An Intriguing Blend of Banjo Styles

The late, great Stringbean somehow seamlessly blends old-time, clawhammer banjo with a Johnny Cash-style country band for “Pretty Little Widder”.

Stringbean and Earl Scruggs. Clawhammer style and three-finger rolls. Bluegrass. Banjo dominance. Live.
Stringbean, funky mountain timing and all, joins Flatt and Scruggs to cover their former boss, Bill Monroe. Whether you’re a fan of bluegrass, old time, or both, I think you’ll like this version of “Rose of Old Kentucky”.

It’s string band a go-go with The Stoneman Family and the incomparable Stringbean. I never thought of dancing to clawhammer banjo – not the way Donna Stoneman does here, at any rate. Maybe she knows something we don’t, incorporating bits of the Charleston as she does.

As long as we’re pondering old-time arcana, can it be that String’s jeans are bedazzled?
Anyway, here they all are, blithely fusing the old with the new while Stringbean performs “Pretty Polly”.

A Crying Shame

In the Appalachian South, the murders of David “Stringbean” Akeman and his wife, Estelle, evoke as much passion as the Manson Family murders do here in California. There’s ample evidence of that in Verlon Thompson’s “The Ballad Of Stringbean and Estelle”, which Thompson sings here with Shawn Camp (Earls of Leicester).

When violence, hubris, and stupidity meet stubbornness and the kind of fear that can only be born of catastrophic poverty and loss, the results are never good. In fact, they’re a crying shame.