Tag: eric weissberg

16 Bluegrass Songs for Summer Vacation

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s summer, our second in the “after times,” where road trips, national parks, and scenic byways are king. As you head off on your COVID-aware vacations this summer, don’t leave all the driving music to indie, easy listening, country & western, or rock ‘n’ roll. The chop of the mandolin, thump of the doghouse bass, and rapid-fire roll of the five-string banjo are just as suited to soundtrack your sunny forays. To prove that point, here are 16 bluegrass songs perfect for inclusion on your summer vacation playlists. (Listen to the full playlist on Spotify below.)

“Highway” – Claire Lynch

Bluegrass being an itinerant livelihood and a nomadic community, traveling songs are just as expected a feature as murder ballads, train tunes (a form of travel song unto themselves!), and moonshine running tales. This modern classic via Claire Lynch — written by Lynch and Irene Kelley — is a perfect example of the form, more ‘90s country offered by a string band than a traditional, four-on-the-F-style grassy track. It’s delightful — and perfectly winsome and longing when you find yourself listening while traveling down the highway.

“Handsome Molly” – Tim O’Brien

Our July 2021 Artist of the Month Tim O’Brien’s rendition of this bluegrass classic is a far cry from, say, a Flatt & Scruggs’ cut. O’Brien’s has a slight transatlantic bent — with a distinct island detour, perhaps through the sunny Caribbean. If you’ve found a craving to set your foot on a steamboat and sail the ocean ‘round deep inside your soul, this one’s for you.

“1952 Vincent Black Lightning” – Del McCoury Band

Another track with a transatlantic story, this ever-popular, most-requested number covered by the Del McCoury Band is a road trip staple — whether you get in or on your vehicle to hit the highway. It would be a sin to make a bluegrass summer vacation playlist and not include “1952 Vincent Black Lightning!”

“Val’s Cabin” – Laurie Lewis

A rare example of a bluegrass song actually about summer vacations, this Laurie Lewis original, “Val’s Cabin,” begins as a simple retelling of childhood memories — nostalgia being a common rhetorical device (and when attempted by many other writers, a well-worn trope) in bluegrass. But Lewis, a veteran through-hiker, wilderness excursioner, and backpacker as well as a Grammy-nominated bluegrass singer and songwriter, tinges the story with melancholy and the existential questions raised by the ever-worsening climate crisis. The song is as evocative as it is gorgeous; though the singer can’t find the way to “Val’s Cabin” any longer, every listener can.

“Paddy on the Turnpike” – Vassar Clements

If you ever happen to find yourself Crossing the Catskills on a summery jaunt, “Paddy on the Turnpike” must be in your listening rotation. Avoid the tolls, but still go for a ride on the turnpike with Vassar Clements’ wild, unpredictable, jaw-dropping, wonky fiddling. “Paddy” is a blank canvas for Clements and a study in bluegrass’ unending affinity for flat seven chords.

“Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler” – Tony Rice

A hit in nearly every jam circle that ever circled, “Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler” is almost as if “Gentle on My Mind” had been written by a much less kind or compassionate protagonist. Tony’s solo vocal stylings are as iconic as his six-string licks, nearly obliterating any memory of this song ever having been sung by anyone else. What’s more, the titular advice of the track still stands. Just don’t.

“Highway 40 Blues” – Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard Time

Because “Interstate 70 Blues” just doesn’t roll off the tongue. And that melodic hook should go down in history as one of the best country licks to ever lick! Cordle wrote one built for the long haul with “Highway 40 Blues.” It’ll keep you good company as you go wherever and back.

“Banjo Pickin’ Girl” – Annie Staninec

Is there any better reason to go around this world than being a banjo picker? There are never enough banjo pickin’ girls and this anthem, no matter how many times it’s picked up, studied, and retooled by another banjo pickin’ girl, always SLAPS. (Clawhammer pun intended.) Fiddler and multi-instrumentalist Annie Staninec, who’s traveled around the world making music quite a bit herself, gives an excellent old-time rendition of this favorite.

“A Crooked Road” – Darrell Scott

Darrell Scott turns a literary device pretty common in songwriting on its ear, with a tender eye for detail and emotion that he brings into all of his musicmaking. Life is, after all, about the journey — not the destination. Why not take the crooked, and thereby, the road less traveled? 

Plus, take this song as suggestion: The Crooked Road, Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail, is well worth a visit. Put this song on and take the Crooked Road.

