Click here to subscribe to the tune of the week (if you’re not already a subscriber) and get a new tune every Friday, plus tabs to all the ones to date.

The banjo world has lost another of its heroes.

On Friday, October 23rd, 3 finger playing legend Bill Keith lost his battle to cancer.

To those who are unfamiliar, Bill Keith was an icon in the world of bluegrass banjo. A former member of Bill Monroe’s genre-defining “Bluegrass Boys” (here’s a nice piece from the NY Times).

He’s also considered the father of the “melodic” style of 3-finger banjo playing (also known as “Keith” style), and his playing has surely inspired and influenced countless pickers.

Myself included.

Years ago while still in early throes of bluegrass (aka “Scruggs style”) banjo learning, I spent a good bit of time listening to Bill Keith, trying to figure out how he navigated around the fretboard to create such wonderful music.

Scruggs style banjo is characterized by the continuous rolling sound of the 3 fingers. Much like the up and down motion of the clawhammer stroke, maintaining that alternating pattern with the 3 fingers is pivotal to creating the driving pulse that is perhaps the single most defining feature of the bluegrass sound.

And, also like with clawhammer banjo, trying to play all the notes of a fiddle tune while maintaining that drive presents a challenge. Prior to Keith, most bluegrass players — Earl Scruggs included — would simply leave those notes out, and leave their playing to the other instruments

Not Bill. By applying his sharp analytical mind and creativity to the challenge, he figured out ways to play all those notes without sacrificing the rolls, and in so doing gave birth to what would become known as “melodic” style of 3-finger banjo.

This week’s tune, Sailor’s Hornpipe, is recognized by most as the theme song to the “Popeye the Sailorman” cartoons. And given my own voracious appetite for Popeye cartoons at a young age, it’s quite possible that this was the first “fiddle tune” I could sing from start to finish.

So when I first heard Keith’s rendition years ago, it was an ideal vehicle through which I could fully appreciate his special way of adapting fiddle tunes to the banjo. And I was hooked.

He was appealing to a banjo aesthetic I didn’t even realize I possessed, and may have even helped to shape it.

The arrangement I play here is most certainly “melodic” in its approach, as I’ve tried to capture as many of the melody notes from the tune as possible.

But the 2nd measure  in particular contains a special nod to Bill. The measure opens with a B, played on the open 2nd string.

The next note needed is the D, which is higher in pitch than the preceding note. The natural inclination here would be grab that note on the 3rd fret of the 2nd string, or the open 1st string. Like this:

The fretboard logic we’ve internalized tells us that notes higher in pitch will either be found by going up the neck or to an adjacent string tuned to a higher pitch (one reason why the high pitched 5th string gives those with prior stringed instrument experience such fits).

But, if you’re desire is to keep the thumb, middle, and index fingers rolling (i.e. no finger plays two notes in a row), then there are times it makes sense to play that higher note on a string that’s tuned to a LOWER pitch. In this case, we get that D note on the 3rd string at the 7th fret. Like this:

If you’re not used to doing such things, then you’re liable to feel some unsettling dissonance the first few times you try it, and your instincts will dutifully strike out in protest the first several times (and you may have to loop through this phrase a few times).

Yet, it’s a perfect solution to this type of problem, one that’s common to both the fingerstyle and clawhammer player who wishes to faithfully render notier tunes on the banjo. Picking patterns like this are found all throughout Keith’s playing, and are essential components in any melodic player’s library of licks.

For me, it’s these type of stylistic idiosyncracies that make the banjo such a cool instrument.

So this week’s tune and its arrangement (and the flat hat) is for Bill Keith, gone but most certainly not forgotten.

Sailor’s Hornpipe

gDGBD tuning, Brainjo level 3-4

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

Click here to subscribe to the tune of the week (if you’re not already a subscriber) and get a new tune every Friday, plus tabs to all the ones to date.

Back in 1982, after his old time Ashokan Fiddle and dance Camp in the Catskill Mountains had just wrapped up, fiddler Jay Ungar decided to play something on his fiddle to capture the emotions he was feeling. As he describes it:

I was feeling a great sense of loss and longing for the music, the dancing and the community of people that had developed at Ashokan that summer. I was having trouble making the transition from a secluded woodland camp with a small group of people who needed little excuse to celebrate the joy of living, back to life as usual, with traffic, newscasts, telephones and impersonal relationships.

I know this feeling very well.

The tune he wrote that day would later be named Ashokan Farewell.

Little could he have known that, with such humble beginnings, this tune would later become the focal musical piece in the most watched PBS series of all time: The Civil War, by Ken Burns. Ultimately, this tune, and this series, would become inextricably and forever linked (so much so that most folks think this to be a Civil War era tune).

Little could he have known that the tune would soon be recognized throughout the world, that it would go on to inspire countless “cover” versions.

Little could he have known that it would become the most popular “fiddle tune” of its time, arguably of all time.

But that’s just what happened in this unlikely story of a tune about an old-time music camp.

Ashokan Farewell

aDADE tuning, Brainjo level 3-4

Notes on the arrangement: The original version of this tune has a lot of open space, which with clawhammer banjo we create largely by using skip notes. So you’ll find plenty of these sprinkled throughout. These are indicated by the notes in parentheses in the tab (for a detailed video all about skip notes and their many uses, go here).

