New Old-Time Discussion Forum

Just for fun, I have added an old-time music discussion forum to my website at sugarinthegourd.com. You can get there by clicking on "Forum" in the menu at left (well, duh) or going to: http://forum.sugarinthegourd.com.

There's not much there yet, but maybe it'll be something folks find useful...

Season's greetings, etc.

John

Great Bumper Sticker

I'm going to have to get one of these for my banjo case. Order yours here.

My 15 Minutes

I was interviewed yesterday by our local CBS affiliate, KYW-3, for a piece they are doing on the Sony DRM fiasco. I am told the piece will air tonight on the 11:00 news.

The producer seems to have really done her homework on this, so I'm hoping it will be a good piece. While the online world has been abuzz over this issue for the past several weeks I haven't seen much coverage in the print or TV media.

John

Twilight Zone

OK, this is weird.

I knew there was a 1942 novel by Evelyn Hanna called Sugar in the Gourd, but I had no idea that the title on the cover would look so much like my logo:

 

Very weird.

John

Interesting article on contemporary Black string bands

The Independent Weekly: To catch the music

Picture this: Three young black men, two on banjo and one on fiddle, are playing music at a square dance in Orange County. The music is driving and raw and at the same time melodic, joyful and fervent, inspiring the mix of dancers on the floor, black and white.

"Frolics" was the term for these gatherings, according to Odell Thompson, one of the banjo players in the above scene. The young man on fiddle is Odell's cousin, Joe Thompson. The other banjo player is Joe's brother, Nate.

Now jump ahead some 70 years to two Fridays ago. Four African-American musicians--three of them in their 20s--with banjos, fiddles and guitars coming alive in their hands, are playing string band standards for a black and white audience gathered at a Greensboro church. The players are from Sankofa Strings and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, two new bands at the vanguard of a revitalization of music styles and traditions slowly forgotten over time. Joining them for "Georgia Buck" and several other tunes is 86-year-old fiddler Joe Thompson, who rode up with the quartet from his home in Mebane. When Sankofa Strings founder Rhiannon Giddens' banjo meets Joe Thompson's fiddle and his voice wanders in, as much chanting as singing, there's the feel of something if not quite ancient, at least the product of an era long gone. You start seeing things in sepia tones and even though the music's being played right in front of you, you expect to hear crackles and hisses as if the sounds were being torn from a salvaged 78.

Read the rest...

Milliner-Koken Fiddle Tune Project

I just saw this posted on BFOTM's website. Sounds like a very, very worthy cause if any of you are feeling philanthropic.

John

Site costs

Nick Halbrook asked a question in the Guestbook about what my costs are in running this site.

Since he asked: I pay $15/mo for web hosting, $39/mo for stream hosting, and around $40/mo for my DSL connection. So I guess the site costs me something like $94 per month to run. I do take advantage of the DSL connection for other things, but the site makes it a necessity.

I'm getting some ad revenues and some donations here and there that help to offset these costs. (In case anyone's wondering, I've never turned a profit, except for one month when I got a very generous anonymous donation -- but whatever profit I made that month was eaten up in the next month or two.) I could probably be more aggressive in terms of looking for ads or sponsors, but I'm happy with things the way they are. Also, my life being what it is (full-time job, 3 young kids, grad school on hold) I don't have time to update as often as I would like.

So, as I have said before, while donations are certainly greatly appreciated, the idea is that this site should be free to listen to, and no one should feel that they're under any obligation to donate.

If I ever turn a profit (yeah, right!) I'll have to figure out how to get the profits back in the hands of the artists whose music I play.

If anyone has any questions about this, please let me know.

Best wishes,

John

Great new playlist additions

I haven't been doing enough of this lately: outlining which CDs have been added to the rotation. Some of these are brand-new additions, others are things I've added within the past few months but not drawn suitable attention to. Mixed into the current playlist, along with the albums below, are some older favorites -- most but not all are players falling under the "Young Fogies" heading.

Recent addtions:

Hilarie Burhans - Put On The Skillet
The Devil Makes Three - Longjohns, Boots, and a Belt
Thomas Fraser - You & My Old Guitar
Thomas Fraser - Long Gone Lonesome Blues
Rayna Gellert & Susie Goehring - Starch & Iron
The Hog Hollar Stringband - The Great Compromise
Hotpoint Stringband - Steppin' on Cords
Hotpoint Stringband - The Road to Burhania
Hotpoint Stringband - Hotpoint Special
The Humdingers - The Humdingers
Mississippi John Hurt - D.C. Blues: The Library Of Congress Recordings, Vol. 2
Dave Landreth - Chairs
Elizabeth LaPrelle - Rain And Snow
R.D. Lunceford - Cottom Blossom
Run of the Mill String Band - Steal Aboard
John Morgan Salyer - Home Recordings 1941-1942 Volume 2
Hobart Smith - In Sacred Trust
The Stairwell Sisters - Feet All Over the Floor
Trevor & Travis Stuart - Mountaineer
Troublesome Creek String Band - Fast as Time Can Take Me
Various Artists - Mountain Blues: Blues, Ballads & String Bands, 1927-38
Various Artists - Sounds Like Jimmie Rodgers

Enjoy.

