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15
Fiddle Tunes for Five String Banjo
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My
first exposure to melodic style three-finger style banjo
came in the summer of 1970. That was when I and several
other five string pickers lost the banjo contest at the
Folk Festival of the Smokies in Gatlinburg to Carroll
Best, the unsung pioneer of melodic style banjo. I had
been struggling mightily trying to figure out how to play
fiddle tunes with my Scruggs style rolls, and my version
of Arkansas Traveler, the tune I played in the Gatlinburg
contest, was still less than a success. I remember that
Best blew us all away when he played Soldier's Joy in
the key of D in open G tuning, without a capo. The notes
just flowed from his banjo in a rippling stream, as he
moved effortlessly about the neck. It was an epiphany
for me. When I got back to Cincinnati, my friend Mack
Smith from the Famous Old Time Music Company showed me
the few basic melodic style moves that he knew, and I
was off and running. I started spitting out melodic style
arrangements one after another, writing them down in tab,
trading them to Mack for strings, picks and capos. It
seems nobody had yet published anything of this new technique,
and few knew how to play anything in the new "Keith
style".
Eventually,
in 1974, with Mack's encouragement, I assembled a number
of my tabs and made up a little pamphlet called "15
Fiddle Tunes for Five String Banjo," which I had
printed at a local offset shop in Boston. I ended up selling
about 2,000 copies through a brand new publication called
the Banjo Newsletter. For your enjoyment, I have scanned
the book and converted it to PDF format, and converted
the tabs to Tabledit format, with guitar, bass, and fiddle
accompaniment, links provided below.
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Introduction
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The
Tunes
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Nothing
goes together quite like a fiddle and a banjo. The smoothly
drawn notes of the fiddle bow make a wonderful pattern of
sound, especially when contrasted with the clear, punctuating
notes of the five-string banjo. Their music is always exciting.
The
tunes in this collection, from all over the country, provide
a fund of ideas for playing with the fiddle. Some ripple
along, like Money Musk, with hardly a pause;others, llike
Dallas Rag, are highly syncopated. Three of the tunes are
in jig time (3/4), Irish Washerwoman, Paddy Whack, and Coleraine.
You may not want to borrow all of the ideas in each tune;
the nice thing about the banjo is that there are countless
ways of getting from one musical place to another.
Don
Borchelt
May, 1974 |
Fifteen
Fiddle Tunes for Five String Banjo, PDF Format
MIDI...TAB...Money
Musk (GDGBD, G)
MIDI...TAB...Saratoga
(GDGBD, G)
MIDI...TAB...Irish
Washerwoman (GDGBD, G)
MIDI...TAB...Arkansas
Traveler (GCGBD, C)
MIDI...TAB...Ragtime
Annie (GDGBD, C)
MIDI...TAB...June
Apple (GDGBD, G Modal)
MIDI...TAB...Lone
Star Rag (GDGBD, C)
MIDI...TAB...The
Last of Callahan (GDGBD, G)
MIDI...TAB...Whiskey
Before Breakfast (GDGBD, C)
MIDI...TAB...Miller's
Reel (GDGBD, G)
MIDI...TAB...The
Red Haired Boy (GDGBD, G Modal)
MIDI...TAB...Coleraine
(GDGCD, G Minor)
MIDI...TAB...Paddy
Whack (GDGBD, G)
MIDI...TAB...Chicken
Reel (GDGBD, G)
MIDI...TAB...Dallas
Rag (GDGBD, C) |
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(c)
copyright 2008, by Donald J. Borchelt, all rights reserved.
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