Down Home Radio Show

Eli here, you’re trusty Down Home Radio host.  When I’m not on DHR playing records and recording interviews, I’m keeping busy by making records of my own! Here’s an album my friend Peter and I did recently.  We asked ourselves, “can two banjo players play together?”  After some experimentation we were able to answer, “yes!”  Here’s a big ad for our new album:

“Twelve Tunes for Two Banjos” is a CD of old-time banjo duets played and sung by Peter K. Siegel & Eli Smith, using mostly 5-string but also 4 and 6-string banjos.

Track List:
(click tune to hear audio samples)

1. The Worried Blues
2. Jesse James
3. Soldier’s Joy
4. Goodbye Booze
5. John Henry
6. Otto Wood the Bandit
7. Marching Jaybird
8. Sweet Betsy from Pike
9. What a Friend We Have in Jesus
10. Poor Boy Long Way from Home
11. Ever See the Devil Uncle Joe?
12. New Prisoner’s Song

To Order:

Go to http://cdbaby.com/cd/siegelsmith where you can order online.  Its also on iTunes.

About the Musicians:

These are Peter K. Siegel’s first recorded banjo performances since he played on Elektra’s Old Time Banjo Project in 1964. Says Siegel: “You play this thing long enough, it begins to sound pretty good.”

In the interim, he produced more than 60 albums of traditional and roots-based music. Peter’s productions include albums by Doc Watson, Hazel Dickens, Joseph Spence, Roy Buchanan, Paul Siebel, and Los Pleneros de la 21.

Siegel founded the Nonesuch Explorer Series, for which he produced 15 albums of traditional world music. Folk Roots (UK) called Siegel “one of the earliest shapers of interest in world music.” His Gorô Yamaguchi album, A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky, continues to make its way spaceward in NASA’s Voyager Time Capsule.

His recent three-CD boxed set Friends of Old Time Music was released by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The New York Times called the set “a boxed set of awesome and concentrated power” and The Boston Globe called it “a precious, wildly beautiful document.”

Eli Smith is a banjo player, writer, researcher and promoter of folk music living in New York City. He regularly plays in a string band known as The Dust Busters, as part of the Roots ‘n’ Ruckus show at the Jalopy Theater and hosts the internet radio show Down Home Radio. He also presents Down Home Live, every second Saturday of the month at Banjo Jim’s on the Lower East Side as well as the Brooklyn Folk Festival, scheduled for May 21-23rd, 2010.

 

 Smokey Joe Miller Remembered: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On today’s show I’m happy to be bringing out a new addition to Down Home Radio.  Well known field recordist, painter and musician Art Rosenbaum hosts his own weekly 15 minute radio program, “Backroads & Banjos” on AM 1690, WMLB out of Atlanta, GA.  We will be periodically re-airing this wonderful program here on Down Home Radio.  Rosenbaum is perhaps best known for his recent Grammy Award winning collections of his own field recordings, “The Art of Field Recording” on the Dust to Digital label.

On this episode Art Rosenbaum and Phil Tanner remembers their friend, guitarist Smokey Joe Miller who passed on in November of 2009.  Miller played with 4 generations of Tanners – he played with Gid Tanner in the old original Skillet Lickers back in the 30’s, as well as with Gid’s son Gordon, then Phil and most lately Russ Tanner, the latest member of this Georgia musical family.  This 1/2 hour program brings together 2 episodes of “Backroads & Banjos” dedicated to Smokey Joe.

Art Rosenbaum (right) talks with guest Phil Tanner as he tapes a segment of his radio show at AM 1690 in Atlanta, photo from an article about Rosenbaum on AccessAtlanta.com

Art Rosenbaum plays six string banjo in front of one of his paintings.

Down Home Radio Continues!

Hello everybody,

Well the fund drive has been a success!  Thank you thank thank you thank you to all of you who donated to the program.  I am very much looking forward to bringing you many more fun, interesting and educational episodes of Down Home Radio in 2010.  The money raised through your donations will be put towards the purchase of new equipment to replace stuff that is getting to be pretty broken as well as to upgrade equipment and software and give me as your host and the program’s producer some compensation for the time it takes to make every episode of Down Home Radio that you see here on the website.

Of course it is still possible to donate to Down Home Radio.  If you are a fan of the show and haven’t yet donated, and I know there are many such people out there, its not too late!  No donation is too small, $25 dollars and up gets you one of the premiums, but $5 or $10 dollars gets you my everlasting gratitude and the promise of more great episodes of Down Home Radio on a much more regular basis.  See below for details.

That said there has been a really great show of support for the program, both in the United States and from our friends in Europe and Canada.  That in itself has been inspiring as many of you who donated also wrote into the program to express your appreciation for the show.  Thank you.

Down Home Radio can now continue into 2010 as I get back to work doing interviews, spinning records, digging out archival treasures, digitizing LPs and being your source for “the greatest hits of the 1920’s, 30’s and today!”

