New Clawhammer Banjo Book

Ragged but Right: The Ungentle Art of Clawhammer Banjo

A Celebration of America's Greatest Multicultural Musical Creation

Bump Ditty Press 2012

By Rick Jackofsky

I just published a new book about clawhammer banjo. Ragged but Right: The Ungentle Art of Clawhammer Banjo.

I had a lot of down time in February so I decided to organize the print-outs I usually hand out to my banjo students. I thought I would just staple a few sheets together to hand out at a clawhammer banjo workshop I will be presenting in Barington, Rhode Island on March 31st, but I got carried away and ended up with a 40 page, 8 1/2 X 11, perfect bound book. Topics covered include practical music theory, clawhammer banjo technique, resources, and some interesting historical notes from the instrument's ancient African roots through the twenty-first century.

Now Available Online, at Shows and at Workshops

Only $15.00 (+ $3.00 shipping)

Banjos, Murder, & Moonshine

For some reason it seems that banjo players have always had a fascination with murder. Is it because they are constantly being threatened with the possibility of meeting an untimely end, or maybe they are just a morbid group, who knows. In any case, solo clawhammer banjo and vocal seems to be the way to go when it comes to murder ballads. On July 29, 1927, in Bristol, Tennesee, at the same recording session that would launch the careers of The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, a banjo playing barber from Kentucky named B.F. Shelton recorded four tunes including two classic murder ballads. He chose the cheery "Pretty Polly," an Americanized version of the English murder ballad "The Cruel Ship's Carpenter," and the All American moonshine murder ballad "Darling Cora."  Doc Watson's neighbor, Tom (AKA Clarence) Ashley, recorded "Little Sadie" and "Naomi Wise" in 1929. The list goes on and on with murder ballads being prominently featured in the repertoires  of many early banjo players including Samantha Bumgarner, Dock Boggs, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and Buell Kazee. I've kept up the tradition by including "Pretty Polly," "Darling Corey," "John Hardy," and "Little Sadie" in my solo performances.

Several years ago I decided to write a new murder ballad, God knows there is no shortage of dastardly deeds to tell a terrible tale about. I decided to compose my murder ballad based on a murder that took place in Berlin, NY, in 1845. This was a time when banjos were just beginning to be manufactured commercially and the instrument of African origin was gaining popularity in mainstream America. I found the grisly details, along with a 24 verse broadside that was hawked at the execution of Henry G. Greene, in "New York State Folktales, Legends and Ballads" by Harold Thompson. Greene, who murdered his wife of one week, Mary Wyatt, with a lethal dose of arsenic, confessed to his terrible crime only after being found guilty and sentenced to hang. In a final act of repentance, Henry sang "Rock of Ages" as he stood upon the gallows. I borrowed some verses from the broadside, added some of my own along with a spooky sounding minor tune, to come up with my version of The Ballad of Mary Wyatt.

Listen to The Ballad of Mary Wyatt by Rick Jackofsky

Watch a video of Rick Jackofsky performing Pretty Polly

Buy the Mp3 or the book

The Ballad of Mary Wyatt

New York State Folktales, Legends and Ballads


Photo by Ed Neale

Rainy Afternoon

Looks like tomorrow is going to be a rainy Sunday afternoon, but that doesn't mean it has to be dreary. Don't stay home and watch Rainout Theater! Come on out to the Pearl River Library at 80 Franklin Avenue in Pearl River, NY and enjoy a great performance of traditional and original song and dance, by the Homegrown String Band.

The Homegrown String Band at the Pearl River Library

3pm - Sunday, June 12 - FREE Admission 

80 Franklin Avenue, Pearl River, NY  10965

(845) 735-4084 

Photo by Rick Jackofsky

Snow Shoveling Blues

The record snowfall in January gave me a sore back and a new song.

