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.

We look forward to playing the Bucktown Apple Pie Contest every October. In anticipation of this year’s contest, we offer this footage of last year’s event, with some fine Tangleweed and pie-related footage.

Scott was a finalist the first year of the contest. Since then, though, the band members have only baked loser pies, bringing shame upon us all. For information on this year’s Apple Pie Contest, visit BucktownApplePieContest.com.

There’s a fellow on YouTube by the name of 78Man, who has posted over 800 videos of 78rpm records playing. The result is strangely compelling — like the yule log, but with better music.

One of the more appealing sides offered is the Sons of the Pioneers classic, Cool Water. The description says that this is a 1948 recording, but I think this is the version they recorded in Chicago on March 27th, 1941 for Decca. It was released on Brunswick’s English subsidiary, which would expain the label. Of course, I can’t see the catalog label to confirm this.

A free Dixie cup to the person who can count all the instances of the word ‘water’ in this recording.

Lake Shore Drive, that is. This latest driving and drumming video has our ‘With a Bottle in My Hand/ Farewell Blues’ medley as the soundtrack, and the view from the southbound lanes of Chicago’s most famous motorway providing the scenery.

More mysterious driving and drumming from the streets of Chicago. This time, the soundtrack comes from our second CD, the leadoff track, “Draggin’ the Bow”. I’m guessing this was shot under the Lake Street El tracks.

I just got a note from the auteur. Maybe we’ll have him sit in on the steering wheel sometime soon.

There’s not a lot of Delmore Brothers footage out there, but there are some good clips of other folks playing Delmore Brothers songs. Here’s Red Foley taking on one of their later songs: Freight Train Boogie. That’s Grady Martin playing the groovy Bigsby double-neck.

Ethnic stereotypes are on parade in this 1960s commercial, in which hillbilly cartoon characters guzzle caffeinated sugar water and play with firearms. The soundtrack uses the Bascom Lamar Lunsford tune Old Mountain Dew, and one of the characters sure sounds like Grandpa Jones.

Steve Martin’s banjo was more than a stage prop — he was is a solid Scruggs picker who rubbed shoulders with some of the greats. He reminisced rather, rather eloquently, about crossing paths with Doug Dillard in the cat-poem-free literary magazine The Oxford American:

The Dillards boasted the fastest and most thrilling banjoist alive, Doug Dillard. They played live in Orange County in those days, and watching Doug Dillard was like watching God, if God were a finger-picking madman. Doug, thin as a rail, had a grin that Lewis Carroll could describe, like a piano keyboard stuck on the end of a reed. But the sound of the banjo accelerating from zero to sixty in a nanosecond, in a town that had heretofore heard only the lazy folk guitar, made us freeze. Doug was generous, too, and he would teach us various licks (slang for finger and chord sequences).

So here the erstwhile Gern Blanston applies what he learned, dueling with the Muppets.