When we hear a banjo, we can’t help but think of the blues.  It also remind us of Dixieland and country music, but most definitely the blues.  The blues and the banjo go hand in hand.  There are many different types of banjos and though they are the same instrument, their sound is unique.  The banjo itself is a unique and wonderful stringed instrument.

African Americans and Caucasians have shared a love and appreciation for the banjo.  African Americans have been playing it for nearly 300 years, and Caucasians since the turn of the century.  And the banjo sounds different in different regions.  If you hear the banjo sound in the Mississippi Delta, it will sound completely different than in Virginia.

The music and style of the banjo was really shaped in the late 1800s by African Americans.  One of the greatest banjo players during that time was Gus Cannon, or better known as “Banjo Joe”.  During 1927 Banjo Joe cut several recordings for Paramount In which his “frailing techniques”, slide playing, and roll patterns became incredibly famous.

The banjo music played back then had such a fluid sound.  It created a nostalgic feeling of friends gathering for a good ole fashioned jam session.  Today it can sound like just about anything, square dance, swing, bluegrass, and everything in between.  What a wonderful instrument and you just can’t miss the banjo sound.

Epistle 18 – Halloween

Autumn in Brewster’s Mill was my favorite time of year. As a lad I could still block out the season that came next and enjoy the brilliant colors, the sparkling sunshine, crunching through the falling leaves, and that special spicy scent in the air—the smell of death. In the good ol’ days, you could burn all those leaves you raked to the curb, and the curling columns of smoke on every street were a cozy end to the green season.

Of course, you can’t burn leaves anymore—to protect the environment, I guess, not to mention all the lawns that caught fire. Maybe burning dead leaves also produced hallucinogens that made young Boomers goofy, sort of a giant, outdoor pot party. Anyway, instead of burning the leaves, today a truck comes along and some guy sucks them up in a big hose. The town leaf sucker.

Of course, the crowning event of autumn is Halloween, the one night when your natural weird habits are encouraged. My first memory of Halloween festivities was the neighborhood Kornstalk Karnival for which my mother dressed me as a really scary . . . Chinaman. There I was, a 5 or 6-year old, tow-headed kid wrapped in an orange oilcloth sheet that came down to my ankles, a Fu Man Chu mustache painted on my face, and a cardboard wok tied on my head.

Terrifying, huh? I can’t imagine where the inspiration for the costume came from since there were no Asians in Brewster’s Mill. Maybe it was that Chinese restaurant we went to on vacation in Milwaukee. Whatever. Anyway, while my brother was honestly earning his treats by ringing door bells, soaping windows and putting fire crackers in mail boxes, I wandered around the Kornstalk Karnival in my Chinese suit, wheedling the adults in charge into tossing candy into my shopping bag. It’s a shame nobody thought to take my picture. I could have been the first Bruce Lee.

Now, the cute little trick-or-treaters are out with their parents and an armed guard on alert for any candy not in a sterilized, vacuum-sealed package. Then, the treats are carefully doled out in exact proportions designed to prevent sugar overload and other assorted dietary maladies. Can you imagine these kids bobbing for apples in a washtub with a bunch of other kids with runny noses? How will they ever build their immune systems?

Of course, thanks to really cool special effects, today’s tykes can get the bejeezes scared out of them by psychos with chainsaws and other instruments of torture.
We had to make do with a stiff Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, a hairy Lon Chaney, Jr. as the wolfman, and James Arness as an arctic carrot, old friends that I’d love to see again but I have to go now. I have an interview for the leaf sucker job.

We Will Win

The first step in mastering the style of blues with the guitar is to learn and master guitar scales.  This is a must if you want to be an excellent guitar player.  Setting time aside each day to only practice scales is a great strategy.  Look at it as if the scales are the underlying technique in which everything else can be laid on top of.  It’s the groundwork so to speak.  Without mastering scales, it will impossible to improvise with the blues.

One tip in learning your scales is to not rush and try to learn several scales all at once.  It is better to start with one, gather all the knowledge of it, and then practice it to perfection.  Memorizing one at a time will actually make it easier to learn more and will eventually give you the freedom, confidence, and creativity once you are improvising.

