I just returned from a weekend at UCLA, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Ash Grove, a seminal music club in Hollywood. The LA Times has had several related articles, and I’m sure more information will be released over the next month. While there, I moderated a workshop titled “Hillbilly Fever”, on the Ash Grove and its very considerable influence on old time, folk, and bluegrass music in Southern California. We invited Mike Seeger, Tom and Patrick Sauber, Herb Peterson, Phil Borof, LeRoy McNees, and Roland White to come play and talk about their Ash Grove memories. I also hosted a bluegrass jam session with a lot of LA pickers and guest Roland White, former leader of the Kentucky Colonels.

Peter with Roland White and LeRoy McNees of the Kentucky Colonels. Photos by my friend Rita Weill Byxbe.

I imagine there are many people now a days that have never spent any time going through a major library’s card catalog.  Perhaps that’s a good thing.  I wiled away hours and whole days of my life in the UCSB library, researching bibliographies and such stuff back in the 60s when others were out playing poker, surfing, burning banks, and indulging other creative recreations.

Nevertheless, I grew to enjoy finding odds and ends in those immense card catalogs, finding things I hadn’t a clue existed anywhere in God’s creation. Things that made one stop and ponder, such as “The Barbed Wire Collector’s Journal”, complete with photos, descriptions, history,  and discussion of eighteen-inch strands of barbed (or bobbed) wire. I began to realise that for every topic I could think of, and some that I couldn’t, there existed a depth of knowledge that a card catalog could reveal to the unwary browser.

One of this country’s greatest treasures is the Library Of Congress, based -of course!- in Washington DC. I have friends back east that regularly take advantage of its facilities. I have managed one vist about 16 years ago and was sorry. Sorry because I was overwhelmed by all that great material - especially in its Folklore Dept. - which was unavailable to me on a regular basis, based as I am on the Left Coast. Now, computers and digital databases have replaced card catalogs and the ‘net has made it possible for all Americans to share some of the wonderful resources of what is now called the American Folklife Center. In the just-arrived Summer 2007 issue of the AFC News (as we know, the people in Washington work, live, and move in glacial terms) comes an article that announces the old card catalog once in use there has been digitized and made available on-line! What a great find and resource for thos eof us who still listen to the amazing collection of field recordings stored in the archives there.

CLICK HERE to enter the card catalog, and have fun browsing.

Today I was web browsing in order to put off finishing my taxes, and happened upon a great site authored by an old friend, Frank Ford.  He is one of the owners / founders of a fine music store in Palo Alto, Gryphon Stringed Instruments.  Frank also happens to be a fine luthier with a lot of useful hints on instrument upkeep, etc.

CLICK HERE   for short articles on:

An Introduction to Instrument Finishes
Advice on Cleaning Your Instrument
Illustrated Glossary
Vinyl is Your ENEMY
Troubleshooting and Repair
Playability and Setup
Structural Problems
Checking Action at the Nut
Looking at Cracks
Tune Up Your Gears
Loose Parts Can Rattle and Buzz
Looking at Frets.
Loose Screws? Fix ‘em Yourself
A Closer Look at Nuts
Buzz Diagnosis
Raising Nonadjustable Mandolin Bridges
Truss Rod Adjustment
Making a New Nut
Make Your Own Loop End Strings
Fixing Loose Tuner Bushings
Scooping the Fingerboard End
Mounting a New Fingerrest
Rebuilding a Collapsed Top
Refretting (F-5)

Whew!  You see what I mean…  I suppose the web is full of places with a closer look at nuts, but this one’s my favorite!  Check it out when you have some time, or a problem with one of your instruments.

From today’s edition of Wired (a digital news site):

“Having failed to stop piracy by suing internet users, the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users.

“In recent months, some of the major labels have warmed to a pitch by Jim Griffin, one of the idea’s chief proponents, to seek an extra fee on broadband connections and to use the money to compensate rights holders for music that’s shared online. Griffin, who consults on digital strategy for three of the four majors, will argue his case at what promises to be a heated discussion Friday at South by Southwest.”

