Old Time Resource of the Week: The Old-Time Fiddler (with Matt Brown) Matt Brown is a terrific old time fiddler and teacher.  He has been posting good instructional materials on his YouTube channel and recently has started a podcast format where he has in-depth interviews with other fiddlers.  He has four episodes up at this writing. For a sample, ...

Old Time Resource of the Week: Jake Blount Circling back to Black History Month, there is one artist that I meant to highlight — Jake Blount.  He has really dug into the backstory of string band music and its connection to African-American culture and history, good and bad.     Check out this extensive Black Stringband ...

  I’m going out on a limb here and give my un-researched, un-fact-checked version of African Americans in old time music.  Blues was such a strong marketing label that every Black artist was marketed as blues (or jazz or spiritual) even if their actual repertoire was much wider and eclectic.  Elijah Wald ...

We conclude our exploration of the African American presence and contribution to old time music with a documentary film I ran across this past week.  I haven’t watched it myself yet but it looks good.  Some members of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and their mentor, Odell Thompson (his cousin Joe, the fiddler, ...

Old Time Resource of the Week: Featured artist: Rhiannon Giddens   We continue honoring African-American musicians in old time music.  In one way, Rhiannon Giddens [Wikipedia] is a come-lately, but I believe she is the key to the complete sea change in understanding of the old time music heritage.  That shift was brought ...

Old Time Resource of the Week: Black String Band Tradition   We’ll start our Black History Month exploration with a program from a couple of decades ago, re-posted here from the Afropop Worldwide site. It gives us one view/overview of this history, and features the voice of Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong. My eyes and ears ...

Old Time Resource of the Week: Mainly Norfolk A bit of a departure.  Many of our songs come from British and Irish sources.  Also, many folks from over there have recorded songs from this side of the pond.  Mainly Norfolk shows the history of the song, links to sources of more information, and ...

Old Time Resource of the Week:  Internet Archive (archive.org) This amazing resource is good for many, many things related to our music.  There are 78s, LPs, etc., but also old books, tune books, radio programs, and other things.  And if you have something to share, you can upload it.  It’s like YouTube for books, audio, and other media.  Just check it ...

Old Time Resource of the Week:  Old Time Conversations This was a new one on me.  I’m glad I ran across it.  High quality video conversations with old time musicians.  Most of the content looks to be for sale as DVDs or books, but there’s a great video of the Canote twins on the home page, ...

Old Time Resource of the Week:  Dust to Digital Radio Dust-to-Digital is a wonderful record label.  They have recently launched an Internet radio station which streams music from their massive archive of recordings from around the globe.  Look for the player widget on their home page. It’s not all string band music, nor ...

Old Time Resource of the Week:  The Henry Reed Collection What a wonder that this collection exists.  Folklorist and fiddler Alan Jabbour interviewed, documented, transcribed, learned, propagated, and preserved as much as he could of Henry Reed, an amazing player from West Virginia.  Reed was born in 1884 and so the tunes he heard growing up ...