The Pete Seeger documentary, The Power of Song will be shown for free this Sunday Feb 28 at 8pm. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a good chance. This was a very good film and I had to drive all the way to deerfield to see it last time. Check it out.
The Power of Song @ the Empty Bottle. Sunday, Feb 28th 8pm
Tags: Pete Seeger
So I’ve been messing around with a banjo lately, and I’ve been looking for good books and youtube videos and Pete Seeger pamphlets about doing so.
I started with Pete’s book ‘How to play the 5-String Banjo’ (which one friend described to me as the most frustrating book he’d ever read). It’s not too bad but a bit vague on technique and he seems to get to more advanced stuff very quickly. There’s a record that went along with this book that has some nice examples, someone has kindly ripped it to youtube. This made following along in the book much easier:
How to Play the 5-String Banjo Part 1 (youtube)
But, Pete starts you off playing in C, and the conventional wisdom (or at least what is considered these days says) says start in G. So some of the materials need a bit of transposing or returning.
Generally tho, for old time, you’ll be working on that frail, Pluck-Rest-Brush-Thumb (Bumm-Titty as Pete Says) for hours, or weeks, or months..
Other than this there are a bunch of pretty good instructional videos on youtube showing this strum and some other nice instructional things, here’s a good one.
Here’s a video from Pete’s Rainbow Quest show where he teaches you how to play Skip To My Lou. A standard starting point. Oh Pete’s great.
Another book I have really come to like is called The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo by Patrick Costello. Its very specific on the strumming pattern and just progresses from there. It’s also pretty dang funny too. And the best part of this one is it’s free under a creative commons license, you can download it here (Archive.org) I really like how it steps you through the initial steps of frailing, very specifically and slowly. Whatever works ends up as the general philosophy, but here’s a good example of one thing that works in excruciating detail.
You’re going to need to play with other folks eventually and jam and become awesome, but these are good resources to get started!
Related Links:
You can get Pete’s book at a lot of places, here are some copies you can purchace from Elderly Instruments. (Elderly)
You can get a hard copy of the How and the Tao (with a nice hard plastic like cover for keeping in your banjo case) at Amazon as well. (Amazon)
Update: You can check out Patrick Costello’s blog at http://dailyfrail.com, cool. And if you want to purchase the book, maybe do it direct from Patrick instead of amazon. (http://funkyseagull.com/banjo-tao.html)
Tags: banjo, frailing, instruction, patrick costello, Pete Seeger
So other sites may have their 2008 best of lists but I’m certainly not hip enough to rank anything and truth be told I spent more time this year listening to things that were released before my parents were born than anything that came out this year. But still I’d like to make a list of some stuff I listened to this year that may or may not have come out in 2008 that you should all check out in no particular order. In many cases you will be supporting some great Chicago artists.
And the more obvious must haves.
Other stuff
Friends
The movers and shakers of Good Time Tonight have weighed in, here are their recommendations. thanks guys:
Tags: 2008, BBQ Show, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Prince Billy, Fred Holstein, Goldmine Pickers, Grape Juice Records, James McMurty, Joe Pug, King Kahn, Laura Gibson, Mavis Staples, Mississippi Records, Neil Young, One Mic Stand, Pete Seeger, rachel ries, RUMI, The Buthcher's Boy, The Floorbirds
So Studs Terkel passed away. I hadn’t gotten a chance to write something about him, but I wanted to get some links up. Studs was an enormously influential member in Chicago music. His book ‘And They All Sang’ has one of the best interviews with Big Bill Broonzy I’ve ever read, I highly suggest you check it out. He covers a wide range of musicians from folk to popular to jazz. On seeing the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson performing at her Chicago church he says,
“Here are parishioners, bone-weary after a week of unsung work, for a wage not worth singing about; here they are, listening to song, such as I, whose work is so much easier and whose wage is so much better, have never heard. It is at such time and circumstance that I become aware of my own arrogance.”
Studs was a great watcher, he had big ears that were open to amazing amount of art and live that moved around him. His most famous book is ‘Working’, interviews with all kinds of regular people, but I really like this musican one. Read on for more memories and links.
