Doc’s playing on this old clip from Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest show is quite good. One can hardly blame Pete for getting up to dance.

Watson, Howard, and Price made the ‘Old Timey Concert‘ LP, which is a pretty special piece of work. I learned a lot of songs from it, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Previous posts:
Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs play John Hardy
Clarence Ashley plays My Sweet Farm Girl
Doc Watson sings Careless Love
Doc Watson playing Deep River Blues
Clarence Ashley singing the House Carpenter
Doc Watson playing Salty Dog in 1976

Sir Robert McAlpine was, and is, a major construction concern in England, and a voracious consumer of cheap Irish labor. Dominic Behan (Brendan’s brother) captured the cruelty of the construction trade beautifully with this song.

I remember the day that the Bear O’Shea fell into a concrete stair,
What Horseface said, when he saw him dead, well it wasn’t what the rich call prayers.
“I’m a navvy short,” was his one retort that reached unto my ears,
When the going is rough, well you must be tough, with McAlpine’s Fusiliers.

The Digital Tradition has lyrics and music for the tune.

The lead vocal is by Ronnie Drew.

The first three Dubliners records (The Dubliners with Luke Kelly, Finnegan’s Wakes, and The Dubliners in Concert) are among the finest records I’ve heard. I’ve listened to them countless dozens of times, and they never wear out their welcome. I never cease to be astonished at the power of their music.

We’ve come full-circle in our approach to live sound. Our earliest gigs were done without the benefit of amplification. When we moved to larger venues, we wanted to keep that same feel, so we used a pair of Oktava MK-012 condenser mics for the band. We had a hard time being loud enough for some venues, though, and we also had some very bad experiences being at the mercy of incompetent soundmen.

So we switched to pickups for our instruments. Ryan, Scott, and I used transducers on our banjo, guitar, and mandolin respectively. This allowed us to be loud. Very very loud. But it didn’t sound good to our ears, and, equally important, we lost a great deal of our dynamic range when we switched to pickups.

We switched back to microphones for everything again (see Know Your Mic, part I, part II, and part III). Scott and I settled on the AKG C-1000 condenser mic with a hypercardioid adapter, and we’ve been very happy with it. Many venues don’t own high-quality condenser mics, so we’re in the habit of bringing our own.

Finding a good banjo mic solution was a little more challenging. On the surface, the banjo is a very easy instrument to capture. The ubiquity of the banjo in the history of early (pre-1927) recorded music is testament to this. The challenges of live sound are different, though. We like to set our instrument mics hot, and then back off for rhythm playing. This allows us to, essentially, mix ourselves. We back off to be quiet, and step up to the mic when we play a solo.

Ryan was having problems with feedback when we used a cardioid condenser mic on his banjo, so we switched him to an SM-57. The 57, as almost everyone knows, is one of the most useful microphones on the planet, the gold standard for micing guitar amps, and useful on almost any instrument in a loud situation. The 57, like our C-1000 mics, is hypercardioid, which means that it cancels out sound interference from the sides very well, and doesn’t let the monitor mix bleed in. We’ve used a 57 on banjo for several gigs, including large outdoor shows and last night in a small, noisy bar, and the results have been good.

That said, for our banjo player Ryan, the best solution is probably the Beta 57, a souped-up 57 with a supercardioid pickup pattern. The supercardioid pattern is even more focused than the hypercardioid pattern, allowing us to jack the microphone up a lot louder without it feeding back. It turns out that I’m not the only one who feels this way. Irish-Banjo.com recommends the Beta-57 should one choose a microphone over a transducer. It’s a well-made, versatile, and very good-sounding microphone for the banjo.

Here’s a pic I clicked the other day. It’s my cat Big Head Todd guarding Tangleweed’s merch bag from any theives who may happen upon my living room. In addition to being a guard cat he is also a brave warrior and hunter of fluffy feathered cat toys.

I stumbled across this earlier this week when I had my MP3 player set to random — a Kennett Brothers recording of ‘Easy to Love‘ I had completely forgotten about. The song was written by Edith Frost, a Chicagoan who now lives in the San Francisco area. Edith recorded it on her very fine Wonder Wonder record.

She described the Kennett’s version as such on her Twitter page:

Listening to Edward Burch covering “Easy To Love”. It’s very surreal, like I just unearthed an early version with the vocals at half-speed.

The track comes from a batch of seven songs we recorded in June, 2002, as a wedding present for Edward’s cousin, released on a run of a dozen CD-Rs. All the songs were recorded and mixed pretty hastily, so I’m pleasantly surprised at how decent they sound.