“Up and Down the Mountain” – David Parmley & Continental Divide

Work life doesn’t suit you? Does “paradise” mean a fiddle and the open road? If so, “Up and Down the Mountain” is for you and your road trip playlist. Especially if you’re planning on trekking through the Rockies, Sierras, Ozarks, Applachians, or what-have-you. Turn off cruise control, watch for the runaway truck ramps, and go up and down those mountains! David Parmley & Continental Divide know something about geography and topography, after all…

“Roving Gambler” – The Country Gentlemen


Not sure why you’d be headed to Las Vegas during one of the hottest summers on record, but if you’ve got your sights set on a casino — wherever it may be — crank up “Roving Gambler” and hope your 2 a.m. slot machine binge or your evening “re-learning” blackjack ends more amiably than with gunfire. Speaking of which, perhaps “Blackjack” deserves a slot on this playlist…

“Travelin’ Prayer” – Dolly Parton

The kick-off of one of Dolly Parton’s masterpieces, her 1999 bluegrass album The Grass Is Blue, “Travelin’ Prayer” was actually written by Billy Joel. Yes, that Billy Joel. The original, from 1973’s Piano Man, featured banjo playing by Eric Weissberg and Fred Heilbrun. So of course the tune stands up to the bluegrass treatment and then some, between Stuart Duncan’s haunting fiddle cadenza to begin the track, the rip roarin’ tempo and train whistle harmonies, and the lonesome feeling of being away from your baby while he travels the world. We’re gonna assume Dolly’s blessed pen and ink added the lyric: “And keep him away from planes / cause my baby hates to fly!”

“Road to Columbus” – Kenny Baker

Growing up this writer frequented a bluegrass jam in Granville, Ohio, about 25 miles east of the state’s capital, Columbus. Like clockwork, every week as the jam wound down around noon on Wednesdays, Troy Herdman — a local bluegrass community stalwart, Doc Watson-style flatpicker, and mentor of many who lived in or around Columbus — would call this tune. Everyone would chuckle, and we’d play “Road to Columbus” as everyone, but especially Troy, hit the road to Columbus. 

Herdman passed away last week at the age of 91. I certainly wouldn’t be the musician I was today if it wasn’t for Troy, and I know quite a few others who would say the same. So no matter where I travel, I always keep “Road to Columbus” nearby. Especially when I’m headed home to Ohio.

Many pickers speculate over whether Kenny Baker and Bill Monroe were referencing Columbus, Ohio, or Columbus, Indiana. But, according to Roland White — who introduces the song with an anecdote from his time on the road with Monroe — it’s about Ohio. For this Ohioan, that’s confirmation enough!

“That’s How I Got to Memphis” – Tom T. Hall

His own recording of one of his most popular hits may sound more like straight up and down country than ‘grass, but even the most casual fan of Tom T. Hall knows that this Bluegrass Hall of Famer is bluegrass to his core. If you’re headed down I-40 from Nashville — or, really, towards Memphis from any direction, no matter how direct or circuitous, this song is a must-add for your road trip playlist.

“Where Rainbows Never Die” – The SteelDrivers

This song is about a decidedly different kind of journey, not often referred to as a “vacation,” but even so it’s a poignant, encouraging, and downright delicious song to background any journey. If you’re road weary — or life weary — “Where Rainbows Never Die” is a certified pick-me-up that doesn’t shy away from reality, like the grit and coarseness in Chris Stapleton’s lead vocal wrapping you in its warmth. There’s a comfort in life not being sugar-coated — and in knowing somewhere, west of where the sun sets, rainbows never die.

“Home Sweet Home” – Flatt & Scruggs

Home never feels so sweet as when you’ve just returned after a long, restful, relaxing vacation. So we’ll close our summer vacation playlist with Flatt & Scruggs’ rendition of this tune pulled directly from the American songbook, “Home Sweet Home.” We hope a banjo roll always greets you at your door, and if not, this playlist will at least cover that for you. Wherever you roam, there’s no place like home! And no music like bluegrass.

Editor’s Note: Check out our follow up playlist, Take the Journey: 17 Songs for a Sunny and Warm Summer Vacation

Bluegrass Memoirs: Thanks to Eric Weissberg

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

On the morning of March 24, 2020 I learned Eric Weissberg had passed away when a friend posted a long and detailed obit. I found several other substantial ones online — Rolling Stone, Variety, New York Times. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Weissberg’s family had a press release ready; he’d been in decline, suffering from dementia. A few days later Jim Rooney posted a very moving memoir focused on his long-time friend Weissberg in mid- and late years; it shed more light on this influential musician. 

Recently Bob Carlin finished a bio on Weissberg. When we spoke at IBMA’s business conference last fall he told me publishers weren’t interested in a book about a studio musician. Too bad, it’s a good story. In 1972 Weissberg won a Grammy for the banjo hit that propelled the growth of bluegrass festivals, “Dueling Banjos,” the theme from the movie Deliverance. 