The Snow Shoveling Blues by the Homegrown String Band
January 29, 2011 - Mineola, NY

Solar Cooking in NY's Dark Days of December

When we were shopping for a solar oven last spring we finally settled on the Global Sun Oven. So far we have been very happy with it. It is very well made—the double walled construction (metal interior  and outer wall of plastic) seems to do a good job of retaining heat. During the warm spring and summer months the oven routinely reached temperatures of 350 degrees. Now that the days are getting shorter (dark by 4:30pm), and the sun angle is more acute, it is maxing out around 250 degrees. During the summer the effective cooking hours stretched from around 9am to 5pm, now we're down to about four hours of useful sunlight form around 10am to 2pm. The trees have lost their leaves, but with the lower angle of the sun we are still chasing the sunlight around the yard. In the summer the light would be blocked by the leafy canopy of trees, now it is blocked by tree trunks and neighboring houses. Today was a nice sunny day around 40 degrees, we baked an apple coffee cake. It will be interesting to see how the oven performs as the temperatures drop and the days get shorter. I think it would be pretty cool to wade out through the snow and pull out a steamy roast chicken.

Photo by Rick Jackofsky

2010 Hudson Valley Garlic Festival

This weekend we will be doing six sets, three each on Saturday and Sunday, at The Hudson Valley Garlic Festival. We (The Homegrown String Band) look forward to this festival all year! Everything about it (music, food, crafts) is first rate. It is also very professionally run by a great group of enthusiastic  garlic lovers. This year I'm planning on getting enough seed garlic for about a hundred plants. Last year I planted sixty and it looks like we will run out of the stinking rose around Christmas. If you are a garlic lover who has never made the pilgrimage to the HVGF you really owe it to yourself to make the trip. Tens of thousands of people will be enjoying everything garlic; from salsas and pestos to chocolate covered garlic and garlic flavored ice cream! We will be appearing on the Pavilion stage; alternating sets with the talented singer song writer and multi-instrumentalist Mark Rust. I expect we'll see our old friend Bruce the soundman again, too!

The Hudson Valley Garlic Festival

September 25 & 26,  2010

Cantine Field, Saugerties NY

Photo by Rick Jackofsky

Music, Apples, and Clean Living!

The Homegrown String Band will be busy this weekend with shows in NJ, PA, and NY. We have two library shows in New Jersey: Thursday, September 16, we will be at the North County Library in Clinton NJ; showtime at 7:00 pm. On Saturday, September 18, we will be  performing in the gazebo at the Catherine Dickson Hofman Library in Blairstown NJ at 6:30 pm.

We'll also be appearing at two festivals this weekend. On Friday, September 17, we will be returning to The Pennsylvania Sustainable Living & Energy Festival in Kempton PA where we'll be on the solar powered stage at 4:00 pm. We close out the weekend at The Apple Festival, which takes place at the Sherwood Jaynes House in Setauket NY on Sunday, September 19. We'll be there all day sharing the stage with our friends Larry Moser and Mary Nagin. The festival runs from 12-4 pm.

Maybe we will bake an apple pie in our solar oven when we get home!

 Global Sun Oven photo by Rick Jackofsky

Arvel Bird at the Shinnecock Pow Wow

Georgianne, Annalee, and I headed out east this morning to check out the 64th Annual Shinnecock Indian Pow Wow.  When the kids were younger we used to go every year, but with all the Homegrown String Band touring it's been several years since we last attended. We strolled around the grounds admiring the crafts and grabbed a bite to eat. There were some very interesting foods available; like buffalo, venison, and wild quail. We settled on Indian frybread tacos mostly because the line was short, but they were quite tasty. The traditional Aztec dancers and competitive fancy dancers are always fun to watch, but for me the highlight of the day was a performance by fiddler/flutist Arvel Bird. Arvel, of mixed Native American and Scottish descent, successfully blends his cultural heritage in his music. He seems equally at home playing a Celtic or traditional American fiddle tune as he is playing Native American flute music. Bird has released numerous genre bending recordings and won several Native American Music Awards. He's been performing everyday of the Pow Wow; if you haven't caught one of his sets you have one more chance, his last set will be at 10:45 Monday morning.

