, but sometimes sung as the Irish ditty "Little Beggarman" in other keys. I have experimented with it in both key of C and key of D fingerings on the banjo ukulele.

https://youtu.be/7tAytt4Mhn4

The first time I saw the banjo uke merging with oldtime tunes was 30-some years ago, in the hands of Jeff Claus of the Horseflies, providing a driving rhythm for the band's neo-primitive bug music. More recent example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaVFzdroXKg

 There's no Firefly-Horseflies connection, as far as I know, but stranger things have happened. TheFirefly's  lightness I mentioned is the result of MagicFluke's buying the "drum" shell and its synthetic head already molded or cemented together. There are no metal mounting brackets (originally needed to adjust the tension of  humidity-sensitive natural skin banjoheads) and no wood and metal resonator like some 1920s models. As a result I can head for a jam session carrying a guitar, a mandolin, and the Firefly without needing a cart or pack animal, or feeling like one. And it is so much fun that I often wind up leaving the guitar at home.

Curiously, the razzmatazz strumming style banjo-uke (a.k.a. banjolele) has quite a following in the U.K. (No U.K./uke pun intended) because of a 1930s-40s comedian, singer, actor and pop star named George Formby, who never quite caught on in the States. The George Formby Society (http://www.georgeformby.co.uk) keeps his legend alive and active over there (http://www.georgeformby.co.uk/news/morecambe/130214.html).

For a frighteningly modern development, explore the phenomenon called "chap-hop."

http://youtu.be/6t28COxEp2k

Defiantly soothing news

Teaching news writing, I've seen "defiantly" before as a typo for "definitely," but combining it with "soothing" might be ironic juxtaposition. I'm not 100 percent sure what's going on in the item below...

If there's any real threat of people calling a genre of sound-wallpaper "stepno music" (combining "techno" and "dubstep") I'll feel compelled to listen once in a while. The idea was raised in the "comment" thread on this Top 20 list:

Little White Earbuds -- LWE’s Top 20 Singles of 2008 (Part 1):

"If there was a running meme of the techno-dubstep hybrid in 2008, “Circling” was the first to organically complete the cycle. Appleblim and Peverelist created a track with both the sensual space of Berlin with all the tickling Bristol bass. Defiantly soothing, “Circling” is the perfect twist to the cartoonishly aggressive dubstep scene."

Thanks for the musical education... It's nice to have some new music in my ears on Christmas, much as I love Bing. (I don't think the "Berlin" mentioned above was Irving.)

As an admitted ukulele player with ethnomusicological tendencies, whose personal musical goal for a few years has been to successfully merge "I wish I could shimmy like my" Sister Kate with Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen," I have to admit I found "Circling" more fun to listen to than many of the 15 items ahead of it on Buds' top-20 list.

The touch of synth rainstick and rainforest sounds is soothing, in a defiant sort of way.

Feliz navidad and happy Chanukkah.

PS If you want one more new audio experience for the new year, a quick search for "ukulele" and "Hanukkah" found this.