Clarence Tross plays “Hound Chase”, also known as “Fox Chase”, “Old Rattler Run the Fox”, “The Fox and the Hounds”, or simply “The Hounds”, among various other names for Pete Hoover, Mike Seeger, and Marj Seeger on March 12th, 1960 in Durgon, West Virginia on the front porch of Tross’ neighbors house. “Fox Chase” can be traced back to traditional Irish and Scottish piping tunes about Fox Hunting, one of which is known as “The Fox Chase”.
Lewis “Big Sweet” Hairston (1929-?) performs his rendition of the African American folk ballad “John Henry”.
The story of John Henry is also told in the form of a legend, and generally follows the premise that John Henry was a steel driver (During the days of railway development and construction through out the United States), and that, at some point during his career, he is challenged by a steam-powered drilling machine which threatened to replace the work of steel drivers like Henry and his coworkers.
Amythyst Kiah was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States. Her father (who is also her tour manager) sang and played percussion in a band in the 1970s. Her mother sang in the church growing up. She attended a creative arts high school and taught herself to play guitar. When she was 17 her mother committed suicide, and singing at her funeral was Kiah's third public performance.
Kiah is a graduate of East Tennessee State University, where she completed the Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies program and joined the school's marquee old-time band.
Introduction to Early Banjo History: a survey of the gourd banjo in early American folk culture
by Clifton Hicks
Banjo maker Jim Hartel shows us old banjos, derived from instruments made by African slaves, plays the minstrel tune "Jim Along Josie," and tells about turn-of-the-century banjo models and playing styles.
Their instruments are discarded gas cans, animals hides and whatever else they can scavenge to produce a tune. But they do make music.
It was from the late 1970s that young boys with homemade banjos were increasingly seen at street corners, on country roads and around towns in Malawi. They began to not only to construct banjos but also guitars, percussive devices as well as a huge bass banjo/guitar, usually with a single string, played with stick or a bottle as a slider.
American traditional music exponent Hubby Jenkins performs a live-streamed concert and joins us for a discussion. Cosponsored by the DePauw Performing Arts Series and the opening event in DePauw's "The Cultural Legacies of the Great Migration Symposium."
In The Banjo: America’s African Instrument (Harvard Univ. Press, 2016), Laurent Dubois weaves a narrative of how this instrument was created by enslaved Africans in the midst of bondage in the Caribbean and Americas. He documents its journey from 17th- and 18th-century plantations to 19th-century minstrel shows to the bluegrass of Appalachia to the folk revival of the mid-20th century. In the process, Dubois documents how the banjo came to symbolize community, slavery, resistance, and ultimately America itself. A historian of the Caribbean and a banjo player himself, Dubois relied on the work of academic historians as well as insights from musicians, collectors, and banjo makers to tell this story.