I came across this photo, circa August 1997, when I was cleaning out some old files. Howard (’Louie Bluie’) Armstrong was a mandolinist I admired enormously, from his early recordings with the unfortunately named Tennessee Chocolate Drops to his later work with Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong, and as a solo artist. His recording of State Street Rag should be required listening for every mandolinist.

Terry Zwigoff (of Crumb, Ghost World, and Bad Santa fame) made his first foray into film making with a documentary of Armstrong called ‘Louie Bluie’. Sadly, it’s not in print on DVD in the US, and VHS copies can be hard to come by.

The Stradivarius of mandolins is this Stradivarius mandolin, one of two known examples. It’s in the collections of the University of South Dakota. With ten gut strings and what appear to be oud-like frets, it’s a markedly different instrument from the contemporary mandolin, which is largely based on the work of Orville Gibson.

It’s signed and dated Antonio Stradivario in Cremona 1680, which would place it twenty years into his career as an instrument maker, but still almost another two decades before his ‘golden age’ of 1698-1720.

In addition to mandolins, he apparently made some fiddles.

I’ll be playing mandolin with the Golden Horse Ranch Square Dance Band for their annual square dance blowout. The dance is at 9pm at 2000 W. Fulton in Chicago. The GHRSDB are good folks. We shared a flatbed truck at the Hideout’s Day in the Country this past summer.

Annie Coleman from the GHRSDB is a third-generation square dance caller, and she’ll be calling the dances all night.

I believe there’ll be copies of this beautiful show poster available for purchase at the show.

I’m listening to the roughs from our session with Mike Hagler on the 20th of October, and liking what I hear. One of the songs we tracked was a little fiddle tune I wrote a few months ago called The Takeup Reel. We weren’t especially happy with any of the takes we got of the tune that day (I think we were all somewhat weary from our gigs the night before), but we like the tune enough to take another crack at it next session.

It’s a simple little two-strain fiddle tune in A. The first strain uses a flat III chord to stretch the tonality a wee bit, while the second strain uses a more typical borrowed flat VII chord. I used my newly acquired copy of Finale to spit out a lead sheet for it. Sorry, no tab. Learn to read music already.

The Takeup Reel sheet music (PDF)

Here’s an excerpt (a rough mix) of one of the rejected takes. It’s not bad, really, just a little sloppier than we’d like. This is one of the first times I’ve used my resonator mandolin in a recording session. It sounds pretty decent, though I suspect that I’ll wind up leaning on my old F-2 when it comes time to cut this tune again. This was cut live with Mike at King Size, with the band gathered in a circle in the live room.

The Takeup Reel (MP3)

Here’s a great Planxty clip from 1974 with a wonderful Christy Moore vocal and some very sensitive mandola accompaniment from Andy Irvine.

Here’s an interesting bit on the mandola from Andy Irvine’s web site:

Classicly, a mandola should be tuned way down to CGDA but I always thought this stupid with a Gibson because it didn’t have a big enough body, nor a long enough string length to cope with the hawser-like strings required. So I thought it logical–as it was two frets longer than a mandolin– to tune it a tone lower, using mandolin strings. So I tune it FCGC (I nearly always have the top string tuned down a tone)

More prewar goodness from the folks at Juneberry78s.com… Ted Hawkins was one of the great mandolin stylists in early country music. His playing adorns some of the late Skillet Lickers recordings, but his most exciting recording may well be this pairing with Skillet Lickers guitarist Riley Puckett.

Puckett is, of course, the gold standard of old-timey guitarists. He sounds freer on this than on perhaps any recording I’ve heard of his. There are some very impressive bass runs and some nice chromaticism in his accompaniment. (There is also what appears to be an uncharacteristic flub from Puckett at the start of the fourth repetition.) And Hawkins was a worthy counterpart, an unusually dexterous old-timey mandolinist. His playing is fast, nimble, and energetic.

The tune is a fairly standard folk rag, with one strain starting on the tonic and sounding not unlike the Fiddler’s Reel (except for the ragtime turn), and the other starting on the dominant and sounding not unlike State Street Rag. It is distinguished, however, by the the quality of the performance, which is exceptional.

Hawkins Rag (MP3)
Courtesy of Juneberry78s.com. Please consider purchasing one of their CD-R or DVD-R compilations of old-time 78s and radio shows.

The excellent site Juneberry78s.com has an extensive listening room with a vast collection of prewar music from a wide variety of genres. The collection of old-time country music is impressive.

It includes a favorite track of mine that has seldom been reissued: The Roanoke Jug Band’s Johnny Lover. The tune is a simple fiddle tune in D with short 4-bar strains. The Jug Band seems to be throughly devoid of a juggist. Try as I may, I can’t hear any jug on the recording. There is, however, some very fine fiddling, rock solid Riley Puckett-esque guitar accompaniment, and some pretty nifty mandolin as well. The energy of the piece is fantastic–it could go on forever.

There’s a transcription of the tune in my now out-of-print, wildly unpopular book.

Johnny Lover (MP3)
Courtesy of Juneberry78s.com. Please consider purchasing a CD-R or DVD-R from them.

I used to play in a jug band down in Champaign called the Cornlikkers, who played together for about two years before we all scattered. Toward the end of our time together, we were invited to perform on the local CBS affiliate, WCIA, the TV home of downstate Illinois’ only full-time radio meteorologist.

The tune is Ginseng Blues, which Tangleweed recorded in a similar fashion, on our second record. On this version, though, there’s yodeling in all the solo breaks, and Ryan Jerving is a much better yodeler than I. There’s a basically inaudible mandolin solo in the middle.

The lineup:

• Ryan Jerving: baritone ukulele and vocals
• Bill Whitemer: banjo ukulele and vocals
• Riley Broach: Bass
• Edward Burch: guitar and vocals
• Kenneth Rainey: mandolin and vocals
• Jim “Jugs” Randall: jug

Like so many of the other great juggists of the 20th Century, Jim Randall was classically trained. We could pair him with our backup juggist, Jerry, for the “jugs-a-plenty” rhythm section, and have them play Bach two part inventions.

All the folks at WCIA were great. After we finished playing, one of the newscasters excitedly played Mike Ditka’s amazingly punk rock performance of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a rare treat in those halcyon pre-YouTube days. We got to rub elbows with the aforementioned full-time radio meteorologist. And our performance was followed by a story about a man and his pet fish, a wild 16-inch largemouth bass that would come when called:

“Do you have a name for him?”
“No. Just fish is all.”

This performance was transfered from an old VHS tape, so the audio is not great. My apologies.