Start by memorizing the fundamental 5 most common key for guitar C, D, G, A, & E.  These are simple.  And then move on to a minor pentatonic scale, which the big daddy of all scales and is often used for blues improvisation.

Once you feel as thought you’ve mastered your scales, begin to learn how to use them in constructing improvised solos and leads.  A great way to do this is to improvise along to guitar backing tracks.  These tracks can facilitate you to improve your timing skills as well as how to play with other musicians.  They will give you the freedom to write and produce your personal lead parts and are really helpful to better your practice time!

Epistle 17 – The Iron Lung

I just knew I had it. Polio, that is. No worse fate could befall a young person. I had seen plenty of newspaper pictures of kids in iron lungs to know. Imagine spending your life lying in a steel tank just so you could breathe. Horrible. Polio was the scourge of the earth before cancer was invented and I knew I had it. I just knew.

It was one of those hot, humid, summer nights in 1955 BAC (Before Air Conditioning) when you just rolled around on top of the sheets, sweatin’ like a butcher, without a wisp of air through the window screen. The lacy curtains hung there as dead as I was. Everything was lifeless. Even my brother, who’s twin bed was pushed up next to mine, was too inert to accidentally whomp me across the chest with his arm.

So there I lay, in the upstairs flat of the Bates Motel, our lodgings in the mid-50’s. With it’s porch roof posts leaning toward each other below the two blank 2^nd floor windows, the place looked like the Scull and Crossbones. And behind one of those ghostly windows, I lay with a really stiff neck, unable to move my head in any direction. It was polio for sure . . . and I had it. Would they carry me downstairs to put me in the iron lung or bring it up to my bedside to gently lay me in it? Nah, probably make me walk to it somewhere with my head in a cast. It was a cruel time.

I suppose the cynics among you are thinking that by morning my stiff neck was gone as I merrily rode off on my bike in search of a sandlot baseball game (which is what we played before Little League was invented—honest). No, sir! We’re not talking about some shallow, tow-headed kid here. I had to go stand in line in the school gym—during summer vacation, for God’s sake—to receive my first Salk vaccine shot. As you all know by now, Dr. Jonas Salk discovered the vaccine to conquer polio and spare thousands of young people the torture of that terrible disease. It’s a shame he discovered it too late for me. True, my stiff neck was gone but I remembered it clearly and knew it was still just a matter of time. Who knows? Maybe I’d have a major attack right there during the shot. Maybe pass out even. Everyone knew that the vaccine itself was full of evil polio germs.

Well, as you may have guessed by now, I am fully recovered. I survived the shot plus a booster or two and even sampled the Sabine oral stuff. By some miracle, I narrowly escaped a brush with death and the inside of school during summer break. I could tell you more about the perils of growing up without national health care or air conditioning, but I need to sign off now. I have a stiff neck.

We Will Win

Boogie-woogie is a popular style of Blues Music.  It is a piano-based style from the early 20^th century.  It has a very strong bass pattern associated with and originally piano players accompanied themselves by playing this strong bass pattern with their left hand.  Then a bass player was added and they would duplicate the piano player’s bass line.  As this style evolved more, the bassist would often play the entire boogie-woogie bass line themselves, and the pianist played entirely different piano parts.

Boogie-woogie became very popular in the 30s and 40s.  It started as solo piano but then grew to three pianos at once, guitar, big band, gospel, and even country and western music.  While the traditional blues usually depicts a variety of emotions, boogie-woogie was mainly associated with dancing.

For the most part boogie-woogie tunes are twelve bar tunes and it’s said to have been created in logging and turpentine camps, and oil boomtowns of Texas, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Delta circa 1900.  The very first boogie-woogie hit was entitled “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie” by Pinetop Smith recorded in 1928 and first released in 1929. This was the first boogie-woogie recording to be a commercial hit, and helped establish boogie-woogie as the name of the style.

Boogie-woogie then gained further attention in 1938 and 1939 thanks to several concerts at Carnegie Hall.  And then it became only natural that swing bands began to implement the boogie-woogie beat into some of their music.  Famous dances known as the jitterbug and the Lindy Hop required the boogie-woogie beat.