I first heard Weissberg’s banjo playing in the fall of 1957. I was an 18-year old Oberlin College freshman who’d gotten into folk music as a high school student in Berkeley, California. This was my first time “back east.” I now had classmates from New York City. One of them, Mike Lipsky, had a new Folkways album, American Banjo Scruggs Style. The final band on the second side was by a friend of his from New York, Eric. 

Weissberg was 17 when he recorded for Folkways, backed by Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler. He picked a medley of “Jesse James” and Woody Guthrie’s “Hard Ain’t It Hard,” using Scruggs pegs on the latter. When Lipsky played it to me and my roommate Mayne Smith (fellow Californian and a fledgling banjo picker) he had to explain what Scruggs pegs were. 

Lipsky knew about this music because he was one of a group of New York teenage folk music fans, mainly from elite high schools — Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, Music and Art — who socialized together. They’d networked not only in school, but also at leftist summer camps where folk music, spearheaded by Pete Seeger, was an essential part of the experience. They called themselves “The Squadron” and they gathered regularly in Greenwich Village on Sunday afternoons to hear two members of their crowd, Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman, picking at the Washington Square folk music jams. Weissberg, a student of Pete Seeger, had been playing the banjo since the age of ten.

Lipsky told us Weissberg and Marshall’s fancy picking confounded Roger Sprung, an older banjoist generally thought to be the best Scruggs picker in New York. And he described their banjos — not long-neck, open-back Vegas like Pete Seeger played, but Gibsons! With resonators, too. And on the fingerboard, down toward the body of the banjo, a little block of mother-of-pearl with “Mastertone” written on it.

This weirdness was all new to me. I’d never heard of “Scruggs picking,” and it was only when I borrowed the LP and read its notes, written by Ralph Rinzler, that I learned this music was called “bluegrass.” 

The following March, at spring vacation, my roommate and I went to New York. I stayed with Mike Lipsky, on this, my first visit to The City. Mayne stayed with another classmate. Among our many adventures — we were rambunctious teen tourists — we went one night to a party for The Squadron in a posh upper East Side residence. 

This was a homecoming party. Attending were young women and men most of whom were like us, on spring vacation from their first year as college and university students at a variety of institutions. Lipsky and Karen, another Oberlin classmate who was part of the group, introduced us to their friends. We’d brought our instruments, leaving them in the anteroom and going up a small flight of stairs to the main floor of this elaborate place. Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman, both of whom were freshmen at the University of Wisconsin, did the same. 

Midway through the evening we were encouraged to get our instruments out and sing. Mayne had his banjo — an old Stewart with a resonator — and I, my guitar — a 1943 Martin 000-21. We went back downstairs. This was the nearest thing to a front porch or back room we could find. We did several pieces, and then Weissberg and Brickman came down and got out their banjos. Mayne had taken one or two lessons with Billy Faier, the virtuoso banjoist who’d arrived in the Bay Area from New York the previous August. Faier had introduced him to three-finger picking. Mayne chatted about Scruggs with Eric and Marshall. 

Then they played a banjo duet, a Scruggs tune, “Earl’s Breakdown,” in harmony, with each picking with the right hand on his own banjo while reaching around to fret the strings on the neck of the other’s banjo. This was the first time we’d ever seen anyone play the banjo Scruggs style, much less a fancy stage stunt like that! It was a very impressive tour-de-force. You can get a good sense of what the harmony sounded like from the version on their 1963 Elektra album, New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass (reissued in 1972 as Dueling Banjos from Deliverance) although they weren’t playing the fancy solo breaks in 1958.

Afterwards Weissberg told us that the best way to learn this music was to study Scruggs’ playing on one of his instrumental records like “Earl’s Breakdown” or “Flint Hill Special.” Mastering all those licks note-for-note would take you a long way towards being able to play like Earl.

Weissberg noticed that I was playing the guitar with just two picks on my fingers — thumb and index. He recommended that I add a pick on my middle finger, like he and Marshall used for the banjo. I followed that advice immediately, and the following year, when I began working seriously on banjo, I also took his advice about studying Scruggs closely.

Putting our instruments away, we went upstairs and joined the party. I conversed for a while with Eric. I told him I’d heard Billy Faier in Berkeley last summer, had been very impressed with his music, and was looking forward to his forthcoming Riverside album, The Art of the Five-String Banjo. Eric agreed, Faier is a great banjo player, and said he had collaborated with Billy and another banjo player, Dick Weissman, on an album due out this coming summer called Banjos, Banjos and More Banjos! 

That summer of 1958, Banjos, Banjos and More Banjos! arrived at Art Music on Telegraph in Berkeley where I hung out listening to new folk records. The album was on Judson, a bargain line label owned by Riverside’s Bill Grauer.

