Product Review

The banjo inspired a great variety of playing styles in the South during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this three-volume in-depth instructional series, Mike Seeger presents an overview of this great American tradition, helping you develop a full range of traditional techniques and repertoire. Mike has acquired his knowledge of these styles directly from traditional players and their recordings.

Volume 3 focuses on mid-twentieth-century styles, the majority of them using finger picks. Each lesson features a complete performance of a song or tune (each one played on a different historical banjo), commentary on its style and source, and detailed instruction for playing it using our easy-to-follow split-screen camerawork. The accompanying booklet includes tabs, a banjo discography, how to choose and set up a banjo, and much more.

Tunes played: Down South Blues - a Dock Boggs blues played with a "slide;" Last Night When My Willie Come Home - in two guitar styles: Maybelle Carter and country rag-time; Wabash Blues - clawhammer instrumental, metal finger pick; Bright Sunny South - Wade Mainer/Ralph Stanley "up-up" picking with picks; Roll on John - Roscoe Holcomb style, thumb and finger pick; Needlecase - early three-finger instrumental, finger picks; Come My Little Pink - Earl Scruggs style; I'm Head Over Heels in Love - Mike's clawhammer version of Earl Scruggs style on an early Flatt & Scruggs song.

The material presented here is based on Mike Seeger's Grammy-nominated Smithsonian Folkways CD "Southern Banjo Sounds,".