tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4821243838031243709.post2949024034663353589..comments2023-11-05T04:15:44.564-08:00Comments on Robert Frost's Banjo: "Country Blues"Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15687192784861682991noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4821243838031243709.post-20928705372510799622012-02-06T11:02:42.155-08:002012-02-06T11:02:42.155-08:00Hi Roy & Dick: Truly sorry to be so late in re...Hi Roy & Dick: Truly sorry to be so late in responding--a very busy weekend, including a show Friday night.<br /><br />Roy: Yes, Boggs' sound is archaic, primordial, even chthonic! I'd say that he of any white artist, with the possible exception of Clarence Ashley, most typifies the "Old Weird America" sound that Marcus wrote about--& I'd certainly put him up there w/Patton & Skip James & others.<br /><br />Dick: It truly is an odd tuning, & I wish I knew the history behind it. I can't say for sure that Boggs came up with it--certainly, as such things go the odds may be against that, since I tend to believe the "nothing new under the sun" paradigm--but from what little research I've done, I could find no one else who used it in an old-time recording. It's 2 notes off the "Graveyard Tuning,"" which Boggs used a lot--that tuning is an open D, tho made a bit more modal by having the third, F#, as the drone string--these days when the bluegrass folks play open D they tend to have A as the drone string. Graveyard=f#DF#AD, so the change down to the C & up to the G complicates things a good bit as you can see. I've tried to mess around in that tuning & find it quite challenging!Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15687192784861682991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4821243838031243709.post-48812982421766555862012-02-03T06:10:11.527-08:002012-02-03T06:10:11.527-08:00That's a weird tuning indeed, John. What a wor...That's a weird tuning indeed, John. What a work of musical sophistication is the devising of a radical non-standard tuning. It's easy to conceive of Davy Graham experimenting in a West London bed-sit with time on his hands and coming up with DADGAD. Another altogether to imagine a sharecropper home from the fields after a dawn-to-dusk day serving the man reaching for a banjo and coming up with F#CGAD! I guess all those Sunday hours in church absorbing the cadences of modal singing (as in 'Oh Death') must have saturated the senses and provided plenty of material for contemplation out there on the land. These musicians black and white constantly surprise, enchant and dazzle, don't they?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4821243838031243709.post-67319966423384690392012-02-03T05:57:24.052-08:002012-02-03T05:57:24.052-08:00Wow! That was amazing! That one certainly points r...Wow! That was amazing! That one certainly points right back to Senegal and the other areas that used to be within the boundaries of the old Malian Empire. The melodic structure and the banjo accompaniment sound exactly like the old griots singing the family history and plucking the kora; you could play this side by side with some of the stuff Foday Musa Sosu was doing when he first came to America and you'd be hard-pressed to figure out which was which. Great post, John!Royhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01648670975466222140noreply@blogger.com