Archive for the ‘jamming’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

White Springs, 2010 – Day 2

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


When I last left you, we (Chris, Jenny, and I) had arrived late and tired at the Florida Folk Festival campground, and I collapsed to get some rest for the next day. Well, Friday dawned bright and promising, and I secured the morning essential (coffee) to start waking up. Pretty soon my mother Renee and her banjo-playing brother, my uncle John Hedgecoth, arrived from Tallahassee and we all picked for a while to warm up. By “we all” I mean myself, Chris, and Jenny, plus John and Barbara Johnson, our bass player.

We’d barely gotten started when someone noticed that our friend Dale was scheduled to play a set at noon on the Seminole Stage, which is at the other end of the festival– probably about a half-mile– from the campground. We wanted to back him up. So we loaded ourselves and our instruments into a variety of vehicles and set out for the Seminole Stage.

Now, when you deal with creative personalities you’re talking about people who sometimes don’t see the point of making sure you arrive everywhere exactly on schedule. This is the case with Dale, one of the most brilliantly creative people I know. So when we all arrived at the Seminole Stage, ready to back him up for his set, he was nowhere to be seen. What to do? Well, we’ve backed Dale up a lot. When the time came to start his set, we just got up in front of the crowd and started singing his songs! We kicked it off with Dale’s original song “Mangrove Buccaneer.” The crowd (full of people who knew Dale) loved it. And when we had played about half of the set, who should come running in, guitar in hand, but Dale himself! Christopher was in the middle of singing “Tate’s Hell,” a wonderful Florida song and one of Dale’s favorites, and Dale just took over the lead vocal from him to finish out with the last verse.

Dale sang several more, and it was time to finish the show. He had decided to end the set with “Mangrove Buccaneer” when one audience member (unfortunately) told him that we’d already sung it! It would have been so much fun if he’d gone ahead and done it again, unknowingly. But instead he finished up with his song “Apalachicola Doin’ Time” (freshly topical these days with the Gulf oil disaster on peoples’ minds), and we we back to the campground to rest and pick.

Our own set was at the same Seminole Stage at 3:30, so we loaded up again and made the trek. We had an excellent crowd, and played and sang many of our favorites, starting off with Chubby Anthony’s “Foothills of Home” and finishing out with the old gospel favorite “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” which I’m glad to say that many people sang along with. Then it was back to the campground and picking until the small hours.

Do you wonder why we do this? Well, who’d want to be anywhere else?

Red

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in By Red, jamming, shows | 3 Comments »

White Springs Festival Coming Up!

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


Folks, it’s almost time for the Florida Folk Festival, held every year at the Stephen Foster State Park on Memorial Day weekend. Chris, Jenny, and I will be driving down there on Thursday (13 hours, but we’ll never match Casey’s travel percentage!), and we’ll have three days of performing music on the festival stages. Here’s our schedule:

Friday, May 28th: 3:30, at the Seminole Hut stage.

Saturday, May 29th: 3:00, at the Old Marble Stage.

Sunday, May 30th: 3:20, at the River Gazebo.

Of course we’ll have plenty of our CDs with us at our sets, and a selection of Murphy Method DVDs as well –and, naturally, there will be plenty of picking in the campground the rest of the time!

This festival runs eight or ten stages during the day, and a big show on the main stage at night. Activities include fiddle and banjo contests as well as contra-dances and craft shows. Look the festival up at http://www.floridastateparks.org/folkfest/Highlights.cfm , and take a look at the schedules! There’ll be a lot going on. Come by if you can, and say hello.

Red

Tags: , , ,
Posted in By Red, CDs, DVDs, jamming, shows | No Comments »

Speed Bumps (Flying and Picking #11)

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


As you may recall if you’ve been a MM blog reader for some time, I’m taking flying lessons. Over and over, I find parallels between learning to fly and our students learning to play music.

