A solid recording of the recent Chicago Bluegrass Festival in Evanston, IL is available for free bit-torrent download at bt.etree.org:  http://bt.etree.org/details.php?id=524105

Here’s a little sample, our four-man, banjo-less version of the Takeup Reel Medley, from our latest record, Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Here are the notes for the recording, which was made by Joe Steffen:

Chicago Bluegrass Festival
2009-04-04
American Legion Hall
Evanston, IL

Source: SP-CMC-8 cardioid > M-AUDIO MicroTrack II > 44.1 kHz 16-bit WAV
Location: front center chair 2′ from stage, ORTF 20cm 100°
Transfer: WAV > CD Wave > Trader’s Little Helper > FLAC
Recorded by: Joe Steffen (HackensawFan at comcast dot net)

Disc 1
01. intro

Harris Covington
02. Some Day

Bubbly Creek Bluegrass Band http://www.myspace.com/bubblycreekbluegrassband
with Harris Covington on guitar
03. intro
04. Travelin’ Teardrop Blues
05. Colleen Malone
06. banter
07. Lee & Paige
08. Dusty Boxcar Wall

James Creek Road http://www.jamescreekroad.com/
09. intro
10. Love Please Come Home
11. Girl from West Virginia
12. Where Corn Don’t Grow
13. Flight That Is Leaving Soon
14. Crosses and Stones
15. Six Feet Under

Whiskey Hollow Bluegrass Band http://nailthatcatfish.tripod.com/WALLOW.html
16. intro
17. Turkey Knob
18. Wonder Where You Are Tonight
19. I Never Will Marry
20. Hang Me
21. A Few Old Memories
22. banter
23. Somewhere Over The Rainbow
Disc 2
01. Bring It On Home
02. Jesus Is A Rock
03. announcements and door prizes

Northern Skyline
04. intro
05. If You’re Ever in Oklahoma
06. Vamp in the Middle
07. Dancin’ with the Angels
08. Walls of Time
09. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
10. E.M.D.
11. announcements

Peter Nye & the Chicago Bluegrass Band http://www.myspace.com/chicagobluegrassband
12. intro
13. Peter Nye: Chip Covington banjo story
14. Butcher Boy
15. Paddy On The Turnpike
16. Love of the Mountain
17. One More Dollar
18. Just Wondering Why
19. banter
Disc 3
01. Steel Rails in the Tennessee Night

Tangleweed http://www.tangleweed.org
02. intro
03. Sir Lucas de Somerville/The Musical Priest/Whiskey Before Breakfast
04. Hard Times
05. The Logjam
06. South Australia
07. Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar
08. The Takeup Reel/Cold Frosty Morning/Grey Eagle

Henhouse Prowlers http://www.henhouseprowlers.com/
09. intro
10. Get in Line Brother
11. Darlin’ Who Cares About Your Fun
12. Give Your Lovin’ Out
13. Mourning Dove
14. The First Train Robbery
15. Clinch Mountain Backstep/Turn Me Loose

All Band Jam
16. intro
17. Doing My Time

Bluegrass Legends Concerts http://www.chicagobluegrass.com

As we ready ourselves to play two shows with Jerry Douglas at the Old Town School of Folk Music next Saturday, here’s a wee snippet from a previous performance there. The tune is Ginseng Blues, from Where You Been So Long, and the recording is from November, 2006.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Our friend The Mayor of Bucktown plays some nice harmonica on this one. The yodeling is crap, sadly, but most of the rest is pretty decent. One other aside: for years I sang the last verse as “Ain’t gonna work on the river, ain’t gonna load no boat.” I recently heard a better transfer of the old Kentucky Ramblers record I learned it from, and the verse is, clear as day, “Ain’t gonna work on no tipple, ain’t gonna load no coal. I guess ‘tipple’ sort of sounds like ‘river’.

Courtesy of Archive.org. If you like, you can download the whole show there.

There’s a new downloadable track from Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals on our music page for your downloading pleasure. It’s called ‘Pick Poor Robin Clean’, an old raggy blues tune that we like a lot. It’s also up on Tangleweed’s MySpace page for your streaming pleasure.

I learned it from an old Luke Jordan record, but Geeshie Wiley also recorded an excellent version of the tune for Paramount Records, which I featured on the blog a while back.