Grauer’s Riverside productions catered to the hip college kids of the fifties — a generation that grew up on hi-fi LPs. Riverside reissued historic prewar jazz and blues; released contemporary jazz and folk; and recorded sports car events. This major independent label ended abruptly in 1964 when Grauer, just 42, died. Their catalog is now with Concord Records, which has reissued some jazz recordings on CDs.

Riverside albums were well-produced, with glossy full-color cover art. Back covers — liners — had a standard format: bold head at the top with album title and artist names. Below it, three dense columns giving the playlist along with information about the music and musicians. Lots to read while listening!

Faier’s The Art of the Five-String Banjo liner held a full column endorsement by Pete Seeger, slightly longer notes by producer Goldstein, and Faier’s bio. In contrast the liner of Banjos, Banjos and More Banjos had its playlist followed by three columns of folklorist John Greenway’s flowery history of the instrument, and brief bios for the three banjoists. I bought the album (later reissued on Grauer’s Washington label with new cover and title: Five-String Jamboree: A Treasury of Banjo Music) because Eric Weissberg was playing Scruggs-style banjo on it.

At the bottom of the center column on the liners for both albums was the standard data of the time: 

A HIGH FIDELITY Recording (Audio Compensation; RIAA Curve). Produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein. Cover by Paul Weller (photography) and Paul Bacon (design). Engineer: Mel Kaiser (Cue Recordings). New York: May, 1957.

 Now I look back at the album, listen to it for the first time in years. When I last heard of Faier, about ten years ago, he was busking in Albuquerque. He died in Alpine, Texas in 2016. We’d seen each other and talked at the Tennessee Banjo Institute in November 1990, recalling the summer of 1958 when I guested on his KPFA show and worked as his backup guitarist at an SF coffee house. Dick Weissman, now 85, had distinguished careers: first as a performer, then as teacher and author. He published his memoir, The Music Never Stops: A Journey Into the Music of the Unknown, The Forgotten, The Rich & Famous, the same year Faier died.

These guys must have been in the Cue Recordings studio more than once in May, 1957. Their recordings were made with a single-track tape recorder; no overdubs. Faier made his solo album at Cue with Frank Hamilton playing guitar, and there’s one track on Banjos with that pairing — probably an outtake from The Art. Most of the other guitar on this album is by Dick Rosmini, then considered the hot, young, go-to guitar accompanist.

Weissberg is heard playing Scruggs-style banjo on five tracks, and singing tenor harmony in duets on three of those. One was an old spiritual, “You Can Dig My Grave,” with Faier. With Weissman, Eric harmonized on the old folksong “Chilly Winds.” My favorite was another spiritual, “Glory Glory.” This vocal duet with Rosmini featured great backup guitar and seven banjo breaks by Eric, each a new variation. I played that track a lot for my friends that summer!

He also did a reprise of his 1956 Folkways track, focusing on “Hard Ain’t It Hard” complete with Scruggs pegs, and a cool version of “900 Miles” in G minor tuning. 

Weissberg’s music spoke to me as a young folk fan just getting into bluegrass. He’d mastered the instrument in this new style, and learned the vocal style that went with it. Here he was applying it to music that I knew — Woody Guthrie songs, a tune the Weavers had sung on their famous Carnegie Hall concert album, and familiar Black spirituals. 

The door to bluegrass was newly opened. Eric Weissberg stood just inside, beckoning in. Come on, it’s not that hard, it’ll be fun.

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, and Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg
Photo of Banjos, Banjos, and More Banjos: Neil V. Rosenberg

Bluegrass Memoirs: New Twists & Scruggs Pegs Take Off

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In December 1953, Decca released “Plunkin’ Rag” by the Shenandoah Valley Boys. It was the first recording by a banjoist other than Earl Scruggs to use Scruggs pegs: Hubert Davis. 

Born in Shelby, North Carolina, in 1932, Davis grew up in a musical family. He was already playing the banjo when, at the age of ten, his older brother, fiddler Pee Wee, brought Earl Scruggs, a co-worker from Lilly Mills, into the family home for some music. Earl had just moved to town to work at the factory. He was boarding with another Lilly Mills employee, Grady Wilkie. In Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American Classic author Thomas Goldsmith tells how Earl’s mother prevailed on her friend Wilkie to help Earl get a job at the mill. Wilkie, a guitarist, and Earl stowed their instruments in the car when they drove to work. In a 1977 interview, Hubert Davis told Bruce Nemerov that Pee Wee, Grady, and Earl: 

…worked on the second shift. They would catch up about supper time and they’d run out to the car and get their music out and run in to the packing house. They’d play for thirty minutes or an hour and go back to work. Swaller their food whole to get more time for pickin’. And I was there, son, at suppertime every evening. I was sitting there against the wall listenin’. 

By the time Hubert was fourteen (1946), he was studying Earl’s playing with Monroe on the Opry. Occasionally Earl came home, visited the Davises, and gave Hubert a banjo tutorial: “he’d show me the parts I didn’t have right.” 

At fifteen Hubert began playing professionally. By 1951 he was working for Virginian Jim Eanes. In 1948 Eanes had been an original member of Flatt & Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys, but was quickly hired away by Monroe. Bluegrass historian Jack Tottle tells what happened after Eanes joined Bill at the Opry: 

His full baritone-range voice turned out to be incompatible with Monroe’s mountain tenor for duet singing. To Jim’s frustration, no matter how high he sang, it was still too low for Monroe’s high vocal harmony. 

Eanes subsequently developed a career as a mellow country singer with a bluegrass band, recording for a small North Carolina label, Blue Ridge. Soon after Hubert joined him Jim had a hit with “Missing in Action,” a Korean war-themed country song. Ernest Tubb’s major-label cover on Decca was also a hit, giving Jim an opportunity to sign with Decca. 

Eanes began recording in Nashville in 1952 with producers Paul Cohen and Owen Bradley. In October 1953, after several country-sound sessions using studio musicians, Eanes returned to record with two members of his bluegrass band, the Shenandoah Valley Boys: Hubert Davis and Bobby Hicks. 

They made two banjo instrumentals: “Ridin’ the Waves” and “Plunkin’ Rag.” These were issued on a 78, credited not to Eanes but simply to The Shenandoah Valley Boys. In “Plunkin’ Rag” Davis used both Scruggs pegs to create the melody. Chet Atkins, playing backup guitar, is heard playing responsorial licks to the melody in its peg sections, and Bobby Hicks — this was his first recording session — contributes fiddle breaks. 

“Plunkin’ Rag” was released in December. By that time Davis had left Eanes, who then advertised over the air for a banjo player. A lanky teenager named Allen Shelton got the job. At the start, Eanes said, “he could only play one tune, but he would play all the time.” An enthusiastic learner, Shelton was a fan of Davis: “he was second to Scruggs as I ever heard it.” 

When the time came for Eanes’ next Decca session in Nashville, on March 2, 1954, Davis had rejoined the band. At this point, probably in February, as Davis recalled, he and Shelton met. Both later spoke of sitting up all night in a hotel room working on “some licks Scruggs was playing.” 

It’s certain that one of the two banjos in that hotel room had Scruggs pegs. Some of the licks they were working on must have involved the pegs, for Davis came to Eanes’ session with two instrumentals that used them: “Cotton Picker’s Stomp” and “There’s No Place Like Home.” 

“There’s No Place Like Home” was the title Decca gave to Davis’s version of “Home Sweet Home.” As with “Plunkin’ Rag,” Davis used the pegs to play the melody. But this was not a new composition, but a very old song, dating back to 1823. The novelty here, its hook, was the idea of using Scruggs pegs to play a familiar melody.

A few months later another banjo picker made a recording using Scruggs pegs. Haskel McCormick was the 16-year-old banjo picker on “Banjo Twist” by the McCormick brothers of Westmoreland, Tennessee. The track was on their first single, released in August 1954 by Hickory Records, Roy Acuff’s new Nashville label. McCormick, who would go on fill in for the hospitalized Earl with Flatt and the Foggy Mountain Boys a few times in 1956, incorporated portions of the hooks from both of Scruggs’ hits, in this, the first of three pieces he recorded that used the pegs. Here’s a brief bio of McCormick by NCTV, which opens with “Banjo Twist:”

Columbia recognized the popularity of Scruggs’ instrumentals that fall by reissuing four of them, including all three Scruggs peg-hook tunes, in their “Hall of Fame” series. While young banjo pickers like McCormick were writing new tunes with his pegs, Earl now took another direction, using one of them in his breaks for Lester’s song, “Till the End of the World Rolls Around.” Columbia released it in December 1954. 

By then Allen Shelton, now in the Raleigh-based band of Hack Johnson and his Tennesseans, had elaborated on the idea of playing “Home Sweet Home” with Scruggs pegs. Early in 1955 Shelton recorded a version of “Home Sweet Home” with Johnson that included a vocal trio on the chorus. Their Colonial single was a regional hit. 

This prompted Reno & Smiley, who recorded for King (a widely distributed independent label) to make a cover. Reno, traveling through North Carolina, heard the Johnson single and called King owner Syd Nathan to tell him about it. Nathan ordered him to get their band into the studio right away and record it. He couldn’t get in touch with his band members… 

…so I went to the studio in Charlotte and cut it by myself. I dubbed in three vocal parts and banjo, guitar, and bass. It took me most of the night and I don’t want to cut any more like that! 

The recording was a bigger hit than Johnson’s, and helped Reno & Smiley, one of the most influential early bluegrass bands — but until that point solely a recording act — launch their touring career.

Although Hubert Davis was first to record “Home Sweet Home” (as “There’s No Place Like Home”) with the pegs, it and the other instrumental he recorded with Jim Eanes didn’t get released until June 1955, after the Reno & Smiley version. By then, Shelton and Johnson had released “Swanee River,” another old familiar song with the same juxtaposition of pegs and vocal trio. Another similar piece, “Old Kentucky Home,” appeared soon after under a new band name. Hack Johnson was gone; now, with the same sound on the same label, they were The Farmhands. 

In the fall of 1955, Earl Scruggs recorded his fourth and last instrumental with a peg hook. In it he reset his peg for the second-string so that it moved up to C from B. His hook riff went through two chords instead of one. “Randy Lynn Rag,” celebrating the birth of his son, was released in February 1956. 

By now the idea of using the pegs to play old familiar pieces had caught on. Early in 1956 Sonny Osborne recorded four tunes using the pegs for Gateway, the Cincinnati label he’d been with since 1952: “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane,” “Jesse James,” “Swanee River,” and “Auld Lang Syne.” Accompanying him in the studio were Red Allen, guitar; Bobby Osborne, mandolin and fiddle; Art Stamper, fiddle; and Les Bodine, bass. These were the last recordings made under Sonny’s name, done just a few months before the first MGM sessions by the Osborne Brothers and Red Allen.

In May Columbia released Flatt & Scruggs’ new gospel single. Earl used the pegs to play his part of the melody in the breaks to the quartet “Joy Bells.” 

It was getting radio play that summer when a letter came to Mike Seeger from Moe Asch, owner of New York’s Folkways Records, asking him “to produce an LP of Scruggs-style banjo playing.” Seeger was certain his older half-brother, Folkways star and folk banjo guru Pete Seeger, “was the reason that Moe wrote me.” 

Living in the Washington-Baltimore area, Mike Seeger had been taping bluegrass shows at local country music parks. “Most bluegrass players were establishing new songs and sounds and so didn’t record the old-time tunes that they played on shows,” he said. Seeger wanted to demonstrate “the connection of the new style to the older music” so he focused on the old-time repertoire for the album. 

He started recording that fall of 1956, with the help of local bluegrass musician and collector Pete Kuykendall. They began after a Monroe show at New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, where Blue Grass Boy Joe Stuart lingered backstage to play his banjo setting of an old-time fiddle tune for Seeger’s portable tape recorder. Subsequently, eight other DC region banjoists, most of them young, were recorded. A trip south captured pioneers from western North Carolina, including Earl’s older brother Junie. Earl was not on the album. Finally, one picker from New York City’s Washington Square bluegrass scene was recorded. 

Seeger’s friend Ralph Rinzler, living in New York at the time, wrote the album notes. Here for the first time the word “bluegrass” was used in print to describe and explain the music. American Banjo Three-Finger and Scruggs Style, the first bluegrass LP, had a total of 31 tracks by fifteen banjoists. Scruggs pegs are heard on two cuts. 

On side B, band 3, Smiley Hobbs, a North Carolinian virtuoso living in northern Virginia, used the pegs to play the melody of the old folksong “Rosewood Casket” in a vocal-instrumental combination similar to Shelton’s.

The very last track on side B featured the Washington Square picker, seventeen-year-old New Yorker Eric Weissberg. Backed by Seeger on guitar and Rinzler on mandolin, he played a two-song medley, combining the tunes of the traditional ballad “Jesse James” and folk revival star Woody Guthrie’s popular composition “Hard Ain’t It Hard.” He used the pegs on the latter piece, which the Weavers, the most popular folk revival group at the time, had recently popularized. Weissberg’s mix of traditional and folk revival repertoire was a harbinger. 

In the next Bluegrass Memoir, more on Eric Weissberg.

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, and Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg

Bluegrass Memoirs: Mayne Smith & Alice Gerrard

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Tom Power’s recent Toy Heart episode with Alice Gerrard, whom I first knew as Alice Foster, reminded me of a 1959 visit several of us Oberlin College folkies made to Antioch College. In 2009, doing research on my early bluegrass experiences, I sent my friend Mayne Smith an email asking about his experiences when he met Alice and her late husband Jeremy Foster during that visit. 

Mayne and I are the same age and have known each other since 1953. We got into folk music as teens in Berkeley, California, and discovered bluegrass together from 1957 to 1959 while in Oberlin, Ohio. We first heard it on records and radio, and at this time had seen it live only once, when we met banjoists Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman at a 1958 spring vacation homecoming party in New York City. We had begun trying to play bluegrass with a circle of Oberlin classmates, folk music enthusiasts learning new music and working on new instruments. 

In the introduction to my memoir, Bluegrass Generation, I mention our trips to Antioch as undergrads, where we met the Fosters. 

Antioch was, like Oberlin, a liberal arts college that drew students from all over the country and beyond. At the time, its co-op system, which placed students in jobs every second semester or so, was thought to be radical. Unlike Oberlin, which still drew on a pious abolitionist point of view about many things, it tended to be a more socially relaxed place. A Fun Place to Party. 

Mayne Smith, Kaz Inaba, and Neil Rosenberg after a morning of jamming at the Hotel New Hankyu in Osaka, Japan. April 31, 1991.

Mayne was the first of our Oberlin bluegrass circle to meet the Fosters during one of these trips. This music was still a new and distant thing to us; we didn’t own tape recorders. In my email I asked Mayne: 

What memories do you have of visiting Antioch and meeting Alice and Jeremy? I went there several times and recall you being there, but don’t have any documents like tapes or photos that include you. Any recollections, however hazy, would be welcome. I remember that you had some kind of document from the Fosters giving you honorary membership in [their band] the Green County Stump Jumpers — do you still have that, was it dated? 

Mayne answered the next day: 

Neil, I have (for me) unusually vivid memories of our first visit to Antioch and hanging out at the Fosters’ place because it was there that I contracted the Stanley Brothers virus. I think it must have been in the spring of 1959 because I had already heard Flatt & Scruggs and understood that this was called bluegrass music. 

But first, Jeremy’s hand-drawn certificate (on a 4×6 card) is undated, but it reads: 

I also vaguely remember showing Marge [Ostrow] (later married to Mike Seeger for a while) how I played Carter Family style guitar. I think I got it from Dave Fredrickson — using the thumb to pick melody, then the index finger brushing down/up. I heard later that Mike was impressed by the fact that Marge had adopted this approach, and asked her where she learned it. 

But about the Stanley Brothers. I recall a thinly carpeted living room with expansive white bookshelves along the wall opposite the windows. At some point, in an afternoon I think, Jeremy put on a tape of the Stanley Brothers in live performance — my gut tells me it was one of the ones Mike Seeger had recorded at New River Ranch in like 1957. As soon as I heard that totally live, undoctored sound I was captivated, and I believe I sat and lay on that hard floor listening to live Stanley Brothers shows (several sets, at least) for hours. My mind was blown. Knowing it was totally live and without studio gimmicks and buried background effects, it came home to me how the fluctuating balance of instruments and voices was accomplished by movement in relation to the microphone and each other, how at times there were lovely breathing spaces in the sound while people shifted from instrumental breaks to solo vocals to harmony vocals. How nobody was using a lot of physical effort to project the sound, yet it penetrated, flowed, darted ahead, waxed and waned like the mating dance of a single complex organism — and how comfortable and familiar the musicians were with what they were singing and playing. 

I was learning not only about how bluegrass fits together, but also about what a band can be like when it’s been playing constantly together, day in and day out, for weeks — for years. 

I don’t believe I’ve ever had a more intense listening and learning experience, nor one that had such a profound effect on my life. 

I should also mention that this was partly possible because I could tell that [Jeremy] and Alice understood what I was going through and supported me by staying out of the way. I felt toward them the way a bridegroom feels about the best man and maid of honor: I could give myself over to the intensity of the music in a nurturing environment. (In retrospect, it was kind of like having a trusted support team when you first get stoned on something very strong.) 

I will always be grateful to them both. 

If you were around when this happened, I don’t remember it. I just blanked on everything else but those sounds. 

I wasn’t at the Fosters when this happened, which was not in the spring of 1959 as Mayne recalled, but a few months earlier, during the January break between semesters. While he visited them, I was off jamming with Guy Carawan, who’d given a concert at Antioch that weekend. I didn’t meet Alice and Jeremy until they brought the Green County Stump Jumpers to an Oberlin Hootenanny a year later. 

In May 1959, our old Berkeley folk scene friend Sandy Paton (co-founder of Folk Legacy records) was the headliner at the annual Oberlin Folk Festival. By then our circle had become The Lorain County String Band. Sandy heard our festival set and said he knew a British folk record company producer who was looking for American bluegrass and old-timey. He suggested we make a demo he could send to his friend. We cut it at the student radio station, but it was never sent. 

That summer, back home in Berkeley, we started The Redwood Canyon Ramblers, Northern California’s first bluegrass band. The story of that band, and of Mayne’s subsequent career as a singer/songwriter and steel guitarist with continuing excursions into bluegrass, is told well at Mayne’s website.

But it does not include an important detail — his groundbreaking work as a scholar. His Master’s Thesis, “Bluegrass Music and Musicians” (Indiana U., 1964) and the article he developed from it, “An Introduction to Bluegrass” (Journal of American Folklore, 1965) opened the door to the serious study of this music. His transcendent aural immersion at the Fosters was the seed that gave him the vision to accomplish this work. I and the many who have followed are indebted to Mayne Smith for blazing the trail.

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, and Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg
Photo of Mayne Smith, Kaz Inaba, and Neil Rosenberg: Ed Neff

Eight Great Cuts of “Eighth of January”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s one of bluegrass and old-time’s favorite days of the year! The “Eighth of January” can be heard from every jam, every folk club, every radio tuned to the bluegrass airwaves — well, it ought to be like that.

To do our part, we’ve collected eight great versions of “Eighth of January,” that is, “The Eighth of January,” or “Jackson’s Victory,” or “Gulf of Mexico” to mark this auspicious day. At the end, we hope you’ve found a new lick to add to your own versions of the tune and we hope “eighth” doesn’t look like a word to you anymore, too!

Tui

Let’s start with a decidedly old-time take from fiddle/banjo duo Tui, AKA Libby Weitnauer and Jake Blount. Here’s hoping you make a stank face when they ever-so-slightly pass over the b7 — if you recall your last music theory course, see also: “the subtonic” — in the B part. (If the parts have been counted wrong, this writer begs your forgiveness.) The frailing rakes by Blount on the banjo, the pair’s playful deviations from each other, only to return, totally enmeshed a moment later… it’s delicious.

Charlie Walden

The old-time fiddler of Missouri, if Charlie Walden doesn’t come up in the first round of results when you search the internet for “Eighth of January” something is very wrong. His command of raw, timeless (and seemingly effortless) fiddling stems from a wealth of talent combined with his insatiable appetite for tunes — he’s collected countless melodies, stories, and songs from fiddlers all across his home state.

Tony Rice

An old-time fiddle tune fully assimilated into the bluegrass canon? This right here is how. That’s Darol Anger and David Grisman on the tasty twin parts, Todd Phillips on bass, and the one and only Tony Rice holding it down and shredding it up all at once. Every time they slightly push, syncopating the tail-end of a random melodic phrase here and there, a shiver should go down your spine.

Jeremy Stephens

No one alive plays Don Reno-style banjo better than Jeremy Stephens. Full stop. Now, if you’ve already hit play and have listened through to his first solo, you should know this: He recorded Scarlet Banjo at the ripe old age of 16. You know him now thanks to his quintessential sound with High Fidelity, but Stephens has been burning a torch for unencumbered, fully-realized traditional bluegrass for a long time. And it’s always been this good!

Scotty Stoneman with the Kentucky Colonels

The Kentucky Colonels were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2019 and though Stoneman was not an original member, he left an indelible mark on the band’s legacy, which manifests chiefly through his “hot” fiddling on the band’s essential live recordings. Though fans may be most familiar with hearing the Colonels hold on for dear life in the wake of his bow at truly incomparable tempos, Stoneman is relatively subdued in his captivating improvisations over “Eighth of January.”

Eric Weissberg

Deliverance reverberates throughout the ages for all of the wrong reasons. If you forgot this was on the original soundtrack to the infamous film, we don’t blame you. That’s why we’re here to remind. Weissberg’s banjo playing — especially his fantastic melodic approach, heard here — certainly deserves more recognition than simply being regarded as the originator of “Dueling Banjos” in its modern form.

Johnny Cash, “The Battle Of New Orleans”

We may have neglected to mention earlier that this tune is named “Eighth of January,” commemorating the day of “Jackson’s Victory,” because (cruel, genocidal) President Jackson won “The Battle of New Orleans” that very day in 1815. Yes, this tune has a lot of titles — and lyrics, to boot! Here’s the Man in Black lending the dusky patina of his baritone to our song du jour.

Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves

This particular variation on “Eighth of January” was found in recordings of African American musicians Nathan Frazier and Frank Patterson, who were first recorded in Nashville in the 1940s, so you’ll notice de Groot and Hargreaves stray from the melodic phenotype of the others on this list. It’s a gentle reminder that the way these tunes travel — from picker to picker, across generations, across counties and countries — is just as important to the history of string band music as the tunes themselves. Just about a year ago (hmm, how is that so easy to remember?) we featured this track in an edition of Tunesday Tuesday, solidifying this BGS tradition.

Photo of Tatiana Hargreaves (L) and Allison de Groot: Louise Bichan