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| | Southern Banjo Sounds | | | Music Artist : | | Mike Seeger | | Music Style : | | General | | Record Label : | | Smithsonian Folkways | | Release Date : | | 1998-09-15 | | Store Price : | | $16.98 | | Artistopia's Price: $16.98 | | Usually ships in 24 hours | | |
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CD Tracks/Songs
Disc 11. Soon in the Morning Babe
2. Josh Thomas's Roustabout
3. Jim Crack Corn
4. Darling Cora
5. Devil's Dream
6. Little Birdie
7. Around the World
8. Whoopin' Up Cattle
9. Flop Eared Mule
10. Lost Gander
11. Sailor and the Soldier
12. American Spanish Fandango
13. Got No Silver Nor Gold Blues
14. We're Up Against It Now
15. That's What the Old Bachelor's Made Out Of
16. Last of Callahan
17. Lady Gay
18. Down South Blues
19. Last Night When My Willie Come Home
20. Wabash Blues
21. Bright Sunny South
22. Roll on John
23. Needlecase
24. Come My Little Pink
25. Battle in the Horseshoe
26. I'm Head Over Heels in Love
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Other Artist Albums
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Customer Reviews of This Album/CD |
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 "For sickness and death I intend to prepare"
Submitted on: 2009-08-10 |
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One great musician, many banjos. Think of this as a Tone Poems or Tone Poems III: The Sounds of the Great Slide & Resophonic Instruments with banjos and vocals, had Mike ever made a Tone Poems.
Sadly, last night I heard Mike Seeger died on 8/7/09. From my favorite version of Jim Crack Corn whose banjer tone and loping, buoyant pace has always felt like it should be on Minstrel Banjo Style, to the wicked, creepy beauty of the vocals/lyrics and the tone Mike pulls from the 2-drone banjo on Whoopin' Up Cattle, this is the real deal. Whoopin' Up Cattle is based on the Old Chisholm Trail on Deep River of Song: Black Texicans - Balladeers And Songsters Of The Texas Frontier.
Notes To Wandering Deadheads and Garcia/Grisman Fans: In Little Birdie you'll hear a lyrical strain that made its way into Box of Rain. Bright Sunny South is not Sweet Sunny South. Where Sweet Sunny South is a Stephen Foster-type of minstrelsy lyric with an African-American reminiscing about how good the South had been to her/him, Bright Sunny South comes from a boy about to be a Confederate soldier, telling us and his family why he has to fight. The only times I've ever felt any sympathy for the Confederate Cause I've been listening to this beautiful, haunting song and performance. Such is the power of music. Such was the power of Mike Seeger.
As I said before, this album is banjo and vocals. Yes we have everything from gourd and frame banjos to Dock Boggs' 1928 Gibson Mastertone, but don't forget the vocals. This Lady Gay has always overflowed with tragic beauty but man it hurts even more in this last day now that Mike just died.
After getting this, you can compare/contrast Mike's Wabash Blues with the one he mentions in the liner-notes which was later released on In Sacred Trust: The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes, another essential disc.
Battle in the Horseshoe is partially in a Chinquapin Pie vein and very much has one of those definitive mountain tune types of feelings.
What else is there to say? Mike was no imitator. No collector and regurgitator of style. He never made music for museums, though he was as potent as the best history books you'll ever read. I'll always thank him for his endless curiosity, determination and ability to make everything his own. |
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The ultimate banjo CD
Submitted on: 2005-06-06 |
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Mike Seeger's has been devoted to traditional American and African American music for more than 50 years. This work catalogs many if not all of the chief southern banjo styles. It is a sharp refutation of the dogmatism that grips many old time banjo "experts" that old time banjo playing is simply one or another regional North Carolina or Virginia form of downpicking/clawhammer/frailing, and everything else is an afterthought.
This CD is here to show you that old time music contained every kind of mixture between finger style, clawhammer, and styles that combine the two. You get a rich appreciation and a real knowledge, and a lot of joy from hearing the creative power of the musics Black and white banjoists created before the 1950s.
There is not only recreation of old time favorites by the masters but innovation. On Dock Bogg's great "Down South Blues," instead of doing it in the stright picking style Dock used as he did on the NLCR's "Gone to the Country" Album in the 1950s, Mike plays slide on the banjo. He maybe carrying out what Boggs said toward the end of his life after he heard Mississippi John Hurt and other Black bluesmen of his own generation on the folk revival circuit. Boggs said if he had to do it all over again, he might have played some banjo, but he would have learned how to play guitar like John Hurt.
Mike takes you from the earliest forms of African American banjo styles, to bluegrass, and leaves many stops behind. Perhaps the ultimate would be to get the three video set of instruction Mike has made based on this same reprtoire where he explains how each song is played and gives the history of the many different banjos he played them on and often the history of the players he learned these tunes from.
Like everything Mike does, this CD would be completely enjoyable to someone who wasn't concerned with banjo history, banjo playing, old time history or anything else except hearing some nice home made music, songs that will make you cry, songs that will make you laugh, songs that will make you wonder, songs that will take you back, songs that will show you how modern times swept through the hills and the hollars and the hills and the plains of the South,still leaving banjos ringing |
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A banjo a novice
Submitted on: 2003-10-13 |
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| I used to think that banjos were only for bluegrass music. As I became intersted in learning to play the banjo, I learned that there were various kinds of banjo styles. Mike Seeger's CD gave me a exposure to different kinds of banjo styles. |
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Southern Banjo Sounds
Submitted on: 2001-05-22 |
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| This CD is a terrific piece of work on a least three levels. If you're a fan of American folk music, this CD is a solid collection of tunes and songs with deep traditional roots. Please note that I said "tunes and songs". Although the CD is titled "Southern Banjo Sounds", eighteen selections are banjo-accompanied songs; the remaining nine are instrumentals. So, on the first level this is a great selection of traditional and old-time music sung a played by one of it's mostly highly regarded contemporary performers. For the old-time banjo fan, there's a lot more. On this CD Mike Seeger explores and presents much of breadth of old-time banjo styles. The banjo styles range from African-based riffs to Scruggs-style bluegrass picking. Between those extremes are quite a few variations of the "frailing", "rapping", "downpicking" style, a variety of two-finger styles as well as a number of pre-bluegrass three finger styles. However, don't take the impression that this is some kind of dry academic presentation. It's not. It's a well selected program of highly enjoyable music. And, there's even more.The twenty-seven pieces are performed on twenty-six different banjos. The instruments range from a modern copy of a fretless banjo with a gourd head (a really plunky low-down sound) to the ubiquitous Gibson Mastertone (the sound that we're probably all familiar with) of early bluegrass. For the real hardcore old-time banjo folks, each selection is described in the excellent notes with the source(s) of the songs/tunes, a bit of information about the particular instrument used, the banjo tuning, and more. The only thing I don't understand is why this Grammy-nominated CD didn't win the award. |
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