The tune is a fairly straightforward circle of fifths ragtime progression, except that it aborts the progression midway when it repeats, resulting in this:

F#7 | F# 7 | B7 | B7 | E7 | E7 | A | A
F#7 | F# 7 | B7 | B7 | A | E7 | A | A

For the solos, we split the progression in half, with the first soloist taking the front eight bars, the second soloist the back eight bars. There are two mandolin solos on the recording, and they give a pretty good sense of the tone of the resonator mandolin I used on the recording. The resonator tone works well on this kind of tune — it’s louder, fatter, and raunchier than what one gets from a traditional mandolin.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Apropos of nothing, I slipped a gratuitous Ohio reference into the tune, replacing an off-color lyric in the original with a reference to the endemic poisonous nut of my home state.

Visit our music page for a download link.

Here’s another handy condensed stream of some of the MP3 files that’ve been posted to this site over the past few months. They should play in the Flash dealie below. If you want to know more about the songs or find download links, visit the links below to read the original posts.

1. Tangleweed: Sandy River Belle, from Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals
2. Sweed and Stoneman: John Hardy, from the original 78rpm recording
3. Tangleweed: Summertime, from a December, 2004 show at Martyr’s in Chicago
4. Bob Dunn’s Vagabonds: You Don’t Know My Mind, from the original 78rpm recording
5. The Kennett Brothers: One of You in Every Size, from Santa is Real
6. Tangleweed: Dead Flowers, from a November, 2008 show at the Hideout in Chicago
7. Blind Alfred Reed: How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live, from the original 78rpm recording
8. Mike Shaw’s Alabama Entertainers: Tennessee River Bottom Blues, from the original 78rpm recording
9. Tangleweed: Listen to the Mockingbird, from a November, 2008 show at the Hideout in Chicago
10. The Kennett Brothers: A Shutin at Christmas, from Santa is Real

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Listen to previous installments of TweedRadio.

This Boxing Day finds Chicago encased in ice, so here’s a little bit of Summertime for you all. This comes from our first appearance at Martyr’s in Chicago, in December of 2004, about a month after we recorded our first CD, Just a Spoonful.

We were still plugging in at this point, with everything except the bass using an instrument pickup rather than a mic. The resulting instrument sounds are a bit odd to my ear, which is one of the primary reasons we stopped plugging in. Nevertheless, this was one of our first times on a big stage, and it was fun. Portions of the set sound reasonably competent, others are agonizingly unlistenable. This track is (I hope) the former.

Mister T. Ryan Fisher sings lead on the Gershwin classic.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Here’s a live interpretation of the Rolling Stones classic, “Dead Flowers,” from our record release show at The Hideout last month. It’s faster and spunkier than the version on Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals, largely due to a combination of nervous energy and adrenaline.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You can download the whole show at archive.org.

Blind Alfred Reed recorded this in New York City, just weeks after the 1929 stock market crash. His recording career began two years earlier in Bristol Tennessee, discovered in the same series of sessions that produced the first recordings by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. Reed was 47 at the time of the sessions.

While Reed’s anthem captures the zeitgeist of the dawn of the Great Depression, his career couldn’t survive the subsequent collapse of the record industry in the early 1930s. This was to be his last session. He lived out the rest of his life in Tennessee and West Virginia, and died in 1956.

Reed sings and provides his own fiddle accompaniment.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Courtesy of archive.org

Bob Dunn is rightly revered as the Ur source of Western Swing steel guitar, owing to his work with Milton Brown’s Musical Brownines in Ft. Worth in the mid 1930a. Dunn cut his first sides with Brown in Chicago, 1935, and cut dozens more with the group until Brown’s death in April of the following year. He was among the first musicians to record with an electric guitar, but Dunn’s work has significance well beyond that. He was an unusually sophisticated soloist whose elegant and languid melodic style helped establish the electric steel guitar as de rigeur in country music.

Dunn recorded in Houston under his own name, with a group that was essentially Cliff Bruner’s Texas Wanderers. He had some notable sidemen for the session (not least of which was another pioneer of electrified string music, electric mandolinist Leo Raley), and they recorded some solid sides of their own. Moon Mullican sings lead on this one.

The personnel:

• Bob Dunn, electric steel guitar
• Leo Raley, electric mandolin
• Mancel Tierney, piano
• Hezzie Bryant, string bass
• “Fritz” Kehm, drums
• “Moon” Mullican, vocal

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Courtesy of Archive.org