The Handmade Music School is looking for a Director of Operations to play a leading role in the development and oversight of teaching traditional music, dance and stories from Floyd County, throughout the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond! Learn more! Interested folks can reach out to info@handmademusicschool.com
As of October 2021, Corbin will assume the position of General Manager of County Sales and we are excited to add him to the team! Corbin brings a wealth of knowledge of old time, bluegrass and early country music. He is a fantastic musician and a good guy to boot! Please make him welcome. Give him a call 540-745-2001 or stop by County Sales at 117 S Locust St in Floyd, Virginia.
he Floyd Music Loft Recording Ensemble is a group class available to up to six students in 8-week sessions. The class provides students an opportunity to write, perform, and record music in a band setting with professional instruments and recording equipment. The next class takes place September 7 - October 26, 2021. Classes meet once a week on Tuesday afternoons from 4:00-6:00 pm. Cost is $400.00 (scholarships available).
The Handmade Music School (at The Floyd Country Store) & Southwest Virginia luthier Jackson Cunningham are offering a chance to win one of Jackson’s beautiful custom-made guitars to benefit programming at The Handmade Music School.
This week’s tune is a revisit to “Angeline the Baker.” Thanks to Molly Stouten for helping me hunt this down. Here is a link to the song version that I heard many years ago on a WPAQ Saturday afternoon broadcast called the Blue Ridge Spotlight.
We are so thrilled with the participation in this year's competition. Folks from all over the world submitted videos of themselves sharing SWVA music and dance, and we are so proud of every single entry. The level of competition was very high and our only regret is that we didn't have enough prizes or categories to recognize all of the deserving entries.
Thanks to old time fiddler Ole Rossel of Copenhagen, Denmark for this take of Carroll County’s Uncle Norman Edmonds and band playing the melody to the old folk song “Lonesome Dove”. Ole has been into playing Appalachian old time fiddle music since the 60s and long ago zeroed in on the more primitive and rustic sounds in his taste for American fiddle music that is truly from the heart and that is old time without a doubt.
I was impressed by one our young clawhammer banjo players in our local JAM program, Hannah Cantrell from Floyd County. She played this tune for me at a gathering this past weekend on my fretless banjo. She told me she had learned this tune Poplar Pole secondhand from banjo player and fiddler Mike Gangloff who knows a lot about the music of our local "unknown" players of the past.
Here’s a tune for this week played by Stuart Lundy, one of the sons of fiddler Emmet Lundy of the Galax area.
This week’s tune is called “Callahan”. This one is from the playing of William (Bill) Shelor. I first heard it on the LP recording on the Heritage label called “Eight Miles Apart” that features two of the families from our local area that were prolific players of our kind of music in their lifetimes, namely, the Kimbles and the Shelor families. I am always going back to their recordings for great listening music and to learn special versions and new ‘old’ tunes from.
Here’s the other tune known as Twin Sisters that is nothing like the D tune called Twin Sisters or Jennie Baker. Here’s old-time clawhammer banjo player Sidna Meyers of Carroll County playing Twin Sisters as a solo. He has some cool melodic right hand techniques not unlike his contemporaries on banjo Glen Smith and Wade Ward. This is not a dance tune in my opinion.
So I want to feature a local version in D of the tune “Twin Sisters”. This rendition was a part of the Old Originals LP that has so many great tune versions played by mostly unknown players who were found in their elderly years still able to remember tunes from their community. Thanks to the work of Blanton Owen and Tom Carter who collected these tunes in the early 1970s.