The personnel for the recording:

• Edward Burch: acoustic guitar and vocals
• Andy Leach: steel guitar and backing vocals
• Kenneth Rainey: bass and backing vocals

The sessions were done in my basement using a fairly limited number of mics. The acoustic guitar and vocals were all done with a Rode NT1, the bass with a Beta 52, and the steel guitar with an SM 57.

I tried something different with the bass to get a more unusual tone. I attached a contact transducer to the body of an old Danelectro bass, and ran the signal through my acoustic guitar preamp. I blended that signal with the output of an old National valve bass amp.

The mix is mine, and was done ‘in the box’ using Cool Edit Pro on a crappy Windows machine that has since been relegated to the scrapheap.

Easy to Love (MP3)

Previous Kennett Brothers posts:
The Kennett Brothers play music for Norwegian Fishing Shows
Merry Christmas from the Kennett Brothers, part II
Merry Christmas from the Kennett Brothers
Atom Tan, as performed by the Kennett Brothers

More music from the North Albany Archive of Recorded Sound…

There’s not much I can add to Riley Puckett’s story. His guitar playing and singing anchored the Skillet Lickers, one of the greatest string bands ever. He’s the gold standard of old-time guitarists, with a strong and surprisingly versatile voice. I learned ‘Ragged But Right’ from a Riley Puckett/ Ted Hawkins recording, and Tangleweed recorded it as the penultimate track on our first CD.

This solo record is delicate and stately when compared to the heterophonic frenzy of the Skillet Lickers. I played it for a friend, who declared it the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. To the best of my knowledge, it’s never been reissued on CD.

Take Me Back to My Carolina Home (MP3)

Previous Skillet Lickers posts:
The Skillet Lickers singing Pass Around the Bottle
Old time listening room with the Skillet Lickers

Last month, the Old Town School of Folk Music broke the record for the largest music lesson in the world. Almost 1,400 people gathered in Welles Park with their guitars to participate, with Old Town’s veteran teachers leading the lesson. Among the students gathered were myself, Paul, Scott, and Scott’s fiancee Alisa. Although I’ve played guitar for almost 15 years and currently teach the instrument to beginners, I’ve never actually had a formal lesson so this was my first.

You can read more about the event at the Chicago Tribune’s online edition here. If you zoom in on the second picture you can barely make out Scott, Alisa, and me in the background, but unfortunately Paul is obscured from view.

The event was part of the Old Town School’s 50th anniversary. The school has been very supportive of Tangleweed over the years and we’re proud to have collaborated with them on numerous projects, including their new Songbook series recordings.

I wrote this piece as part of the introduction to my book, The American Country Music Tunebook, to help my students become more comfortable with transposition. I’m posting it here for the same reason — with a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of practice, anyone can become comfortable transposing songs and tunes on the fly.

Although the capo is referred to derisively as a “cheater” in some circles, it can be a valuable tool–handy for the guitarist, almost essential to the banjo player. Capos are also available for mandolins and other stringed instruments (even dobros), and these might prove handy for beginning players. When buying a capo, avoid the cheap elastic variety, as they can be hard to use and tend to pull the instrument out of tune. I prefer the “one hand” spring-action capo, such as a Keyser, for ease of use, although there are a number of well-made capos in different styles on the market which will do the trick for under twenty dollars, Dunlop and Shubb being two of the more popular brands.

The reasons for using a capo are quite simple. You may need to transpose a song to accommodate a singer’s range. You may find yourself playing with folks who play familiar tunes in unfamiliar keys. Most commonly, however, you may find that you need access to notes on open strings to play a tune comfortably.

In guitar playing, the ideal flatpicking keys are C and G. These are also the two easiest keys on the five-string banjo in standard tuning. The trick to using the capo, then, is using it to play tunes in other keys as though they were in C or G. The process is quite easy once you get the hang of it. Just count up from the nut in half-steps. To play in D, capo on the second fret and play as if you were in C. To play in A, capo on the second fret and play as if you were in G. To play in B Flat, capo on the third fret and play as if you were in G, and so on.

Most old-time songs use a limited number of chords–a “tonic” or I chord, which represents the home key; a “dominant” or V7 chord which tends to show up near the end of phrases and is used to lead back to the tonic; and a “subdominant” or IV chord, a whole step below the dominant, which is used to add some variety to the mix.

Here are the I, IV and V7 chords for the most commonly encountered keys:

Thus, if you want to play a tune in D as though it were in C, capo on the second fret and play C, F, and G7. With the capo in place, they will sound as D, G, and A7. With a little bit of practice, a capo can make your life a lot easier.