Photo by Rick Jackofsky

End of Summer & Time for Fall Festivals

Yesterday's gig went well. Kudos to James and Jamie Faith and their excellent sound crew for the great job they did providing a first class stage and professional sound. We got there just in time to see our friends Bob Wescott, Ken Korb, and Mike DiGeronimo do their set as the Tobacco Roadies. Their show included some classic blues and rockabilly as well as a generous helping of Bob's original tunes. Ken played a couple of tunes by himself and got to display his amazing harmonica virtuosity. The Homegrown String Band did their usual stellar job of entertaining the crowd, then we listened to Klyph Black and Rumor Has It do a set of great original tunes in the classic Rock 'n Roll mode. The final act, The Donna Godchaux Band, kept the crowd hoppin'. I listened to three or four Grateful Dead tunes (singer/guitarist Jeff Matson sounds uncannily like Jerry Garcia) and a cover of Gillian Welch's Tear My Stillhouse Down before we decided to pack it in for the day. We have a couple of weeks off now then we have a busy second half of September that will include The Pennsylvania Sustainable Living Festival, The Apple Festival in Setauket, NY, and The Hudson Valley Garlic Festival.

Didn't get to run much last week, but I started this week off with a 12 mile plus run through the trails of the RCA property in Rocky Point. This is a 5,500 acre parcel that at one time was laced with towers and wires forming a giant antenna used to transmit and recieve trans-Atlantic radio signals by RCA and Marconi. RCA turned the land over to the state in the '70s and it is now controlled by the NY State DEC as part of the LI Pine Barrens Preserve. My run was about 60% narrow single track trails on varying terrain, winding through dense woodlands, and 40% wider flatter horse trails and fire roads running through more open areas. The single track portion of the run was on the first few miles of the Paumanok Path; a 125 mile hiking trail between Rocky Point and Montauk, NY. I decided to wear my belt pack and carry a 12 oz. bottle of water and a Clif Shot energy gel. I was glad I did. The temperature was around 80 degrees when I went into the woods, but was in the mid nineties when I emerged, with an empty water bottle, an hour and half later.

Photo by Rick Jackofsky

Garlic Scape Harvest Time

This past week we harvested scapes off the 60 garlic plants that sprouted from the cloves I planted in the fall. The scape is the flower stalk and bud of the garlic plant. According to conventional wisdom, breaking off the stalk as soon as it starts to curl will encourage the development of bigger, tastier garlic bulbs. There is some debate on if and when the scapes should be removed. Some say that though the bulbs will be a bit smaller, they will store better if the scape is left on longer. We decided to go for bigger bulbs figuring we will use them quick enough. Another benefit to removing the scapes is they are quite tasty themselves. We roasted some scapes with olive oil, salt and pepper in our solar oven and they were delicious. The taste and texture was kind of like a cross between garlic and string beans.

Photo by Rick Jackofsky

37 Hours on the Road

Maps, Shubb capos & Blue Chip guitar picks: "Tools of the Trade"

This weekend we made a quick trip to New Jersey and Maryland. We were only gone for 37 hrs, but we covered over 700 miles! Driving through a couple of disaster areas, over flooded waterways, through driving rain, power outages, and hurricane force winds. Here's how we spent our 37 hrs on the road. 14 hrs driving, 5 hrs setting up/breaking down, 8 hrs sleeping, 6 hrs visiting our friends Joe and Dottie in Bethlehem, PA, 1 hr lost to the spring ahead time change, and 3 hrs of playing music. All in all a pretty typical two days on the road. Those three hours of playing and our visit were great. Two good sized and attentive audiences, despite the nasty weather, in Chester, NJ, and Hagerstown, MD.

Next weekend it's another quick road trip. This time we will be heading north to Walpole, MA, and Pomfret, CT. Friday night we will be at The Dog Rock Coffeehouse in Walpole and Saturday night at The Vanilla Bean Cafe in Pomfret. Try and catch a show and say hey to the Travelin' Homies if you can. This weekend will close out a month that saw The Homegrown String Band visit 6 states: NY, NJ, CT, PA, MA, and MD.