Keep in touch,

Eli

Here’s some preview tracks from the new Tompkins Square Records release, “Fire In My Bones,” a really amazing gospel compilation.

1. Don’t Let Him Ride – Mississippi Nightingales

2. Storm Thru Mississippi – Henry Green

3. How Long – Sister Ola Mae Terrell

 

 Don't Let Him Ride: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Storm Thu Mississippi: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 How Long: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Banjo Music Mix Tape (All the original recordings of songs taught in the workshop): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 John Cohen Banjo Workshop: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Banjo Tunings and Styles Workshop with John Cohen

Here’s the first bit of audio I’m posting from the Brooklyn Folk Festival - John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers leads a banjo workshop focusing on different tunings and styles used by a number of banjo players he has learned from either directly or studied through their old recordings.  Banjo player Wade Ward describes tunings as “different atmospheres.”  Each banjo tuning carries its own set of possibilities and its own feeling.  In 1965 John Cohen encountered Ward and many other banjo players as he journeyed through the South finding musicians, making field recordings, discovering banjo tunings and lots more along the way.  Many of these field recordings were released on his wonderful album “High Atmosphere”. John discusses and demonstrates these many styles, sounds and techniques in this workshop from May, 17th, 2009.

The first play button plays a banjo music mix tape of all the original recordings of songs John covers in this workshop.  The second play button plays the audio of the workshop itself.  This is for banjo players only! (Unless you’re really interested)

John begins with a bit of Pete Seeger up picking, then a bit of frailing and thumb lead 2-finger picking, then more up picking (the same rhythm as clawhammer but picking up instead of hitting down on the string), Charlie Poole style finger picking banjo, Bascom Lamar Lunsford / George Landers style up picking (the workshop focuses a lot on this style, where in the first finger picks the melody and also then brushes up over the strings and the thumb picks the fifth string and drops down to some of the other strings.  There are no downward motions in this style.)  Sydna Myers style clawhammer, Dock Boggs finger picking and finally Pete Steele finger picking

Links:
Film about John Cohen on FolkStreams.net: Remembering the High Lonesome
Down Home Radio Rufus Crisp Feature Episode – playing recordings of Crisp, a banjo player very influential to John Cohen and the early folk music scene in New York.

Tunes included in the workshop: (more…)

Bruce Springsteen got Pete Seeger invited to play at this Obamanation concert event at the Capitol yesterday.  Tao Rodriguez, the Boss and a large choir sang the song as Pete called out the lyrics to the crowd.  Pete called the song as originally written by Guthrie back when, complete with the verse about private property:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted, it said private property;

But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;

That side was made for you and me.

He also got in another lesser known verse:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;

By the relief office, I’d seen my people.

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,

Is this land made for you and me?

The choir kind of messes up on the private property verse.  Was it planned to sing that one?  He sings it instead of the chorus.  I guess it was planned since it seems like the thing was rehearsed with the choir somehow, but all the same I’m amazed they let him even say the words “private property.”  That’s awesome.  He gave people a dose of the real business.

Guthrie took the melody for “This Land Is Your Land” from the hymn “When the World’s On Fire.”  Guthrie loved the Carter Family so maybe he heard their version or he just learned the song from someone he knew.  Bryant’s Jubilee Quartet does a great version, you can find that on iTunes.

I also appreciated that Rev. Lowry referenced Big Bill Broonzy’s song “Black, Brown & White Blues” at the end of the benediction he gave at the inauguration.

“They says, “if you was white, should be all right,
If you was brown, stick around,
But as you’s black, hmm brother, get back, get back, get back”

The Jalopy Theater & School of Music (the gravitational center of Down Home Radio) was recently featured on the Brooklyn Independent Television channel.  The show features interviews with owners Geoff and Lynette Wiley, with Roots n Ruckus host Feral Foster and with Eli Smith (me) as well as some excellent footage of the place.  This is from an excellent cable show, featuring different neighborhoods in Brooklyn each week.  We were included in the Redhook episode, Jalopy being located in the Redhook section of Brooklyn.

Jalopy has lots of great live music on weekends and throughout the week, sells and repairs instruments and offers music classes.  I teach the banjo class there.

Check out the Village Voice for a nice write up of Down Home Radio.  DHR won in the “Best Way to Compensate for the Lack of Roots-Music Radio” category.

“Everyone complains about how the local airwaves suck, but instead of bitching, you should go online to find a Gotham-based program that actually has good roots music—the podcast-formatted Down Home Radio Show…“

Here’s the rest of what they wrote.

Plus, the Jalopy Theater won in the “Best Old-Timey Venue” category!

Hello everybody, thought I’d post up a bunch of my favorite videos I’ve found over the last period.  To all those people who have posted these videos – I salute you.

Enjoy!

Videos below:

“March of Time” newsreel footage about Leadbelly and John Lomax -
A reenactment where they play the parts of themselves! This is unbelievable footage. It is also pretty spooky and haunted. (more…)