——-
Piracy of music recordings is a huge problem for musicians and record labels. As a musician and a label owner, I am certainly aware of that. No one knows the final outcome of the current fiasco, but past and current efforts of the large corporations in the industry, beginning with the absurd Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the multi-thousand dollar lawsuits of individual file sharers, and other repressive actions have only made matters worse.  This new proposal plans to tax internet service providers a suggested fee of $5 / month per user!  The resultant money - millions of dollars per month - to be divided among the corporate music entities by formulas sinmilar to what ASCAP, BMI, etc. now use to divide royalty payments.

Now, this proposed surcharge would not apply only to those who belong to peer-to-peer file sharing networks, but to all internet users.  Griffin and cohorts claim that 20% of internet users illegally download music files.  So here we have a double-whammy:  most of us do not illegally download music files, yet we would be forced to pay a minimum of $60 a year in fees to cover the supposedly “lost” royalties to the music inductry giants.  At the same time, those of us who attempt to make a living in the music business as small independent artists and labels will, as usual, not see a dime of the surcharge money, since it is the big cats who will be in charge of the distribution.

I would urge anyone affected by this outrageous proposal to keep close track of developments in the next few weeks. This seems just another bold agttempt by the big corporations to rope off music income to themselves.

During the past two or three weeks, PBS has been showing the film “Pete Seeger: The Power Of Song” on its national network. I hope many of you have had a chance to see that, or if not, that you may have a friend who’s recorded it, because it provides a link to how bluegrass first entered a lot of city dwellers’ consciousness.

To a lot of city-dwellers, it was the brilliant, sparkling sound of “Scruggs-Style” banjo picking that first caught our ears, leading us through that low garden door through the barrier wall of pop music into the then-secret place called bluegrass. And it was Pete Seeger, now remembered mainly for his song leading political activism, that first brought Scrugg’s three-fingered banjo technique into our realm in his book “How To Play The Five-String Banjo”. Pete had fallen in love with the sound of a banjo from a 1936 visit to a folk festival in Asheville, North Carolina. There he found Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a local attorney and a complete mountain music fan who helped run the festival and played a mean two-fingered banjo roll himself. Bascom’s recording of “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground” is still one of my favorite banjo songs, and effectively disproves the adage that thirty lawyers, buried up to the necks at the bottom of the ocean is a good start.
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I recently came across a great article, very detailed, on the old King Records label, founded in the 1950s by the legendary Syd Nathan. The piece, by Cincinnati music critic and sometimes bluegrass bassist Larry Nager, covers the entirety of the spectrum of musical styles issued by King through the years, from blues, R&B, country, to bluegrass.  The Stanley Brothers’ album pictured above, King 719, Includes Finger-Poppin’ Time and How Mountain Girls Can Love.

Click here for the article’s URL. Once there, you may be asked for a username, e-mail address, and password. Type in anything you like,  but use the password: “yum”. It’s worth the effort!

I hope most of you got a chance to view the PBS American Masters showing of the new bio on Pete Seeger.  It was pretty nice, with glimpses into several facets of Pete’s musical career.  It also contained some rare video footage of old friends of mine, including Fred McDowell

(from Como, Mississippi) and Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers from St. Simon’s Island, Georgia.  If you missed it, watch for re-runs or take the time to rent the DVD, it’s highly recomended.

The first time I met Pete, I was living in Chicago and working at the Field Museum of Natural History - sort of nice going to a job in a Roman Temple located right on the lakefront.  By lucky accident, I had run into an old friend of Pete’s from WW II army days, Robert Parrish and his wife Dorothea, who had a house on Chicago’s north side near my one-room apartment.  Bob was a writer and magician, working with Pete entertaining the troops.  It was in the fall of 1961 that Bob, Dorothea, and I went to a concert billed as a Seeger family reunion, which included Pete, Penny, Peggy and Mike Seeger.  I still remember a night of great music, and being able to talk to Pete afterwards.  It was the Parrishes that told me about the newly-formed Old Town School of Folk Music which apparently is still going strong.  Music is about connections. . .

[Robert Parrish, writer and magician]

Two years later, I again encountered Pete at a folk festival at UC Berkeley, where he condicted workshops and was part of a show at that campus’ Greek Theater. Lots of fine music.

[Pete Seeger at the Greek Theater, Berkeley]