An Instruction Method for playing the old-time five-string mountain banjo based on the styles of traditional banjo-pickers.

A complete survey of traditional banjo styles complete with tunings, playing tips, and the author's deft drawings. Progresses from easy tunes for the beginner to more difficult pieces. The styles include up-picking or Pete Seeger's basic strum; two-finger picking; three-finger picking; and what had variously been called frailing, clawhammer, knocking, rapping, overhand, fram-style, flayin' hand, andother Appalachian names, here called down-picking. Audio download available online

Art Rosenbaum is one of America's foremost performers and teachers of traditional five-string banjo playing. He has a long-time interest in the myriad old-time tunings that give breadth and richness to mountain and old-time banjo picking, and has learned first-hand from old-timers in the South and Midwest. Pete Seeger (whose pioneering book How to Play the Five-String Banjo gave Art his start in the 1950s) praised the inclusion of 23 tunings in Art's 1968 Oak Publications book Old-Time Mountain Banjo. This book and 2-DVD set doubles (plus one!) that number of tunings. Art groups the tunings into families and shows how they can be used, with various picking styles, in playing banjo tunes and string band music and in song accompaniment. Experienced players will broaden their knowledge of unusual and interesting tunings and styles, and novice players can get started with common tunings for easy pieces like Cripple Creek and Shout Lulu, the first tunes many old-timers learned.

BanjoCraft is a brief look at banjo making in the small shop. This book is intended to to be accessible to banjo people and wood workers of all skill levels. BanjoCraft contains 50+ full color photos and 46 pages of detailed banjo making knowledge. BanjoCraft guides the reader through the process of making an open back banjo, from raw wood to a finished instrument. It focuses on building techniques and considerations that are specific to banjo making and does not delve deeply into sub-topics such as fretwork, inlay, or how to use a protractor. In composing this book it was our goal to provide general considerations, instructions, and techniques while encouraging the reader to get to work in the shop and cultivate experience of their own.

In the summer of 1972, a group of young people in Bloomington, Indiana, began a weekly gathering with the purpose of reviving traditional American old-time music and dance. In time, the group became a kind of accidental utopia, a community bound by celebration and deliberately void of structure and authority. In this joyful and engaging book, John Bealle tells the lively history of the Bloomington Old-Time Music and Dance Group -- how it was formed, how it evolved its unique culture, and how it grew to shape and influence new waves of traditional music and dance. Broader questions about the folk revival movement, social resistance, counter culture, authenticity, and identity intersect this delightful history. More than a story about the people who forged the group or an extraordinary convergence of talent and creativity, Old-Time Music and Dance follows the threads of American folk culture and the social experience generated by this living tradition of music and dance.

This friendly book is filled with clawhammer banjo instruction, tablature, lyrics, tune histories, chords, playing tips, vintage photos, and more. Includes such classid oldtime tunes as, Soldier's Joy; Cluck Old Hen; Arkansas Traveler; Leather Britches; Mississippi Sawyer; Chicken Reel; Shady Grove; Red Rocking Chair; John Henry; Uncle Joe; Little Rosewood Casket; the State of Arkansas; Hogeye; the Old Spinning Wheel; and When You and I Were Young Maggie. A companion recording, Southern Mountain Classics, is available on CD.