The Hanging of Fiddlin’ Joe Coleman

American Fiddler cBy Wayne Erbsen

The story of the hanging of Fiddlin’ Joe Coleman is enough to send chills up and down your spine. In 1847, near the town of Slate Fork, in Adair County, Kentucky, a shoemaker and fiddler named Joe Coleman was living with his wife, and his wife’s mother and sister. According to some accounts, Joe had been acting erratically and not long after that, someone smothered his mother-in-law to death with a pillow. A few days later, Joe’s wife went into the woods to gather bark and never came back. Joe went searching for his wife in the

Read the rest

About

We are a small, family-owned, American publishing company, started with a simple idea – to teach and preserve Southern Appalachian music.

We offer:

Books: Music instruction books, songbooks, cookbooks, and books on folklore

Recordings: Bluegrass and old-time music

Log Cabin Classes: In-person and online music and cooking classes

History of Native Ground Books & Music

Wayne-at-cabin-window
Wayne Erbsen

It was 1973 and Wayne Erbsen had just moved from his home in California to Charlotte, North Carolina. His aim was to dig deep into the roots of Southern Appalachian music by learning from the masters. He chose Charlotte because this area had

Read the rest

A Word About These Free Bluegrass Banjo Tabs!

Howdy!

If you’re thinking that the free tabs look a little sparse, you’re right! What I’ve provided you is just the bare bones skeleton of the melody.

Why did I do that, and where are the rolls?

As you know, bluegrass banjo plays the melody using rolls, which consist of 4 or 8 note patterns that are repeated over and over.

Virtually every single bluegrass banjo method out there teaches you a tune with the rolls already incorporated into the melody. That is a BIG MISTAKE.

Why?

Because you need to be able to figure out how to add the

Read the rest

Darling Cory

Clawhammer banjo for the complete ignoramus cover

Darling Cory

Wake up, wake up, darlin’ Cory,
What makes you sleep so sound
When the revenours are comin’
Goin’ to tear your still house down?

Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow
Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground
Go and dig you a hole in the meadow
Gonna lay darlin’ Cory down.

Go away, go away, darlin’ Cory
Stop hangin’ around my bed
Bad liquor destroyed my body,
Pretty women’s gone to my head.

Don’t you hear them bluebirds a-singing’?
Don’t you hear their mournful sound?
They are preachin’ Cory’s funeral
In some lonesome graveyard

Read the rest

Log Cabin Diaries, Part 3: The Log Cabin Band

By Wayne Erbsen

We love log cabins. Always have. As far as we’re concerned, you can’t have too many of them. In addition to our rustic log cabin way up in Big Pine, North Carolina, we have an authentic log cabin here in Asheville on the same piece of land as our Native Ground office. This is where we teach our Appalachian music and cooking classes. We think this cabin was built in the 1940s out of a kit sold by Sears, of all things. That is the rumor, anyway. The original cabin has been added on to twice

Read the rest

Wayne Erbsen


Wayne Erbsen
It was 1973 and Wayne Erbsen had just moved from his home in California to Charlotte, North Carolina. His aim was to dig deep into the roots of Southern Appalachian music by learning from the masters. He chose Charlotte because the area had once been a hotbed of traditional Southern music.

To his shock, Wayne discovered that little of the old music was left. Instead, North Carolina seemed intent on covering up its own Appalachian roots with concrete and embracing the new music of New York as well as Los Angeles and Hollywood, two places Wayne had just escaped from!

Read the rest

Native Ground Music

Native Ground Music, founded in 1973, is your comprehensive resource for authentic southern Appalachian music and traditional music of rural America, the Civil War, and the Old West. Our gospel, bluegrass, and old-time folk music collections are unsurpassed, and we have a full catalog of outlaw ballads, cowboy music, pioneer music, Lewis & Clark music, and railroad songs.

INSTRUCTION BOOKS written by author, teacher, and musician Wayne Erbsen teach total and absolute beginners how to play the clawhammer banjo, bluegrass banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar and dulcimer. We also publish a series of best-selling cookbooks

Read the rest

Arkansas Traveler Skit

Rural Roots of Bluegrass by Wayne Erbsen
arkanas-traveler-art

By Wayne Erbsen

The Arkansas Traveler is one of most recognizable and popular old-time fiddle tunes played today. The tune was first printed on February 23, 1847. The skit that goes with the tune is said to go back to the 1820s, and some have credited it to Colonel Sandford C. Faulkner, who became known as The Arkansas Traveler. The setting of the skit is a farmer playing the fiddle on the front porch of his ramshackle cabin in rural Arkansas. Up rides a city slicker on a horse who is beyond lost. Their conversation is captured in the

Read the rest

Hallejuha I’m a Bum & Harry McClintock

By Wayne Erbsen

Let’s take a look at one of the most notable labor songs of all time, Hallelujah I’m a Bum, and the man who wrote it,” Harry McClintock, whose nickname was Haywire Mac.

Mac’s life reads like the pages of a dime novel. Born October 8, 1882, he ran away from home when he was still a boy and joined the circus. Yielding to his itch to roam, he worked as a railroad man in Africa, a seaman, and a muleskinner in the Philippines. In 1899 he worked in China assisting a newsman reporting on the Boxer

Read the rest

The Ballad of Frankie Silver

Her real name was Frances Steward Silver, but they all called her Frankie. The words chiseled into her tombstone give us a chilling reminder of what this story is about: “Frankie Silver, Only Woman Ever Hanged in Burke County, Morganton, July 2, 1833.”

I first heard about this strange chapter of North Carolina folklore from a mountain man named Bobby McMillan, whom I met when I lived in Hickory, North Carolina in the mid-1970’s. Because he was the third cousin to Charlie Silver, the man Frankie was accused of killing, Bobby had been collecting stories, songs and lore about Frankie

Read the rest