Tags: Big Bill Broonzy, Bob Dylan, Chicago, Deaths, I Come For To Sing, Mahalia Jackson, Pete Seeger, Studs Place, Studs Terkel, Win Stracke, Working
Eli Smith over at the Down Home Radio Show blog posted a great article on Music for Democracy. It is focused most broadly, touching on many corners of influential and protest music. Eli sums up the what and why on political music, why it has the power to resonate, even long after the movements themselves have died down.
Music is often the best remembered and loved part of social/political struggles through out history, but the most important element of political music is the music, which is why we care in the first place.
Our buddy today, Pete Seeger even gets his own section.
Tags: Democracy, Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger’s new album, “Pete Seeger at 89″, 32 tracks of music and talk, is released today. I got a chance to watch Pete on David Letterman last night, he performed ‘Take it from Dr. King’, a apropos selection and perhaps a bit calculated on Dave and Pete’s part given the snub by McCain on the show this week. I haven’t had a chance to pickup the album yet, but I will swing by the store tonight. For now, here’s the NY Times blurb:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/arts/music/29choi.html
and here’s another nice long review of the album.
Pete Seeger at 89 - Blog Critics
He encourages people to open their hearts and genuinely feel that they are part of something bigger then themselves…they become part of a community of people who are all doing the same thing at the same time
Though these things have a tendancy to end up praising Seeger rather than reviewing the disc. Perhaps, that too, is apropos.
Here’s pete playing that song from last year’s American Masters on PBS. He also talks about being on the Playboy show, one of the very few national outlets that would let him perform during the hollywood blacklist.
Tags: Pete Seeger
“Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it.
My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle
they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they
created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me - and if I take
the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach
out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down
into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.” - Utah PhillipsÂ
The Pickin’ Bubs are Maura Lally, Peggy Browning, and Mark Mitchell. They are excellent musicians performing around Chicago and teaching at Chicagos’ Old Town School of Folk Music. They create lovely new songs and adapt traditional folk and blues songs with an everchanging series of guests and collaborators. The Bubs don’t just talk a lot about tradition; They are keenly aware of being part of a living music tradition. Like the quote says, they are aware of what’s in that stream, how to add to it and see the ability in us all to tap into that stream as we need. I put up a live set from them before the weekend (It also went out on our podcast feed, but check it out if you haven’t gotten a chance) , but here is the companion interview the Bubs were nice enough to give me.
Tags: Big Bill Broonzy, Chris Waltz, Ed Holstein, Fred Holstein, John Hartford, Mark “Louie†Mitchell, Mark Dvorak, Maura Lally, Peggy Browning, Pete Seeger, The Pickin’ Bubs
After posting the out of print album version of this concert a bit ago a friend of gave me a copy of the complete concert as it was broadcast on Chicago WFMT radio in 1956. Here’s a copy of it for all your Independence Day Barbecues. From the liner notes:
This historic concert was broadcast live on WFMT radio’s ‘Midnight Special’, on October 25, 1956. It was one of Big Bill’s last shows before being diagnosed with cancer, and one of Pete’s first visits to chicago after leaving the Weavers. This concert is remembered as an important event in Chicago folk music. Soon The Gate of Horn, the first folk music night club in the nation, would open on the near north side, and within the year the Old Town School of Folk Music would open it’s doors.
Click here to download an archive of this concert:
PeteAndBillNorthwestern.zip
See Also:
Pete Seeger and Big Bill Broonzy in Concert
Tags: Big Bill Broonzy, Pete Seeger
First of all, I saw this comic, go ahead, read this comic:
http://catandgirl.com/view.php?loc=611
This comic is cute, but I think it’s got a point. And it’s an interesting point, at that, for folk musicians. Are we approacing (or regressing?) to a state of ‘post-consumerism’ in music? Where the everpresent microphone makes recordings meaningless and the idea of music as a commodity, moot? A marching resurgance of DIY Folk Musicians taking over the planet? Read on for my thoughts on this compelling cartoon!
Tags: Comics, Pete Seeger