Streaming problems

I'm having some kind of problem with the streams, but I won't be able to investigate until I get home from work this evening. Until then, you may not be able to listen.

Sorry for the inconvenience...

John

...Update: 5:30 PM Problem resolved. The player was stopped for some reason...

Fingers crossed

I think/hope the problem with dropouts when listening is resolved. Please let me know if you have any problems when listening.

thanks,

John

Listening problems

There is something wrong at the moment but I'm not sure what. The streams play for a minute or two, then stop for 30 seconds or so, then start again. Not sure where the problem is and I won't be able to look into it fully until I am home tonight.

In general, if you have a high-speed Internet connection and you have problems listening, please send me an email to let me know. I often don't know there's a problem until I hear from one of you.

thanks,

John

Ari Eisinger's new CD is great!

It's not old-time music, but I wanted to put in a plug for my friend Ari Eisinger's new CD, titled That Will Never Happen No More. Not because he's my friend, but because this CD is just so darn good.

Our friends at Weenie Campbell have a review of Ari's CD that nails it:

One of the more impressive things about him, aside from sheer virtuosity, is he doesn’t just master individual songs but takes on the entire stylistic vocabulary as well, allowing him to interject his own musical ideas into a tune without breaking the spell of painstaking authenticity and a real '20s vibe. His additions to Lemon Jefferson sound right at home, his liberties with Blake are things Blake himself would likely have played. Some contemporary players of country blues dismiss such an approach as too curatorial and insist the music needs a modern or personal imprint to stay vibrant and keep moving forward. But That Will Never Happen No More proves Eisinger’s method is completely viable as well: the music is very much alive in his hands, bringing new insight into the guitar styles of the '20s and '30s and the original masters of the music in a way that is just as exciting, if not moreso, for the listener. What he calls "the golden age of the blues" comes streaming back for the all-too-brief 45 minutes you'll spend with this CD in the player.

I think that anyone who enjoys my site and the music I play would find Ari's new CD a great addition to their collection. You can order it from him via his website at http://www.secondmind.com or from Elderly Instruments.

John

Back online

As of earlier this afternoon, the station is back up. The upgrade went well, and means that I should be able to do more on my computer without robbing Winamp/Shoutcast of processing power, which results in dropouts or "skipping" in the streams.

For you geeks out there, I have a new MSI motherboard with an Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice) processor, a gig of DDR2 RAM, and some other fun stuff like a new case, DVD burner, and new graphics and sound cards.

If anyone wants an inexpensive sound card that really does produce much better quality sound that your motherboard's onboard audio or SoundBlaster cards, check out the Chaintech AV-710. I'm really pleasantly surprised at how much better the computer sounds vs my old Soundblaster (which cost more).

Everything seems pretty stable -- I'll probably have to restart a few more times but hopefully any outages will only last a minutes or two. If you do experience any listening problems please let me know!

thanks,

John

Site will be down a bit this weekend

Starting on Friday night, I'm going to have to take the streams down while I rebuild/upgrade my computer. The station will probably be down most of Saturday, and possibly longer, depending on how things go.

Hope everyone enjoys their holiday weekend. Our thoughts are with the people in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast.

John

New listening slots added

I just added 20 more slots on the 40k stream, so I can now handle 60 concurrent listeners: 40 at 40kbps, and 20 at 24kbps.

Some of you may have gotten dumped when I made the change a couple minutes ago -- I had to briefly restart the server. If so, sorry for the brief interruption. You should be able to reconnect now.

John

Welcome Visitors from BoingBoing!

As a longtime BoingBoing reader, I welcome you! Glad to know where all these hits are coming from. I also see that a couple dozen of you have added del.icio.us bookmarks today.

If the audio isn't working for you, it's because all the BoingBoing traffic has consumed all my listening slots. If it doesn't settle down soon, I'll try to add some more slots.

Thanks for checking out the site...and come back soon.

John

Wow...why so many listeners?

Someone just emailed & said they weren't able to listen. I checked & saw all slots are full. I pay for 40 simultaneous connections: 20 at 40kbps, and 20 at 24kpbs. All are currently in use. Normally I have 20-30 people listening concurrently. Today I've hit 40 and people are apparently getting turned away.

What happened -- is this a post-Clifftop thing? Was someone talking up SITG down there?