In the last several weeks I’ve made a lot of progress in flying. I’ve flown solo to some airports over a hundred miles away and returned home easily. Flying solo, I’ve made some difficult landings in crosswinds and tailwinds, and had gotten pretty confident of my ability to get the plane on the ground safely in nearly any situation. But recently, the quality of my landings deteriorated for no reason that I could see. All of a sudden, just getting on the ground solo was a problem. Safety was not an issue– it’s very easy and safe to keep trying landings over and over until one is right and you land– but the landings were much more difficult. Practice didn’t help, as my landings got more and more awkward. So in search of some insight I took a flight with the chief instructor, and he gave me some new angles, exercises, and tips on landing the plane, and now my landings are back to normal.

Is this connected to learning to play? You bet. Whether you’re learning your first tune or your hundredth, you’ll have ups and downs in your learning. You’ll play a tune well one day, and suddenly be unable to get through it the next. You play in groups and jams with no problem, and then one day you find that your fingers don’t work right in front of other people. This is normal!

This happens to professional players too, but you usually can’t tell when they’re on stage. Some days (or weeks) we just can’t play as well as other times. Practice helps, but sometimes, like golfers and baseball pitchers, we can get into a slump, though the audience won’t usually notice it. Professionals just let it go, perhaps giving themselves a break by taking a few days off, because they know that the music will come back.

When you’re in a slump, try something new. If practice isn’t helping, you might even take a few days off from playing. If playing in your usual jam group doesn’t help, try taking a week off from the jam, or playing with some other folks for an evening instead. Listen to some banjo music that’s different from your usual fare. Relax and play along with our Slow Jam or Picking Up the Pace DVDs. Ask your instructor to just spend a lesson playing, trading breaks on your familiar tunes, instead of trying to learn any new tunes for a while. Everybody needs a break!

Red

Tags: , , ,
Posted in By Red, Improvising, Learning By Ear, jamming, lessons | 4 Comments »

No Hiding Place

Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Murphy Henry

Murphy Henry

Greetings from Florida! Our whole family is down here celebrating Red’s mom’s 85th birthday. Last night Casey cooked the most stupendous birthday supper for us, complete with an Italian Cream birthday cake. This morning she made poppy seed muffins. I could make this whole blog about the food that Casey has cooked, but instead will now turn my attention to telling you about the second jam with my newest group of Misfits.

You may recall that last time we had four students present: Zach, Judy, Randy, and Matt. This time Matt was sick (dare I say he was sick of learning “Boil Them Cabbage Down”?) but the others were present along with Kim and Bill on bass. Along with an audience of Zach’s parents, his aunt, and his little cousin.

Zach had had his lesson the hour before the jam and I took my requisite Nature break before we got started. This time when I returned to the room, the students were at least talking to each other. Or maybe it was just Kim, breaking the ice.

My goal at this jam was to get us through Foggy Mountain Breakdown. By now, everyone had learned it even though I’d just showed most of them the vamp chords a few days earlier. (I will have to say that my new idea to have the students actually memorize the vamp chords to these first songs is really working well. Wish I’d thought of that years ago.)

We started out with that tired and true favorite Banjo in the Hollow. (NOTE: did I just type “tired and true”?? Yes, I did! Hmmm, I guess, as my brother-in-law says, “Freud lives!” I meant, of course, tried and true!) Again, I had Zach kick off all the songs—rather than letting everyone have a turn–because, again, it adds some structure and consistency to the format. And he does such a good job. We followed that with Cripple Creek and Boil Them Cabbage. I wish I could report some fireworks or major meltdowns (just for the drama) but, from my point of view, everyone played very well. (I’m sure all of them would tell a different story!) No, they didn’t play perfectly, and yes, everyone missed a few vamp chords, and Randy did have to adjust the timing on his entrance to Cripple Creek (reverting back to his original version rather than the Earl Way he was trying to work in), but all in all everyone seemed to understand the gist of the songs and recover from their mistakes which is all I am ever looking for in a Misfit jam.

We skipped Cumberland Gap (which seems to always get short shrift) in order to get to Foggy Mountain Breakdown. After we played it slow, I turned Zach loose for a Very Fast Version which he managed to hold together until his third break when he rushed through that open fourth string note at the beginning of the D lick and ended up finishing before I did. I told him there was no prize for getting there first and he just grinned. He was playing his new Gold Star banjo and his playing has really taken a jump since he moved up from his starter instrument.