Road tip of the day: Shubb Capos, Blue Chip Picks, and Rand McNally Atlas—don't leave home with out 'em!

Photo by Rick Jackofsky

Diggin' the Snow

Took a Break From Shoveling to Take a Few Photos
&
Play a Few Tunes

Life is Hard, But It's Good!

Click to listen to "Life is Hard" and other Homegrown ditties! 

Photo by Rick Jackofsky 

Praying for Haiti

Our prayers and well wishes go out to the people of Haiti suffering from the effects of a massive earthquake. This catastrophe deals yet another blow to the people of one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Hopefully the U.S. and other neighboring countries will hasten to their aid; extending a helping hand to the people of Haiti in their time of need.

Donate to the

American Red Cross Haitian Relief Fund

Photo by Rick Jackofsky

Praying For Spring

Baby it's cold outside! If this keeps up we're

gonna get a ton of snow this year! This early winter weather reminds me of the year I wrote "Praying  for Spring." It was getting pretty deep into a particularly hard winter, cabin fever had set in and I was dreaming about summer festivals and homegrown tomatoes. With the downturn in the economy, this song has taken on a new significance, offering hope to people who have been struggling through hard times. In response to these hard times we, The Homegrown String Band, have slashed prices on all our CDs. The new recession busting price is just $10 each!

To hear "Praying For Spring" and other HGSB streaming music
click here

To download a FREE Mp3 version of "Praying for Spring"
click here
Sleeping Gnome photo by Rick Jackofsky

Hudson Valley Garlic Festival

In 1989, Pat Reppert, AKA The Goddess of Garlic, a Hudson Valley herb farmer (Shale Hill Farm and Herb Gardens) organized the first Garlic Festival held in the Hudson Valley—and perhaps on the first on the East Coast. The Hudson Valley Garlic Festival, a celebration in honor of "the stinking rose," has been a Homegrown String Band fall favorite for the last 4 years. Every year we look forward to the food, music, crafts, and good people we will be enjoying on the last weekend of September in Saugerties, NY. This festival is a real class act; everything about it is top notch, and it's no wonder up to 50,000 garlic lovers from around the country attend each year. The weather was not great this year, but the festival was still very well attended. As usual, we came home with 15 or 20 lbs. of various varieties of organically grown garlic, including some seed garlic that I'll be planting in the next few weeks. If you attend the HVGF you will be able to sample an amazing array of garlic and garlic-flavored products like roasted garlic, garlic ice cream, garlic pretzels, chocolate covered garlic, garlic scape guacamole, garlic salsa, and garlic shots (better than flu shots!), as well as 10 bands performing, everything from bluegrass to zydeco, continuously on 5 stages scattered throughout the park. Be there in 2010, we will!

Garlic Photo by Rick Jackofsky

Fun in the Sun: Solar Powered Sound & Music Blowing in the Wind

 

ATECH Wind Turbine - photo by Rick Jackofsky

We just got back from a three day "mini tour" of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. We performed at libraries in Princeton and Flemington NJ and at the Pennsylvania Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Festival in Kempton PA.  At the Energy Festival we played on a really cool, solar powered stage with sound provided by Crow Weaver. His solar collectors, batteries, and DC powered amps provided enough power to fill the air with music throughout the day. Crow also played sax, guitar, and flute with his band, The Native Earthling Band, an eclectic outfit that performed jazz, rock, folk, and jamband music. All in all it was a great day, beautiful weather, good music, children's activities, vendors selling organic food and produce, crafts, native plants, and, of course, wind, solar, and other alternative energy products. Throughout the day lecturers provided festival goers with information on the politics, economics, and technologies of alternative energy and sustainable living. The day was capped off with a performance by saxophonist Paul Winter and the Makoto Taiko Japanese drummers. All in all this was a really nice and very well run little festival.

