The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. Click the image to buy tickets.

The Old Town School of Folk Music made these spiffy posters for our August 21st show with Americana pioneers The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The early 7pm show is almost completely sold out, but as of this writing there are still main floor tickets for the 10pm show.

We’ll be joined by some very special guests to help make this a evening to remember. Get your tickets early, as this is likely to sell out.

Tangleweed is getting ready for our Saturday show at the Fiddler’s Hearth in South Bend, dusting off some of our Irish repertoire. We’ll almost certainly play this one, perhaps the catchiest song ever written about infanticide.

The footage is from Swedish television in 1973. Ronnie Drew has the lead vocal.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The first three Dubliners records, The Dubliners with Luke Kelly, In Concert, and Finnegan Wakes are three of the finest records you will ever hear in any genre.

There’s a new t-shirt design in our Cafe Press shop, a tangleweed twist on the classic emo wuss shirt, featuring a full-color reproduction of Tony Nuccio’s beautiful banjoburst poster.

In part I, The Viper showed you the materials you’ll need to build a washtub bass. In part II, he shows you how to put it all together. In part III, with the help of his daughter Irene, he demonstrates how to play Paganini’s Caprice #5 on the gutbucket.

In part one, our friend The Viper showed you the materials you’ll need for your gutbucket. In part two, he shows you how to put it all together.

In our ongoing effort to promote bass portability and homemade instruments, our friend and yodeler extraordinaire The Viper shows you how to make your own washtub bass. In part one, you’ll learn what materials you’ll need to pick up at the hardware store to make the Stradivarius of gutbuckets.

We were very happy to have The Viper sit in with us for a few songs on our last sojourn to the land of cows and beer. We have some recordings that we’ll share soon.

As we prepare for our special St. Patrick’s Day show tomorrow night at Lizard’s Liquid Lounge, we thought it proper to share a wee bit of our Irish repertoire with you all. The tune is Whiskey in the Jar, originally written by Metallica, and later covered by the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners*.

The recording comes from a practice recording made last year in my basement. Ryan was out of town, so it’s just Billy, Paul, Scott, and me.

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*I may be slightly off on the chronology.

Tangleweed had a chance to record a tune on an early 20th century Edison wax cylinder recording rig. Martin Fisher, audio archivist at Middle Tennessee State University, set up the acoustic recording studio at last week’s Folk Alliance conference in Memphis

This being a pre-electric recording studio, the band was gathered around a single horn, which was connected directly to a lathe that etched the sounds into a blank wax cylinder. Each cylinder blank could hold two minutes, so we had to tweak the arrangement and push the tempo a bit to get it in under the maximum time. We recorded two takes. It’s all live to mono, so there’s no ‘fixing in the mix’, as it were.

The tune is a Tangleweed medley called ‘The Logan Square Dance’.

We will have audio of the cylinder itself soon.