We had just enough time left to slide in I Saw The Light, which we did as an instrumental. So all in all, we got through five songs. And a great big Thank You to Bill, whose bass playing was a welcome addition.

I am so proud of all these students not only for the hard work they do on their own time, but for their willingness come to out and lay it all on the line (as the Kendalls sang in “The Pittsburgh Stealers”) in front of the other students. As the old gospel song says, “There’s no hiding place down here!”

And now it’s time for Casey and me (not I!) to take a beach walk. Wish you were here!

Tags:
Posted in By Murphy, jamming | 1 Comment »

Find that Common Ground

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Red Henry

Red Henry

As you may have been informed by now on this blog, we’re at the beach for a week. We made excellent arrangements for the Murphy Method orders to be taken care of back in Winchester, and here we are at the Florida seashore for several days. Life is hard.

Along with relaxing and getting enough sleep, one thing we do on vacation is pick. In the last two days we’re had several excellent picking sessions, the participants being (at various times and in different combinations) myself, Murphy, Casey, Christopher, my banjo-playing uncle John Hedgecoth, and Chris’s fiddle-playing girlfriend Jenny. The music’s been good, and it’s been a big help in getting in shape for shows we’re playing next weekend.

What songs do we play when we pick, and how do we go about it? Well, for one thing, since all the people here have known each other for a long time, we know quite a few of each others’ favorite songs and tunes, and we’re never at a loss for what to play. The material this week seems to be ranging from Bill Monroe, through lots of Chris’s original material (and mine too), to the Stanley Brothers. And we like the hard-core stuff. But just what does that mean?

Well, in the case of Bill Monroe material, it means that we’re not likely to play Uncle Pen or Love Come Home, but instead we’d play more intense, lesser-known things like Stoney Lonesome, On and On, and Brown County Breakdown. On the Stanley side, we’re not likely to play How Mountain Girls Can Love or Clinch Mountain Backstep (even though we really like those numbers), but instead we might pick Hard Times or sing Mother No Longer Awaits Me at Home. Maybe even Hey, Hey, Hey. Or even Please Papa, Don’t Whip Little Benny, one of the most cheerful numbers we know. It just depends on how far we want to get into the “deep catalog,” as they call it.

But what I was saying all this for was to point out that every jam session has its natural material. The people in each picking circle have a natural kind of bluegrass they like to play and are best at playing, and it’s very sensible and polite to find a “common ground” and play that kind of music when you’re with that group. You wouldn’t get into a newgrass session and try to sing hard-core three-chord numbers with complex harmonies, like Your Selfish Heart or I’m Waiting to Hear You Call Me Darling. You wouldn’t get into a beginning or intermediate-level session and try to play complex or obscure tunes, even if they are your favorites. Murphy Method students may play their favorite selections from our Slow Jam with Murphy and Casey or Picking Up the Pace DVDs. Suit your song-suggestions to the folks you’re with. The music will sound better, the musicians will be happier, and everybody will look forward to the next time! Find that Common Ground.

Posted in By Red, jamming | 1 Comment »

Passing off the Break in a Jam

Monday, April 26th, 2010
Casey Henry

Casey Henry

I have been holding an almost regular student jam at my house for a few months now. Most weeks we only have two people – Ginny and Jean – but on a couple of occasions we’ve had third person join us. Week before last it was Matt, who has been taking from me for years but who rarely gets to come and jam. When there are only two people, looking at the other person to pass the break becomes less important. I mean, where else is the break going to go? But as I watched the three of them play the first couple songs I realized that they needed a reminder to make some eye contact. They took the reminder to heart and looked at each other very conscientiously.

It occurred to me that what many students don’t realize when we tell them to look at the next person to pass off the break, is that you don’t have to wait until the END of your break to look at that person. You can make that eye contact at ANY point during your break (though probably sometime after the halfway point), just long enough to confirm that the next person is going to take over from you. Of course, this requires that the next jammer be paying attention to the person who is playing lead – if not looking at them directly then at least keeping track in their peripheral vision so that they can tell when they’re getting the hairy eyeball. Once that confirmation has been made the lead player can concentrate on finishing out their break, and the next person can concentrate on coming in right.

