Word: banjo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Folk songs are too big to be tied down to one meaning. A striking example was Seeger's opening selection, a simple little banjo piece called Little Birdie, which he collected from Coon Creek, Kentucky...
...lanky banjo plucker brought the evening to its emotional climax with a version of "Wasn't That a Time" when he declared (in song) that everything in my life attests to my loyalty...
...most agreeable and freest entertainments in Manhattan is, or was, to wander down to Washington Square in Greenwich Village on a warm Sunday afternoon and listen to the folk singers. There, on a good Sunday, ten or a dozen guitarists and banjo pickers will be roosting around the edge of a big, ugly fountain playing loudly or softly according to confidence and competition. The songs are love ballads and louder lieder, seditious of maidenly morals and bankerly riches (not because the minstrels hate capitalists or, in some cases, like maidens, but merely because good ballads in praise of chastity...