Old-Time Music Links

RECORDINGS: There are some great sites for listening to old time music on the web. A tremendous source of vintage old time music is Jeremy Stephen's Soggy Record Cabinet, which has digital files of a vast number of out of print old-time and early bluegrass vinyl albums, including the Home Folks (with two finger legend Will Keys), both J.E. and Wade Mainer, the Bailes Brothers, fiddler Allen Sisson, Arthur Smith, and many others. For banjo, check out the great MP3 files on the Jukebox and members homepages on the Banjo Hangout. There are a growing number of fiddle MP3s being posted by members of the Fiddle Hangout, sister site to the Banjo Hangout, where you can hear a wide variety of styles and regions. There is a terrific webpage from some folks in Seattle, posted for an old time stringband class, featuring the playing of Greg and Jere Canote and Candy Goldman. They play fiddle and banjo duets- lots of great old-time tunes- at a pace fast enough to enjoy but slow enough to hear all the notes! The accompanying banjo tabs are for clawhammer, but they will give you a starting point. Leo McDermott's fiddletunes.net has solid renditions of about 190 tunes, all well known and often played. Atlanta neurologist and banjo picker Josh Turknett has put up a great site called The Old Time Jam,with lots of old times tunes. Select the Fiddle and Banjo playlist from the The Old Time Machine.

For some great field recordings of old-time fiddlers, check out the Henry Reed webpage, Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier, which is part of the Library of Congress American Memory project. The Digital Library of Appalachia, a project sponsored by a dozen Kentucky college and university libraries, contains dozens of field recordings of old-time fiddlers and banjo pickers. For fans of Jeff Titon's great annotated collection, Old Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes, the source tunes have been posted on-line by fiddler Larry Warren. This includes recordings of John Morgan Salyer, Doc Roberts, Hiram Stamper, Clyde Davenport, and many others. Some of these recordings are also available in the Digital Library of Appalachia collection (see above), but it is nice to have them all in one place. Not long ago I purchased a copy of The Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes, the enormous volume of tune transcriptions by Claire Milliner and Walt Koken. There are over 1,400 tunes in the collection, presented in strandard notation. Now, the original source recordings used by the authors is available for download on-line in MP3 format, from a site called Slippery Hill, assembled by fiddler and tune collector Larry Warren, along with the source recordings for two other collections. This is an incredible resource for anyone interested in Applachian fiddle tunes, and the one I use the most these days.

FIDDLE TRANSCRIPTIONS & MIDI: There are quite a few great sites with fiddle tune transcriptions in musical notation and/or MIDI files, which can be a great help when trying to remember how a tune goes, or to figure out the notes in a particularly difficult phrase. John Chambers' is the author of the misnamed JC's ABC Tune Finder, since he also offers the tunes in PDF, GIF, and other formats. A British site called A Traditional Music Library has a great page of Traditional Old-Time Music of America, with scores, and MIDI in slow, medium and fast speeds. Another great site is Peter Doyle's Fiddle Tunes from Bernie Waugh, taken from Waugh's collection "282 Fiddle Tunes." The Charlotte Folk Society has put up music transcriptions with MIDI and MP3 files for 33 of the tunes played at their Post Gathering Slow Jam. And last but not least, for excellent, comprehensive background notes recorded sources for a whole slew of tunes, many with the melodies in abc format, check out Andrew Kuntz's encyclopedic reference guide, the Fiddler's Companion. This is the site I use the most.

VIDEO: One of the best resources on the net for watching and listening to old time music is YouTube. Just type in the name of the tune you are looking for in the search box, and almost always a whole bunch of vids will pop up. Here, as an example, is the result for Abe's Retreat, the first- and fairly obscure- tune on my tab list. Generally the results are a live video taken fom a concert performance, a festival jam session, or someone's posted lesson. Occasionally, it will be a classic 78 rpm recording, with no video, or some type of still image montage. There is a channel by a YouTube member with the screenname BBYMRLCCOTN, which has a great collection of old-time music posted. A great take is the video Appalachian Journey, produced by Alan Lomax in 1991. Well worth the time. Old time music historian David Hoffman made a film in 1965 called Ballad of a Mountain Man, featuring the Appalachian music impresario Bascom Lamar Lunsford,which goes on a road trip with Lunsford through the hills of western North Carolina, visiting a great number of traditional old time players in their homes.

TAB SOFTWARE: Again, I would also like to recommend the Tabledit software for tablature creation and editing. This is a great program, with excellent editing tools, clear printer output, and tremendous MIDI dynamic control and effects.