Tags:
Posted in By Casey, jamming | No Comments »

This Thing About Words

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Murphy Henry

Murphy Henry

I am in the midst of learning something and don’t quite know what to make of it. Maybe you can help me!

I have just begun to realize that some of my students don’t “hear” the words to songs. They don’t listen to the words while playing or vamping, and when I encourage them to do so, they have trouble retaining the words.

Now, I am a 100% words person myself. I even sometimes hear words to instrumentals! In the tune “Ashoken Farewell” I hear the words “You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me” on the last line. And in Monroe’s “Road to Columbus,” at the beginning of the second half I hear “Come and sit by my side little darling…” I could go on. So memorizing words comes automatically to me.

So, my question to myself is: Can you play bluegrass (and I’m talking about jamming) without knowing the words to the songs? And by “knowing,” I don’t mean knowing all the verses to every song, but at least being able to recognize the chorus of the song when it comes up. Or is this just me imposing the way I do something on someone else?

I didn’t realize this was a problem until Susan and I were working on jamming skills and how to anticipate whether you might be asked to play a break or not. I was explaining to her that there are some songs that usually start off with the chorus (Going Down the Road Feeling Bad, Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms). In that case, the singer might give the nod for a break after that initial chorus OR she might choose to sing chorus/verse/chorus without a break. It happens all the time. And that in any singing song, the break always comes after a chorus. And it never comes after a verse. Unless the song is all verses and no chorus.

Well, Susan (who is a wonderful folk singer) couldn’t tell the difference between the chorus and the verses. Bluegrass is a new music to her, these are all new songs to her, and she hadn’t been paying attention to the words. After all, she had her hands full learning to play the breaks and doing the vamping. So the question came up in my mind: Is it necessary to ask you to learn the words to the choruses of all these songs you’ve never heard before?
It seems to me that it is. But, as I say, maybe that’s just me. After all, we all play instrumentals fine without hearing any words. But what happens when someone asks you to kick off a singing song you can’t quite remember? I always use the words to get me on track. Maybe it’s possible to recall a melody without the words. I simply don’t know.

Can I get some feedback from all y’all? What are your thoughts? Anybody else having trouble remembering words to songs? Anybody doing just fine without knowing the words? Talk to me, folks!

Tags: ,
Posted in By Murphy, jamming | 15 Comments »

Susan’s Story: I Did It!

Monday, April 19th, 2010
Murphy Henry

Murphy Henry

As some of you may know, our musician friends David and Linda Lay host a jam session every Thursday night at their Vegetable Stand on Route 522 North in Winchester. (Shout out: Organic fruits and veggies and grass feed beef! Check ‘em out!) Susan had gone once or twice last year and sent in a blog report. She was Very Brave to go (since she’d only been playing a little more than a year) and found the experience “challenging” to say the least. (There were also some good parts.)

The past few months she and I have been working hard on jamming protocol: how to look up after every chorus to see if you are going to get a break, what the heck IS the chorus and how do you distinguish it from the verse, how to be alert for the upcoming ending. She is making Great Strides and things are Coming Together.

So, last Thursday she went to the jam again. Her first words in an email (subject line: I Did It!) were: I suggested a tune (“I Saw the Light”) at the Vegetable Stand Jam, kicked it off with a banjo break, then vamped to Linda Lay’s singing of the tune!

She followed that energetic opening with:

I got there a little after 7 and left a little after 8, with my tune being the last one I played. I stood up and vamped and rolled chords to every tune that was played and knew most of them or had heard them at Nancy’s jam.

When I asked for more info like what key did Linda sing in and the names of some of the tunes she replied:

Since we had just played a tune in A, I asked her if she wanted G or A; she said that she couldn’t sing in either of those keys and laughed. But by that time, I had basically kicked it off in A, so in A she sang. What was so cool, is that up until that time the “audience” just sang along limply to the tunes  that they knew. When we started “I Saw The Light” the crowd really started to sing with energy and volume!

As to other keys, for the hour I stayed, the tunes were in G and A (capo second fret, of course). No C or D or E, however I did see something that I’d never seen before: a man playing guitar, capo 3, using the E-chord shape as G!

