Jimmie Strothers was a blind banjo and guitar player from Virginia who recorded 15 tracks for Alan Lomax and Harold Spivacke in 1936. Biographical details are sketchy, but Strothers was apparently a medicine show entertainer for a time before going to work in the mines, where an explosion took his eyesight, forcing him to earn a living as a street singer.
John "Uncle" Homer Walker was born in 1904 in Summers County, VA, although he lived most of his life in Glen Lyn, VA (Giles County). A fine clawhammer banjo player in the archaic black Appalachian tradition, Walker was the subject of a short documentary film, Banjo Man, produced in 1977 by Seattle filmmaker Joe Vinikow and narrated by Taj Mahal. Walker also appeared in another documentary film, 1980's Morris Family Old Time Music Festival. Reported to have been playing banjo since he was seven or eight years old, Walker died on January 4, 1980, in Princeton, WV.
The first video was of Carl Johnson and Jim Lloyd performing at the Black Banjo and Fiddle Gathering at Appalachian State University in Boone NC on March 28, 2012. Black Banjo and Fiddle Gathering bring musician together to share the mix of music from Appalachia.
Appalachian Journey is one of five films made from footage that Alan Lomax shot between 1978 and 1985 for the PBS American Patchwork series (1991). It offers songs, dances, stories, and religious rituals of the Southern Appalachians. Preachers, singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers, moonshiners, cloggers, and square dancers recount the good times and the hard times of rural life there.
The Carolina Chocolate Drops from Greensboro, North Carolina
The Ebony Hillbillies from New York City
Curtis Wright - Cruise2Jam Bluegrass/Gospel History Workshop - Carnival Inspiration 2013
Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton (born January 26, 1989) is an American musician from Los Angeles. A vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Paxton's style draws from blues and jazz music before World War II and was influenced by Fats Waller and "Blind" Lemon Jefferson. According to Will Friedwald in The Wall Street Journal, Paxton is "virtually the only music-maker of his generation — playing guitar, banjo, piano and violin, among other implements — to fully assimilate the blues idiom of the 1920s and '30s, the blues of Bessie Smith and Lonnie Johnson."
Highlights from Otis Taylor's ("...one of the most innovative, thought-provoking blues artists to emerge in the last 20 years." Billboard) upcoming album, Recapturing the Banjo (Feb '08) featuring Guy Davis, Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Otis Taylor, and Don Vappie. www.telarc.com
Directed by Marc Fields. Narrated by Steve Martin, The Banjo Project: The Story of Americas Instrument is a cross-media cultural odyssey: a major television documentary, a live stage/multi-media performance with Tony Trischka, and a website that chronicle the journey of Americas quintessential instrument—the banjo—from its African roots to the 21st century.