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.

This is an uncommonly good piece of old-time mandolin playing. It is available on CD on the excellent collection Down in the Basement. According to that disc’s liner notes, the recording was by a pair of Knoxville musicians name Joe Evans and Arthur McClain. The two recorded for several labels under, as was the custom at the time, a variety of names. This was recorded for the Perfect label in May of 1931.

The relentless rhythmic drive and energy, the phrases that eat their own tails, this is just about perfect.

Old Hen Cackle (MP3)

Courtesy of Archive.org

Mandolinists always need more volume. Our instrument is not a loud one, and trying to keep up with banjos, fiddles, and guitars can be like tapdancing in a buffalo stampede. The tone-gard is a simple aftermarket way of increasing your volume. It clips onto the back of the instrument, pushing it away from the body and allowing the back of the instrument to vibrate freely. David Grisman, Ricky Skaggs, and Roland White are using them, which is as good a recommendation as any.

Many old mandolins, especially my old Gibson A-50, put as much sound out of the back of the instrument as they do the top. When recording my Gibson ‘A’, I sometimes have the engineer put a microphone behind the instrument as well as in front of it. My F-2 behaves similarly — it’s noticeably louder and fuller sounding if I let the sound come out of the back as well as the top of the instrument.

With that in mind, I’ve ordered a tone-gard for my F-2 from Tony Pires, and should have it in a few days. If it works well, I’ll likely use it when we record our next record. We prefer to track almost all the instrumental tracks live, and I’d much prefer to use my sweet-sounding F-2 rather than anything else.

I’m testing out some new mandolin strings made by a Canadian company called Fire Wire. I strung up my resonator mandolin with them for a two-set show tonight.

The wound strings are a little darker than the nickel strings I’m presently using. The gauges run from .010 to .036. I sometimes like to use a slightly gauges on the wound strings (.026 and .038), but that’s not that big a deal.

The strings settled in very quickly. Like DR’s, the Fire Wire strings are ‘pre-stretched’, so they stay in tune well right out of the package. They have a reputation for long life, though I won’t be able to verify that immediately, obviously.

So far, I’ve had none of the freaky problems I was having with Ernie Ball strings.

I still haven’t done anything to replace the tailpiece on my mandolin. My initial impression of it is that it was designed by sadists. After using the mando for the better part of eight months, and restringing it many times, I’ve found nothing to contradict that. It’s a brutal design. See my earlier post for more info. I’ve been using a cheap paperclip to hold the loop end on while I bring the string to tension, and that’s helped somewhat. I think the ideal solution is to buy a large quantity of cheap rubber washers with a very small inner hole and slide those over each of the pegs.

More mandoblog posts:
The Mandoblog

More goodness from Frank Ford’s Frets.com site. He shows two ways that a person can make a loop-end string in a pinch. The gizmo at right is a simple winder one can use to fashion custom strings from any gauge of wire. One could purchase a 200 foot spool of music wire for around 15 bucks and make nearly 100 strings from it.

He also demonstrates how one can safely remove the ball from a ball-end string, leaving only the loop.

In desperate times, we’ve done the opposite — used loop-end banjo or mandolin strings on the guitar. You can loop them around the bridge pin and use them just like a conventional string. Once the pin is in, it’s hard to tell the difference.

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Secret serial numbers on vintage Gibson mandolins