I'd love to add more connections, but it costs me $$$ -- maybe I'll put up a tip jar or something.

Any thoughts/suggestions/explanations would be appreciated.

thanks!

John

Subtle improvement to this site

Folks may or may not have noticed, but last week I made a long-wished-for technical change that hopefully has improved both the stability and functionality of the site.

The process I was using previously to update and upload the "now playing/recently played" html file was causing the program that runs the stream on my computer to crash periodically. I had been trying to figure out a fix for some time, but finally gave up and last week put a new process in place. This new method is proving to be far more stable (no crashes in about 5 days, knock on wood) but also has another advantage.

The previous process used ID3v1 tags to update the page. The problem was, these tags truncate fields (e.g. song title, artist name, album name) after 30 characters. The new process uses ID3v2 which holds longer fields. So longer album names like The Legacy of Tommy Jarrell Volume 2: Rainbow Sign now come through intact instead of being truncated to The Legacy of Tommy Jarrell Vo.

All of which makes me very happy.

John

More twins pics

I haven't been taking enough pictures -- one of the things you discover pretty quickly when you have twins is that there's not much time for anything else! Not that I'm complaining, mind you...

Anyway, these are from a couple of weeks ago but they're nice pictures of our boys asleep in our arms on the front steps.

James:


Will:


You can't see it here, but James has very long, delicate fingers. I'm thinking fiddle...

John

Twins update

As you might have guessed, we've been a little busy. Melinda and the twins came home on Friday and everyone's doing great.

The boys' names are James Cartwright Salmon and William Hill Salmon, named after their grandfathers James Cartwright Salmon and William Buren Hill.

Here is a quick snapshot I took this morning. Bad lighting & no flash (for obvious reasons) but you can see what the little guys look like. That's James on the left and Will on the right.



Proud papa,

John

The twins are here!!

My wife Melinda delivered two beautiful twin baby boys last night. Mom and babys are doing great, and Dad and Big Brother Jake are proud and delighted (and a bit tired).

Details/pics/names will follow in a few days...

John

OK, spammers: you win

The Message Board was quickly deluged with literally hundreds of posts from spammers promoting little blue pills that I'm sure are not needed by us old-time fans.

So I took it down.

Oh well.

The alternative is to use a more robust discussion forum system that requires a login, etc. But that's not something I have time for right now, and it's kind of beyond the mission of this site anyway. There are already several good mailing lists and usenet forums for discussing old-time music -- let me know if you need any help finding them.

John

Message Board is back

I get a lot of questions via email about what banjo tuning a certain song is in, who's playing the banjo on a certain track, etc. I usually just reply directly but I figured why not share the answers more broadly, as they often come up repeatedly.

So I just turned the "Message Board" back on. This was something I had put up when I first built the site -- it never saw much use so I took it down. But if folks are interested in using it to discuss tunings of songs I'm playing, or anything else related to old-time music, please feel free! I'll leave it up as a trial for a little while to see if it's getting any use & then re-evaluate.

Click the "Message Board" link on the lower left of the main screen to get in.

I've also added a little "Search" feature that allows you to search Google from here. You can also use it to search sugarinthegourd.com, although not all the pages seemed to be indexed yet -- I am working on fixing this.

While I'm on this topic, this site really requires a screen resolution of 800x600 or (preferably) higher. At 640x480 resolution it looks pretty lousy...but so does much of the Internet, so hopefully folks are using a higher resolution. If any of you are having trouble viewing the site please let me know.

thanks!

John

Long time, no entries

Yikes, I look back & see the last post I wrote was back in November...time sure does fly. My wife and I are expecting twin boys (!) in April which is one reason I've been extra busy (getting ready) but not half as busy as I'm going to be!

Anyway, the last post referred to an upcoming "Young Fogies" playlist -- that was put up and updated a few times and there have been many, many playlist updates since then.

You may notice I've started running a few ads on the site, in an effort to recoup some of my operating costs. I'll try to strike a good balance: to make the ads effective for the advertisers, but not overly obtrusive for my visitors.

I'm also running a few ads of my own using Google AdWords...already I've gotten quite a few new visitors, and I've only spent 75 cents!

I've noticed that the number of available listeners on the 40kbps channel has been exhausted quite a bit lately. If this happens to you, just click on the 24kpbs stream and hopefully you will be able to listen. I hope to add more concurrent listeners in the future, as well as possibly a higher-bitrate (this won't be anytime soon) but of course all these things mean added expense. We'll see how the ad revenues add up and take a look at these options.

That's about all for now -- let me know if you have questions, or if there's anything in particular you'd like to hear. The next major playlist update will probably be another banjo-centric show.

Thanks to all for the kind emails & Guestbook entries -- if you haven't signed the Guestbook, please do so!

Enjoy!

John