Among the people who will, with any luck, be waiting on the far side of the bridge from this world to the next, we now add Mike Seeger. Mike carved himself a niche in folk, and proceeded to define it for generations.
I only met him once, in 1965. Berkeley Folk Festival. I had been listening to him speak on guitar and banjo techniques appropriate to Old-TImey. When question time came up, a young lady rose to protest my 6-string banjo being in the room.
THis was in the days when one carried an instrument in such gatherings to participate in unstructured, non-competitive group music. Totally unlike the rigidly srtuctured, "cite the 'Rise Up Singing' page or don't play it" dreck that just about killed the whole idea. So I had the instrument in hand, when Seeger informed the group that it was "period" ..... so that was OK ...... but it didn't work too well on some songs, and it looked hard to tune.
Nothing profound, but it got me marginally accepted with the purists that year.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)

No comments:
Post a Comment