Friday Night Concert: Pickin’ in Jefferson
An impromptu pickin’ session with Curt Locklear on the banjo (l.), and Frank Reedy on the guitar (r.) at the 5th Annual Jefferson, Texas Civil War Symposium last Saturday. This was unplanned, and I believe these men had never met before. They just saw each had their instruments, and it happened. Didn’t even know if anyone was watching. Unrehearsed, unsynthesized, unamplified, unmixed, and unvarnished. Wish I’d caught the whole thing.
Curt is the author of the new Civil War novel, Asunder. Check him out.
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Nice. I used to see this sort of thing when I spent my summers in Louisiana. Not much else to do: you either played an instrument, sang, or danced. Us kids wished we had “more”, now I realize we had it all 🙂
Great fun!
They’re playing “Worried Man Blues” (Roud index #4753). Not a song that would have been around during the Civil War. And he’s playing a modern Bluegrass banjo. Of course Civil War music probably wasn’t on the agenda. Polk Miller, a Civil War veteran who recorded a version of “The Bonny Blue Flag”, is pictured in Wikipedia playing an open-back fretted banjo. So the old fretless Civil War era banjos were going away even with folks who were trying to perpetuate the music of the era. On minstrelbanjo.com there is a photo of a Union soldier playing a Boucher banjo (from Baltimore MD). Several craftsmen produce replicas of this banjo (including Hartel and also flesherbanjos.com).