Whether or not you choose to play or skip those notes is your own aesthetic decision. In my first run through of the tune in the video, I skipped them all. In the second run through, I put some of them back in, and I think you’ll notice there the sound is more distinctively that of clawhammer banjo.

All in all, it’s nice to have options.

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

Click here to subscribe to the tune of the week (if you’re not already a subscriber) and get a new tune every Friday, plus tabs to all the ones to date.

In the pantheon of old-time music, there’s no shortage of tunes that pay homage to domesticated farm animals.

Whereas the classical guitarist and violinist’s skill may be measured by his or her purity of tone and clarity of articulation, the old time banjoist and fiddler is judged by his or her ability to faithfully reproduce the sounds of a chicken.

And that’s the way we like it.

We’ve already covered some of the most classic chicken material as part of the Tune of the Week (though there’s certainly more material to be mined from that well) series because, well, you’ve gotta start with the basics. With today’s tune, we’ll attempt to capture the spirit of our beloved equine hybrid, the [flop-eared] mule.

Our journey begins with a happy-go-lucky and instantly likable melody in the key of G. It seems we’re all set for a pleasant jaunt aboard our four-legged companion. All seems to be quite well.

And then comes the B part, and, all of the sudden, we find ourselves in the midst of a surprisingly melodic detour. In the key of D, no less! It seems our mule, a species known for having a mind of its own, now has something entirely different in mind. So we might as well go along for the ride.

Flop Eared Mule

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 my complete guide on reading banjo tabs.

 

Click here to subscribe to the tune of the week (if you’re not already a subscriber) and get a new tune every Friday, plus tabs to all the ones to date.

It’s 2 for 1 tunes today!

“Year of Jubilo” has long been one of my favorite tunes to play (not sure how it’s escaped inclusion in the Tune of the Week for this long!), and it’s one I’ve been playing since my early days of banjo.

Yet, oftentimes while playing it, I’d want to insert a majored 2nd chord (the E major in this case) into that 5th measure and transform the tune into a rag of sorts. It may not surprise you, given my affinity for syncopation, that I’ve long been a huge fan of Ragtime.

So one day I did insert that major 2nd, and another tune fell out of the banjo, one I later dubbed “Jubilation Rag.”

“Year of Jubilo,” aka “Kingdom Coming” (Year of Jubilo could be considered the “fiddle tune” name for this song) , was written by Henry Clay Work (who has several American classics to his name). Written in 1862, the words to it are sung from the perspective of slaves who are imagining their impending freedom, and the fate that may become of their masters once the Union soldiers arrive.

So I like the story these two tunes together tell. Year of Jubilo, a song that celebrates the emancipation of blacks in the American south, leads into a tune that celebrates a genre of music that I not only love dearly, but that likely would’ve never existed were it not for that aforementioned emancipation.

Time to get jubilating!

Year of Jubilo

aDADE tuning, Brainjo level 3

 

Jubilation Rag

aDADE tuning, Brainjo level 3-4

 

Notes on the tab:

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

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

Click here to subscribe to the tune of the week (if you’re not already a subscriber) and get a new tune every Friday, plus tabs to all the ones to date.

Good tunes are like good viruses (“good” from the virus perspective, of course…).

Long before videos of cats playing patty cake and finger-biting infants made it cool, tunes have been going viral. Arguments about whether it’s the result of adaptive selection or an evolutionary byproduct of our linguistic capacity (a “spandrel“, in evolutionary biology terms) aside, our brains are clearly wired for music.

As such, musical memes are particularly good at spreading themselves from one brain to the next.

Good music, in other words, is memorable. We all know that a good earworm has a way of sticking inside of our minds after only one or two listens and crawling around for days, in most cases whether we like it or not.

Some think that the stickiness of musical memories may explain the prevalence of murder ballads in the music that predates mass media. Packaging these stories in musical form may have been less about celebrating the macabre than about optimizing the transmission of a noteworthy event.

It’s also worth noting that without good earworms, we surely wouldn’t have so many great tunes to play. Many of the tunes in the traditional banjo repertoire aren’t still around because they were written and preserved in written form by their creator (this is an aural tradition, after all), but rather because they were successfully passed along generation to generation from one mind to another.

Such is the case with the spread of a good “fiddle” tune. It begins modestly enough inside the mind of a single individual. But, if it’s especially virulent, if by dint of its euphonical quotient it sticks inside the minds of those it enters, and if those minds have access to other minds, then you have the recipe for a full scale epidemic.

I think we’re in the midst of an epidemic (bolstered by the access to other minds now afforded by technology) when it comes to this week’s tune, “Dull Chisel”.

Formed originally inside the mind of the late fiddler Garry Harrison and released on his album “Red Prairie Dawn” (no longer in print, but here’s a short clip of “Dull Chisel” from the album), in short order it found its way in jams and festivals all over, which is a rare thing. Most of the tunes that have become old-time jam staples are centuries old, but every now and then a tune of recent vintage and singular appeal works its way into the mix.

It’s official: Dull Chisel has gone viral. Acquire and infect at will.

 

Dull Chisel

aEAC#E tuning, Brainjo Level 3-4

 

Notes on the tab:

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

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