#string band

i yap about this a lot but finally made some playlists

The Musicale, Barber Shop, Trenton Falls, New York

Artist: Thomas Hicks (American, 1823-1890)

Date: 1866

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, United States

Description

Why this instrument explains Black American folk music, October 21, 2022

Jake Blount, a banjo scholar, explains. 

Jake Blount has built a career out of understanding the banjo’s connection to Black American folk music. In this video, he walks us through the instrument’s history — from West Africa to enslaved people in the US to the early record industry — to explain how Black folk music has evolved. 

For example: The early record industry confined Black musicians to “race records” and white musicians to “hillbilly records.” Hillbilly music would have been early country and string band music. Race records restricted Black musicians to blues and jazz genres. Which meant Black musicians playing bluegrass-style banjo weren’t recorded — even if they were responsible for teaching white musicians.   

Using field recordings, their own banjo and fiddle skills, and a deconstructed version of one of their own songs, Jake explains how Black musicians have long been left out of the current canon of folklore recordings and American folk music history. And what he’s doing to keep the tradition alive, with fresh observations and a musical style that looks both forward and backward. 

This video was filmed on location at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Vox

Jake Blount - "Once There Was No Sun" (Official Music Video), July 20, 2022

“I learned "Once There Was No Sun" from a Bessie Jones recording. The track opens with a reading from Genesis, describing the world in the days prior to the creation of light, the sun, and the moon. The song’s lyrics reflect on the same period of time, reminding us that many things we treat as universal constants did not always exist - and, by extension, could recede into nothingness at any time. "Once There Was No Sun" is an invitation to reflect on the impermanence, fragility and beauty of a world we too often take for granted. 

We filmed on a small island off the coast of Maine, which also inspired the setting for 'The New Faith,' and it was clear to us from the start that the video should highlight the majesty of the landscape. The video is a celebration of beauty, in some of its most elemental forms: wind, light, sea and stone, and human bodies moving through it all. It’s my hope that, through such celebrations, we can learn to better care for all these things.”

 Video Produced by Blacklodge 

Cinematographer & Editor - Tadin Brego 

Backup Dancer - Veeva Banga 

Pink faces—(worlds or flowers or seas or stars), You all alike are patterned with hot bars

Of coloured light; and falling where I stand, The sharp and rainbow splinters from the band

Seem fireworks, splinters of the Infinite— (Glitter of leaves the echoes). And the night

Will weld this dust of bright Infinity To forms that we may touch and call and see:—

Pink pyramids of faces: tulip-trees Spilling night perfumes on the terraces.

The music, blond airs waving like a sea Draws in its vortex of immensity

The new-awakened flower-strange hair and eyes Of crowds beneath the floating summer skies.

And, ’gainst the silk pavilions of the sea I watch the people move incessantly

Vibrating, petals blown from flower-hued stars Beneath the music-fireworks’ waving bars;

So all seems indivisible, at one: The flow of hair, the flowers, the seas that run,—

A coloured floating music of the night Through the pavilions of the Infinite.

----

Fireworks

Edith Sitwell  1887-1964

----