Word: banjo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pure cream: Dave Brubeck and Count Basie on the ivories, Pete Fountain on the clarinet, Jack Brokensha on the vibes, and Cannonball Adderley, the meanest alto sax this side of Basin Street. The cats in the crowd yowled for all of them. But they also cheered for a bulky banjo player, clad in a cleric's cassock, who sat in the midst of a stripe-blazered combo and lined out Bill Bailey and Paddlin' Madeleine Home with minstrel zest and skill. This improbable jazz musician was Father John Joseph Dustin. 45, a Redemptorist priest, who has been strumming...
...Detroit Father Dustin is as well known for his accomplishments on the banjo as he is for his work at the city's Holy Redeemer Church. Songs Father Taught Me, a record album that he cut with his own Dixieland combo of six lay musicians, is the fastest-selling disk in town (more than 5,000 to date). Says Marvin Jacobs, general manager of Detroit's Music Merchants, Inc., Father Dustin's distributor: "In the language of the record industry, he's got it in the groove...
...were busy taping enough bluegrass tunes to enable them to leave their daily radio show for one of their frequent concert tours. On the road, dressed in black jackets, red string ties and white Stetson hats, they scramble frantically through Foggy Mountain Special, Randy Lynn Rag, Polka on the Banjo, Shuckin' The Corn, giving each piece the knuckle-cracking momentum and the curiously high-pitched, pinging tone that is the mark of bluegrass style. For a dramatic finisher, Flatt may lift his nasal, sowbelly voice in an enduring country hit named Give Me Flowers While I'm Living...
...Nashville, Tenn., one of the local mills advertises a self-rising ingredient for flour and meal known as Hot Rize. For the past nine years, the fortunes of Hot Rize have been rising with a couple of hillbillies-Banjo Player Earl Scruggs and Guitarist Lester Flatt-whose musical style on Grand Ole Opry is uncannily like the gassy product they represent on the show. Scruggs and Flatt are the country's leading practitioners of a particularly corny style of country music known as "bluegrass." And, thanks in large measure to the efforts of the twanging pair, bluegrass is enjoying...
What distinguishes bluegrass is 1) the fact that all instruments are unamplified (folk fanciers have long deplored the siren-wailing electric guitars of less authentic country singers), and 2) the employment of a five-string banjo technique known affectionately as "pickin' scruggs." This technique, which moved one astigmatic observer to compare Scruggs's achievement on the banjo to Paganini's on the violin, involves a clawlike motion with thumb and two fingers that serves to transform the banjo player from a plunk-plunking accompanist into a virtuoso soloist. Nobody has heard anything to equal it, says...