Click on the button below to get the PDF download for this tab delivered to you, and get 2 new tunes and tabs sent to you every week!

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(NOTE: The Tab-Walkthrough for this tune is now available in the Breakthrough Banjo course. Click here to learn more about and view a sample of the tab walk-through videos. Click here to learn more, and see the full schedule.)

If you think playing in the old time tradition means rigidly adhering to how iconic old time musician such and such first played a tune, think again.

For Exhibit Z, I give you the backstory for this week’s tune, “Salt River.”

I was fortunate enough to learn this one from one of my favorite people and players in the old time world, Paul Brown.

That was a 2 finger version, which Paul had learned from Benton Flippen’s own idiosyncratic banjo rendition.

(RELATED: If you’d like to learn 2 finger style, plus old time 3 finger and bluegrass, click here to check out the Breakthrough Banjo course for fingerstyle banjo)

The first Salt River recording comes by way of Clark Kessinger on the fiddle. Flippen recorded that on fiddle as well, adhering to Kessinger’s original structure, mixed with his own distinctive stylistic elements.

On banjo, however, he took even more poetic license. Gone is the Myxolydian scale and that infernal VII chord, replaced by our tried and true I, IV, and V.

Personally, I think the tune got an upgrade!

And of course, what you hear above is Benton’s 2 finger version adapted for clawhammer, with bits of poetic license of my own, of course (and yes, it is the same tune as Bill Monroe’s “Salt Creek,” which Bill Monroe took his own musical and terminological liberties with)

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(NOTE: For those considering acquiring a Brainjo banjo, the banjo played in this video is a “Hobart” model. Click here if you’d like to learn more, or claim one in the next batch (shipping May 2019!)

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 “Salt River”

aEAC#E tuning, Brainjo level 3

Notes on the Tab

Notes in parentheses are “skip” notes. To learn more about these, check out my video lesson on the subject.

For more on reading tabs in general, check out this complete guide to reading banjo tabs.

[RELATED: Level 2 arrangements and video demos for the Tune (and Song!) of the Week tunes are now available as part of the Breakthrough Banjo course. Learn more about it here.

Click here for a current list of all the clawhammer songs and tunes currently available inside of The Vault

Click on the button below to get the PDF download for this tab delivered to you, and get 2 new tunes and tabs sent to you every week!

Click Here To Get The Tab

(NOTE: I’ll be teaching a live, step by step “tab walk-through” for this tune for Breakthrough Banjo members on April 15. Click here to learn more, and see the full schedule.)

Roughly 60 miles west of Georgia, and walking distance to the Alabama line, sits the small town of Tallapoosa.

Old Time Music enthusiasts will recognize it as the home city of one of Georgia’s most decorated contest fiddlers, Ahaz Augustus Gray. Or, to avoid the twisting of tongues, just A.A. Gray.

Fortunately, Gray wrote a rollickin’ fiddle tune to help us remember that factoid, one he recorded in a studio in Atlanta back in 1930, along with guitarist John Dilleshaw, aka “seven foot Dilly” (he was actually but 6 foot 7 inches, but rounding up was the convention).

While Gray may have shed his mortal coil back in 1939, 80 years later “Tallapoosa Bound” still enjoys heavy rotation in jams around here.

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(NOTE: For those considering acquiring a Brainjo banjo, the banjo played in this video is a “Hobart” model. Click here if you’d like to learn more, or claim one in the next batch (shipping May 2019!)

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 “Tallapoosa Bound”

gDGBD tuning, Brainjo level 3

Notes on the Tab

Notes in parentheses are “skip” notes. To learn more about these, check out my video lesson on the subject.

For more on reading tabs in general, check out this complete guide to reading banjo tabs.

[RELATED: Level 2 arrangements and video demos for the Tune (and Song!) of the Week tunes are now available as part of the Breakthrough Banjo course. Learn more about it here.

Click here for a current list of all the clawhammer songs and tunes currently available inside of The Vault

Click on the button below to get the PDF download for this tab delivered to you, and get 2 new tunes and tabs sent to you every week!

Click Here To Get The Tab

(NOTE: I’ll be teaching a live, step by step “tab walk-through” for this tune for Breakthrough Banjo members on Mar. 25. Click here to learn more, and see the full schedule.)

To the outsider, or to fans of looser musical forms like jazz, the traditional old-time repertoire, especially the fiddle tune, can seem comparatively rigid. A fixed structure, with little room for individual or artistic expression.

And yet, the the deeper you get into this music, the more you appreciate their deceptive complexity.

When you consider the number of decision points in any tune, the math reveals an incomprehensibly high number of potential variations. Variations that are still easily recognizable as versions of the same fundamental thing (part of the magic of your brain is it can recognize these many faces of a tune – though I defy you to describe how you do this!).

Ultimately, there remains just as much room for creative expression within old-time fiddle tunes as improvisational jazz. And part of the fun in working up any traditional tune is in trying to find its best face.

Just as a makeup artist might choose a specific set of colors based on a client’s skin tone or clothing, the decisions we make in how we end up playing the tune are in part an effort to show off a tune’s best features. At least, “best” according to our own tastes at any given moment (the concept of “best” in music is quite a dubious one).

The first time I heard “Duck River,” a tune from the repertoire of Kentucky fiddler John Salyer, was off Sheesham & Lotus’s “Five Miles from Town” album. It was hard to imagine it sounding any better, or a better “face” to put on it.

So needless to say, I didn’t alter much for the rendition you hear above! (which actually doesn’t stray far from Salyer’s original recording)!

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(NOTE: For those considering acquiring a Brainjo banjo, the banjo played in this video is a “Hobart” model. Click here if you’d like to learn more, or claim one in the next batch (shipping May 2019!)

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 “Duck River”

aDADE tuning, Brainjo level 3

Notes on the Tab

Notes in parentheses are “skip” notes. To learn more about these, check out my video lesson on the subject.

For more on reading tabs in general, check out this complete guide to reading banjo tabs.

[RELATED: Level 2 arrangements and video demos for the Tune (and Song!) of the Week tunes are now available as part of the Breakthrough Banjo course. Learn more about it here.

Click here for a current list of all the clawhammer songs and tunes currently available inside of The Vault