Happy Thanksgiving

I'm off to Ithaca, NY today to spend a few days with family for Thanksgiving.

Hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday. I think Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. Being with family, eating too much, and being appreciative for all we have: what's not to like?

I was hoping to have the "Young Fogies" set up before I left but I have just been too busy. So hopefully I'll finish it up on Sunday. I do have a lot of great new CDs ripped & ready to go.

In the meantime, I have thrown up a "kitchen sink" list that's a pretty wide collection of stuff without much in the way of theme. So give a listen & have yourselves a happy holiday!

John

New Playlist Coming Soon...

Sorry for the lack of updates, folks. I've been really busy & have spent a lot of time over the last few months working on the election. Without getting too far into politics, I'll just say I'm pretty devastated by the outcome.

But what better way to drown my sorrows than in the deep, wide river of old-time music?

Look for a new playlist soon. I think the theme will be, to borrow a phrase from Ray Alden's CDs, "Young Fogies." Should be some good stuff.

Thanks for listening...

Got my fingers crossed...

We've had some technical difficulties over the past few days, with one of the servers that relays my Shoutcast streams. I've moved onto a new server, and everything seems to be OK now.

Thanks for your patience...

New playlist is up

I put up a new playlist last night, focusing on rags & blues. What do these words mean in an old-time context? I'm not even sure how to define it, except that you know it when you hear it. The beat is swing-ier, you'll hear lots of I-VI-II-V changes, and there's more of a noticable African-American influence evident. I've also included a few blues proper, including some from the great new Mississippi John Hurt reissue, many of which I've juxtaposed with other similar tunes to try to draw out connections between the blues & old-time traditions.

In a sense, these playlists are my attempt to learn more about this music. (I listen to Sugar in the Gourd too.) When I put several versions of "Lost Indian" back-to-back it helps me figure out which versions are different and how others may be related. I've often tried to figure out why certain tunes have "rag" or "blues" in the title. After listening to this playlist for awhile, I hope to have a better idea, and hopefully you will too.

There are also some tunes that have nothing to do with "rags and blues" -- just things that were new to my collection or that I thought were worth playing for one reason or another. As always, this initial playlist is a work in progress, and I plan on adding to it and moving things around over the next few days. If there's anything you'd especially like to hear, just let me know.

thanks,

John

Thank you, whoever you are!

On Saturday, the mailman brought a wonderful, totally unexpected, surprise: a very generous contribution, in cash, accompanied by a kind letter -- but with no name or return address.

The individual suggested that I use the donation to offset my costs in running this site, to buy some more CDs, or to buy my wife a nice bottle of wine when we go out to dinner. As much as my wife likes the third choice, I think I'll take her out to dinner & buy a nice bottle of wine from my own funds, and funnel this donation back into the station. And how can I resist a few new CDs?

So I just picked up Mississippi John Hurt's D.C. Blues -- The Library Of Congress Recordings, Vol. 1, which is really wonderful and highly recommended. It will likely form a cornerstone of the new playlist I am now working on. I have ordered a few other discs as well: one from Roger Cooper, one from Snake Chapman, a Roane County Ramblers reissue, and a collection of Kentucky Old Time Banjo. I look forward to hearing these, and you should too.

While the costs of running this site are not overly burdensome, they do add up. Donations like these are totally surprising, mind-blowing, and very kind. They also serve as a nice reminder that people appreciate what I am doing.

I wish I knew who to thank but I guess you want to remain anonymous. So whoever you are -- thank you!

John

What do you want to hear?

I'm hoping to get a new playlist going in the next few days.

Aside from the current Ed Haley playlist, I've recently had shows focusing on banjo, on West Virginia & Kentucky tunes, and several with less defined themes. I'm thinking the next playlist will feature "rags and blues" (in the old-time sense) -- but I thought I'd throw it out to the listeners -- what do you want to hear?

Other than the "rags and blues" idea, I've thought of doing a show focusing on balladry, or on African-American old-time musicians, or gospel-themed stuff, or I can do mostly "old stuff" from 78s, mostly current stuff -- you get the idea. So post a comment here (see link at the end of this post) or let me know via email -- what do you want to hear?

thanks,

John

Ed Haley

Mac Benford just sent me a wonderful new CD of Ed Haley tunes played on clawhammer banjo. A day earlier, I had received a great new CD from Rhys Jones, Jeff Miller, and Jim Nelson, which also features exciting renditions of a few Haley tunes. So I figured it's time for an Ed Haley tribute playlist.

This new playlist features a lot of Haley's recordings (warning: some are of very poor sound quality -- if you find these too hard to listen to, just let me know), as well as tracks from the above two albums, John Hartford's two Haley tribute albums, and other versions of tunes Haley played from simpatico artists (not necessarily the Haley versions, but interesting as points of comparison).

I'm still monkeying with the track order, so what's playing right now isn't quite final, but please give a listen and let me know what you think. (You can use the "comments" link below if you'd like to post a public comment.)

Best wishes,

John

Tune in, turn on, drop thumb

I'm currently running a playlist featuring mostly banjo players and tunes with prominent banjo. Plenty of fiddles and guitars thrown in for good measure, but the focus is on banjos.

Enjoy!

John

New news format

In the past, I was updating this news page with some regularity, in particular when I put up a new playlist. Now that I have moved from Live365 to a Shoutcast stream, I update the playlist much more frequently (I can update it on my home PC rather than having to do time-consuming uploads to a server).

One result is that with more frequent incremental updates, I haven't taken the time to post notices to the news page. To make this process less time-consuming for me, rather than editing & uploading new html files by hand, I am using Blogger.com to post updates online.

This shouldn't look any different to you -- it just makes the process quicker & easier for me, so I will hopefully be posting news updates more often.

See the link at the lower-left to read older SITG "News" postings.

Best wishes,

John