I knew it was going to be a good night when they kicked the jam off with “Fireball Mail,” but I didn’t take a break due to it being a hair too fast for me. Also, being the first song, I needed to settle in a little.

Names of Tunes ?!?!?!?! Was I supposed to remember names of tunes ?!?!?!?! I recognized them, that was about all—”I’ll Fly Away” was one. These folks like to sing a lot of gospel stuff which is why I suggested “I Saw The Light.”

Anyway, you may call me Earl Scruggs! a.k.a. Susan :)

And there you have it! Susan, I am so proud of you and all the “grunt” work  you have put into learning to jam. Way to go! Other students: Go thou and do likewise! <G>

Tags: ,
Posted in By Murphy, jamming | 4 Comments »

Becoming an Independent Banjo Player (Flying and Picking #10)

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


Murphy, in an old Banjo Newsletter column, talked at length about how people want to become Independent Banjo Players. They want to be able to get in a group and play tunes, play backup, and pass the breaks around to others just like “independent” pickers do, who don’t need a teacher’s guidance to participate. And they need to be able to do all this while standing up!

I thought about this yesterday while I was on a solo cross-country flight. As you learn to be an independent pilot, you learn to fly the plane and land it, communicate with other pilots in the air, and to navigate from one place to another– and eventually, you do all this without an instructor’s help. So I took off yesterday morning by myself and flew about 75 miles to an airport I’d never seen before (Somerset County, Pa.), landed there, took off again, and found my way right back and landed here at Winchester. When I got back here, I felt like I was learning to be an Independent Pilot. Could I have done this without a lot of training from my instructor? Of course not. But is it good to feel like an Independent Pilot? Oh, yes.

It also feels good when you learn to be an Independent Banjo Player. You know that you can stand up in a group, play the tunes, do backup when someone else is playing, take breaks and pass them off when you’re through playing yourself, and start and finish the tune at the same time as everybody else. Can you learn this all at once? No. And like everything else, it takes some folks longer to learn than others. But when you reach your goal, it feels good. You know you’re an Independent Banjo Player.

Red

Tags: , , ,
Posted in By Red, Improvising, Instructors, banjo, jamming | 2 Comments »

Building Blocks (Flying and Picking #9)

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


Last night, my instructor Brian and I made a cross-country flight to an airport about 62 miles away. The flight was in the dark, it was over some pretty sparsely-populated Virginia and West Virginia mountains, and it was in a very small single-engined airplane. We navigated visually at night, and we were not flying on instruments. Were we scared? No, not even when one of the radios quit working. We didn’t really need any radios at all. Did we have any trouble getting there and back? No. It was a lot of fun.

The flight went really smoothly, and along with flying the plane I was able to do all the things I’ve been practicing: checking our course on the ground, checking our speed toward our destination, cross-checking our progress using the navigational radio that still worked, and talking when necessary to Air Traffic Control and other airplanes. Then, of course, I had to land the plane when we got where we were going and again when we came back. In the dark. Was all this complicated? Yes, a bit. Could I have done all this right after I started training? No, of course not. Why wasn’t it overwhelming? Because I’d learned it all a step at a time.

I keep finding similarities between learning to fly and learning to play music. Learning to pick is something you need to do a little at a time. Our banjo students, for example, no matter how much they want to, can’t launch right into learning “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”, or playing “Dueling Banjos”, or improvising in jam sessions, right off the bat. Nobody can (except maybe teenagers). Instead, the students need to go through our Beginning Banjo DVDs step-by-step to learn the building blocks– the banjo licks– which they’re going to use. Then they need to go, step-by-step, into more advanced DVDs which teach them how to put those building blocks together, one step at a time.

Taking one step at a time, it all makes sense and becomes easier. You start with one thing and learn another, and then you aren’t overwhelmed and discouraged by not being able to do it all at once! Learn to play step-by-step at your own speed, and after a while you’ll be cruising over the mountains yourself.

Red

Tags: , ,
Posted in By Red, DVDs, Improvising, Learning By Ear, Practice, Uncategorized, jamming | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »