The Mercury Dimes: Garfield's Blackberry Blossom

The Mercury Dimes perform their encore at the San Francisco Bluegrass & Old-Time Festival.

Elise Engleberg, fiddle. Michael Follstad, fiddle. Jordan Ruyle, banjo. Sabra Guzman, guitar. Mike Brown, bass. Matt Knoth, guitar. Recorded at 12 Galaxies.

With a tip of the hat to Bill Streeter at Lo Fi St. Louis, who knows how to shoot and edit live music performances with a modicum or two (or fifteen) of style.

Length: 2:41


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Categories: old-time

The Devil's Music

11 nights. 20 venues. 67 bands. The best urban Appalachian traditional music festival you'll find on either side of the Mississippi. This February event combined with Warren Hellman’s October extravaganza and the overabundance of locally-based talent make the San Francisco Bay Area one of the world capitals of bluegrass and old-time music.

Though in Nashville you might have more luck making a living at it.

Length: 1:04

Song: "Danville Girl" performed by Foghorn Stringband

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Categories: old-time

Night Porch Banjo

The San Francisco Bluegrass & Old-Time Festival is in full swing, which made me remember this snippet from a warm night back in November.

I have got to get out more.

Length: 1:27

Tune: "Motherless Children" by way of Roscoe Holcomb

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Categories: old-time

Living Room Recordings #010: Sally Come Down the Middle / Last Train Home

The last piece from my evening with Barbara Hansen (fiddle, ADAE) and Maggie Brunjes (banjo, aDADE). Includes a bit of toying with the built-in slow shutter effect.

Oh. And there's supposed to be a B minor chord in "Last Train Home" as well. But, what can you do.

Length: 3:05

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Categories: old-time

Living Room Recordings #009: Song for Jackson

Another experiment in old-time music under low-light conditions.

Between tunes, Maggie launched into this simple ode to her cat, Jackson. By the time Barb joined in, the song was pretty much ended.

Later that year (2001) Maggie left town to ride the rails (not, as I understand it, just metaphorically). Don't know where Jackson wound up.

Length: 0:47

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Living Room Recordings #008: Goodbye, My Honey, I'm Gone / Ducks on the Millpond

Two tunes and a bit of discussion about talking while fiddling. From my evening with Barbara Hansen (fiddle, ADAE) and Maggie Brunjes (banjo, aDADE).

Barbara acquired "Goodbye, My Honey" from Bill Conley, via Rounder's Traditional Fiddle Music of the Ozarks, Volume III: Down in the Border Countries. On the recording the guitarist accompanying Conley plays a distinct B minor chord under the F# note at the middle of the B part of the tune, but at the time this video was shot both Barb and Maggie had reached the sixth stage of old-time music obsession, in which minor chords are to be disdained.

(Sadly, many fine old-time musicians never recover from this stage.)

"Ducks on the Millpond" I know primarily from recordings of Tommy Jarrell. Barbara's phrasing is different enough that she probably learned it from a secondary source, possibly Rayna Gellert's first CD. But you'll have to ask her.

Length: 3:47

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Living Room Recordings #007: Lonesome Blues

The first from an evening I spent with Barbara Hansen (fiddle, GDAE) and Maggie Brunjes (banjo, gCGCD). I'm pretty sure their source on this was the Leake County Revelers.

Back in spring of 2001 they were both living San Francisco and playing together an awful lot. Haven't seen Maggie in a while but I still covet her banjo, a Mike Ramsey model with an extra-wide (13") pot.

Length: 3:01

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Living Room Recordings #005: Tombigbee Waltz

My last piece from my day with Stephanie Prausnitz (fiddle), Barbara Hansen (fiddle), and Matt Knoth (guitar) 1 2 3 back in the year 2000.

Like Kristin & Joe's Love Train, this piece from the earlier incarnation of Matchbook Films toyed with some of the conventions that now seem to be part of the language of today's videoblogs. The brevity of the form is conducive to this sort of formal exploration. See, e.g. Scratch Video or Josh Leo's experimental playspace Stone Farm.

In my college film courses these sorts of exercises often seemed pretentious, in part because our department was so under-equipped and -funded that you'd have sometimes as few as two projects in an entire quarter. Ending up with a piece that would never be viewed outside of a classroom seemed like such a waste of time. (So I often went with: funny.)

But here, where the stakes are so aggressively low (do not watch M Verdi's seething R-rated rant on the subject, "The Yang of Videoblogging") and the pace of production as optionally brisk, the payoffs for playful experimentation are much greater.

Make one piece, post it, make another. Learn. Move on. Drop by your relatives' houses and sneak the feed into their copy of iTunes.

No waiting by the mailbox for a rejection letter from yet another festival. Today that seems so... so 20th century.

Length: 1:42

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Living Room Recordings #004: Booth Shot Lincoln

Just got to the point in Sara Vowell's Assassination Vacation where she writes about John Wilkes Booth having expected people would have written songs celebrating his shooting of the despot Abraham Lincoln. I don't think he lived to hear any, but this tune is one of them.

Once again featuring: Stephanie Prausnitz (fiddle), Barbara Hansen (fiddle), and Matt Knoth (guitar) 1 2 3 Shot way back in 2000.

With my backlog of video increasing, I'll try for two videos/week through the summer. Could be tough to sustain, but my enthusiasm is high right now; figure I'll ride the wave.

Length: 2:51


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Living Room Recordings #003: Hobart's Transformation

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Featuring: Barbara Hansen (fiddle), Matt Knoth (guitar) 1 2 3, Stephanie Prausnitz (fiddle)
Length: 2:12