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My friend Clarke Buehling,
of Fayetteville, AR, an accomplished musician
focused on minstrel banjo style and 19th century American tunes, rolled into Staunton, VA, on a rainy Monday
evening last week, late and wet and tired.
I had set up a chance for
him to play downtown in Laurie Gundersen’s store, Appalachian Piecework, but it
looked as though the weather would slice through that opportunity and
eviscerate our effort to showcase Clarke’s incredible classic banjo playing. We did manage to set up, and Clarke did work
his way through a wide variety of tunes – classic, minstrel, popular – for
about 2 hours before we retired to my home.
Clarke played for a small
group of people assembled on this grey day, and attracted the attention of
shoppers who came into Laurie’s incredible store to check out her textile art,
antiques, and Appalachian folk art.
Clarke’s got an upbeat view of the world, and a positive sense of where
he stands in the universe. He engaged in
patter with people strolling through the store, offered a quick 15 minute
impromptu banjo lesson to a young lady (and a BHO member) who came and stayed
for the whole “show,” pushing her beyond her sense of current limited
capabilities, and urging consistent attention to learning something new every day.
That evening I had Bill
Wellington come to the house. Bill, a
local Staunton musician steeped in old time music, is a fiddler, banjoer, and
guitarer of note, was “present at creation” for some of the earliest jams and
OT groups in the northeast during the seventies, and did his fair share of
field recordings of fiddlers, banjo
players, and ballad singers in West Virginia University. Bill toured with Caledonia, and in recent
years has focused on building an elementary school residency program that brings
folklore alive for the school community, in partnership with the Virginia
Commission for the Arts.
Clarke and Bill spend
the evening at my home trading stories and tunes, tracing the provenance of
some great old time tunes through their memories of their first encounter with
some esoteric music, reconstructing the history of some of the great Midwest,
southern and northeastern old time bands, and trading some tunes -- and
eccentric tunings, too. I’m going to
try and get some of that history down (which bands begat which music, etc) in
the next weeks.
Bill is an old time
clawhammer player. Clarke whips his way
through a variety of minstrel and classic styles, so bringing these two
together was an opportunity to see how adaptable and flexible musicians, and
music, can be. Though they had never
played together, they quickly broke the code and figured out how to back one
another up, trade licks and keep tunes moving.
Clarke has developed
two books of some very accessible tabs, one primarily on classic tunes and the
other focused on minstrel playing, written in his florid, artistic hand. Available from the author:
Clarke Buehling
P.O. Box 744
Fayetteville, AR 72702-0744
479-442-5368
Email to buehlingbanjo @ yahoo.com
Fayetteville, AR 72702-0744
479-442-5368
Email to buehlingbanjo @ yahoo.com
Play hard,
Lew
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