Highly recommended by The Homegrown String Band 

"A 100% Natural Organically Grown Family Band"

"Guitar Hero"
Les Paul Passes

Another music legend passed this week. On August 13, 2009, Guitar virtuoso and music visionary Les Paul died at the age of 94. Famous for his duets with Mary Ford and, of course, inventing the solid body electric guitar, Les Paul also changed the way music is recorded and listened to by pioneering the use of multitrack recording. This was the first step in the evolution of music being created in the studio rather than just being captured by a recording device. When electronic recording technology was originally made possible by the Western Electric Company's invention of the microphone, the idea was to replicate the sound of a live performance. Now digital technology, with sampling and audio cut and pasting, has evolved to the point that there is no live performance and musicians performing live strive to duplicate music created in the studio rather than the recording process duplicating the sound of a live performance.

There has been a bit of a backlash to the digital music manufacturing. More and more venues insist on seeing a band perform live, or at least reviewing a live audio or video performance, before booking to be sure they are going to get the performance they want and expect. There is also a movement known as "Real Stereo"  promoting the use of recording music using a "live" 2 mic true stereo process.

So far all of The Homegrown String Band's CDs have been recorded "live" in the studio. We record one or two takes of each song with all of us playing at the same time, but recorded on separate tracks so that the volume and EQ can be adjust to optimize the sound of each instrument. Basically what a good sound man would do at a live performance. In the end I think we usually sound better live than on our recordings because we are more spontaneous and we can feed of the energy of the audience and bounce off each other. There is also less pressure to get it "right," which ironically means we are much more likely to get it right.

However you look at it, Les Paul's innovations have had a huge and lasting impact on the way music is performed and preserved.

Vaya con Dios mi amigo!

A 21 Jaw Harp Salute to Mike Seeger

Mike Seeger goes to the West

Last week, while performing at the AFBA bluegrass festival in Wind Gap PA, we had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum. After their set we were back stage chatting and I asked Laurie about a song she had sung that has gone in and out of our repertoire over the years, "Going to the West." I had learned it in 2001 from Joe Herrmann of the Critton Hollow String Band when he and his brother John were house guests in our humble abode. I had often wondered about the origins of the song, but hadn't been able to dig up any historical background. Laurie told me she had learned it from Mike Seeger, who learned it from his sister Peggy, who learned it from a book called "Folk Songs of Alabama." So the mystery was solved, or at least I got a really good clue. Laurie also informed us, and the rest of the audience, that Mike was gravely ill. I knew that Mike had been battling cancer for a long time because when John Hartford passed in 2001 Mike revealed that he was suffering from a similar affliction. During our shows we often tip our hats to Mike and his work preserving traditional American music. During our show with Carlene Carter we made mention of his documentary film "Talking Feet" and told the audience that he had been ill and that we were praying for him. Sadly, after the show Mike Kornfeld of Acoustic Music Scene.com informed us that Mike had passed on Friday night. His passing is a huge loss to the traditional music community. Mike was an amazing musician. He played guitar, banjo, autoharp, jawharp, harmonica, panpipes, and fiddle. He was also an ethnomusicologist who had more to do with reviving interest in old time country music than anyone I know of. He introduced or reintroduced numerous traditional musicians, including Elizabeth Cotton and Dock Boggs, to audiences around the world. Though we never met him we did correspond, and Mike was always supportive and willing to dispense helpful advice. He was best known for his work with the revivalist group known as The New Lost City Ramblers, which he co-founded with John Cohen and Tom Paley in 1958. But it was his solo work that inspired me and served as a model for my early children's shows that in turn inspired my children to become interested in American folk music. I guess there would be no "Amazing" Annalee if I hadn't learned Mike's version of Fooba Wooba John and passed down the fine art of jawharp playing to my daughter. We are so greatfull to Mike for making oldtime musicians and their music available to us. His presence will be missed, but his musical legacy will be with us forever. Mike leaves behind a huge body of work that includes, books and video as well as his wonderful discography of old-time music.

Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger's Life and Musical Journey

Old Time Country Music by Mike Seeger

Southern Banjo Sounds 

Jaw Harp Photo by Rick Jackofsky