The Art of Chewing Tobacco for the Complete Ignoramus

By Wayne Erbsen

Good News! I’ve discovered a way of increasing your speed on the banjo without resorting to harmful drugs or distasteful practicing. It doesn’t even require that you force yourself to change long-held habits of picking the banjo. After all, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, now can you? For some strange reason, this miracle solution to banjo speed has been omitted from all banjo instruction materials now on the market. The method, as you may have gathered from the title, consists of the venerable practice of chewing tobacco. Yes, that’s right folks. Chewing tobacco makes

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Rural Black String Band Music

By Charles Wolfe

Originally published in Black Music Research Newsletter 4, No. 2 (Fall 1980). Used by permission of Mary Dean Wolfe.

“The first time I think I ever seen Arnold Schultz … this square dance was at Rosine, Kentucky, and Arnold and two more colored fellows come up there and played for the dance. They had a guitar, banjo, and fiddle. Ar­nold played the guitar but he could play the fiddle-numbers like Sally Goodin. People loved Arnold so well all through Kentucky there; if he was playing a guitar they’d go gang up around him till he would

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Lester Woodie, Coming Up The Hard Road

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

In the Summer of 1949 a shy boy of eighteen rode up to Bristol, Virginia for his first professional job as a fiddle player. Behind the steering wheel was a man in his early twenties who had encouraged the boy’s music from the start. The older man’s name was George Shuffler.

“This is a good break for you,” George said to the younger man riding beside him. “The Stanley’s are tough, and what with making a guaranteed $50 a week, why you could send some home to the folks and still have more money than you would have ever made

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History of Jimmy Rodgers, Blue Yodeler by John Lilly

“Folks everywhere knew about Jimmie Rodgers, and although some of them were reluctant at first to believe that he was really there in person, playing their own town, they soon learned that he was as much at home in Sweetwater or O’Donnell as in front of a Victor microphone or on the stage of some fancy big-city theater. Vernon Dalhart and Gene Austin might make a lot of records, but they didn’t come out into the boondocks to rub shoulders and tell bawdy jokes and laugh with the plain folks who bought them. The effects of the Blue Yodeler’s tours

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Build Your Own Chords on Fiddle or Mandolin

MandoFrogBy Wayne Erbsen

One of my students recently asked me to give him a sheet with all the fiddles chords he would need to play most any bluegrass song. I certainly wanted to help him out, but I decided that I wouldn’t be doing him any big favors by handing him the chords on a sheet of paper. Instead, I needed to help him understand how to make up his own chords. That way, if a big gust of wind blew his sheet away, he wouldn’t be up the creek without a paddle, so to speak.

As you already know,

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Emmett Miller – The Vaudeville Star Who Helped Shape Country Music

By Charles Wolfe

Emmett-Miller-photo

There are dozens of unsung heroes in the annals of country music; some are instrumentalists, like the legendary Georgia fiddler Joe Lee, who introduced the “long bow” style to greats like Clayton McMichen; some are songwriters, like the gospel singer Grady Cole, who wrote Tramp on the Street; others were promoters and radio personalities like the late Eddie Hill, who helped introduce the music of the Louvin Broth­ers to a wide audience. But one of the most unsung, and one of the most mysterious, was a remarkable blackface come­dian and singer named Emmett Miller. He flourished

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Bluegrass Jamming on Banjo MP3s

Thanks for purchasing Bluegrass Jamming on Banjo. Click on one of the links below to download or stream a folder containing a whopping 197 instructional audio tracks to accompany your book. Whenever you see an image of an antique gramophone in your eBook, it will have a number inside of it which corresponds to the numbered audio track.


Here are the links to download or stream the MP3s:

Download (zipped) files
Stream Audio


Please let us know if you have any questions or comments! If you like this book, check out out our other banjo instruction books, Clawhammer Banjo

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Easy Mandolin Songs

By Wayne Erbsen

In my article Mandolin Chords, I showed you a number of two-finger chords you can play on the mandolin. Armed with that knowledge, there are thousands of songs you can play simply by strumming the chord and singing, humming, or whistling the song.

Before you can do that you will need to figure out which chords to play when.

The good news is that most bluegrass songs can be played with just three chords. These three chords form a little family called a “key.” We often give the chords in this family the numbers 1 4

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Easy Bluegrass & Folk Songs on Mandolin

By Wayne Erbsen

In my article entitled Mandolin Chords, I showed you a number of basic mandolin chords. Armed with that knowledge, there are thousands of songs you can play simply by strumming the chord and singing, humming or whistling the song.

Before you can do that you will need to figure out which chords to play when.

The good news is that most bluegrass, folk and country songs can be played with just three chords. These three chords form a little family called a “key.” We often give the chords in this family the numbers 1, 4, and

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Blue Sky Boys

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

It all began with a misunderstanding. It was early June, 1936, and the teenage brother duet of Bill and Earl Bolick had just abruptly ended a three-month stint at radio WGST in Atlanta over a dispute with the sponsor, W.J. Fincher’s Crazy Water Crystals. Within a matter of days the Bolicks traveled to the RCA Victor studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, to fulfill a contract to make their first recordings.

Perhaps out of spite, W.J. Fincher passed on to RCA Victor the erroneous information that the brothers had broken up their act. For this reason, Eli Oberstein

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