1 comments about Banjo Player's Songbook (Banjo).

1. Simple clawhammer arrangements of a lot of folk and other songs, grouped by category ("A parcel of rogues", "All over this land", etc.) and with a short introduction to each song.

   Most of the tunes are what you'd expect from a book of this type (Shady Grove, Sweet Betsy from Pike, etc.) but there are a few from left field - a whole section on Stephen Foster, for example, and a few Jewish tunes which are arranged quite well.

   If you already own a book or two of folk tunes, you can probably do without this, but it's a great book for someone just starting out on the banjo (it was for me!)

No comments about Gospel Songs for Bluegrass Banjo.

1 comments about Hal Leonard Banjo Method - Book 2: Banjo Technique (Hal Leonard Banjo Method).

1. Book is lame. Would not recommend it for beginner banjo players. Much better are the banjo encyclopedia (ross nickerson) or the best way to learn is with DVD's (highly recommend Murphy Method dvds)

No comments about Mel Bay presents Gospel Tunes for Clawhammer Banjo.

No comments about Mel Bay presents Modern 5-string Banjo Method Grade 1 (Modern Method).

No comments about Banjo-Kazooie: The Official Nintendo Player's Guide.

No comments about Mel Bay's A Treasury of Songs for Young People: For Autoharp, Guitar, Ukulele, Mandolin, Banjo, and Keyboard.

No comments about Mel Bay Frailing the 5-String Banjo.

4 comments about Mel Bay Round Peak Style Clawhammer Banjo (Mel Bay Presents).

1. This round peak style book is fantastic in that is has all the old time songs I have ever wanted to learn. It is not for the beginner though. The tab notation is a bit hard to figure out but it is possible.



2. A great addition to my collection of banjo how to books. Brad Leftwich has this sound down pat. I find the tabs easy to use, provided you read the how to part, and with the accompanying CD the banjo player can hear each tune played the way it is supposed to be played. I especially enjoyed the short stories about the history of each tune.



3. Here is another book where you listen to the authors playing and you get tabs that sort of resemble the songs being played. The tiny bit of instruction in the beginning lets you know you bought this book mostly to listen. Some interesting comments about the fretless banjo, but again, VERY little instuction and none really on the CD. At least, the author takes the time to match up the CD tracks to the tabulature in the book but all the songs are played at jam speed. On the plus side, the included CD is a good one to have. If you already know how to play clawhammer banjo you can learn a lot about Round Peak style and also pick up more than a few licks from this fat book and its 82 tunes.



4. This book comes highly recommended by Round Peak style experts, and does a fair job at walking you through the mechanics of Round Peak style, but frankly, most of the songs included on the accompanying CD sound like variations upon a few themes rather than distinct songs.
   
   As I was going through the CD, I was struck at how many of the songs sounded the same. By the last track, I was extremely disappointed. It's a bit deeper than just surface-level similarities - in my opinion, this book covers about 5 "themes", expanded into about 30 "songs". In fact, you could probably learn the 5 themes and just improvise around the themes to get the same net effect.
   
   If you are looking to learn a banjo playing style AND some memorable songs, this might not be your best bet - this book doesn't quite deliver.

1 comments about The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy.

1. Bob Carlin spent years and years researching, consulting, studying, documenting, and otherwise working on this book. To some of us who joked about how this book might never appear, Bob always responded, I've got to get everything right.
   
   Bob did get everything right, at least as far as I know, here. In doing so he provides a strong practical basis not just for the life of Sweeney but for the nature of early Minstrelsy, the roots of the five string banjo, the spread of banjo playing and minstrelsy to Britain, and much about the nature of the entertainment business in the 1830s through the 1850s.
   
   No one who wants to know about the five-string banjo, American cultural and musical history should be without this book, No one.
   
   This book has the same strengths that Carlin's earlier book on Piedmont Carolina String Bands has. Bob's interest is not to create, validate, or invalidate this or that academic theory. Bob isn't an academic. He is one of the best banjo players, banjo item collectors, and instructors and students of the history of the old time banjo. He was one of the pioneers of the rediscovery of minstrel banjo playing, and accompanied old time music and bluegrass legend John Hartford as well as Joe Thompson, the last remaining traditional African American fiddler.
   
   In this book, Bob Carlin has gathered a wealth of information which he presents clearly and in an orderly manner. He completely disposes of the legend that Sweeney invented the banjo or invented the fifth string of the banjo. Sweeney never claimed that, but claims of that nature were made about him after his death. Carlin tracts down the origins of those claims in a detailed and documented way.
   
   This does not mean that this is a book of Sweeney bashing. Carlin's approach is respect for the great musical capacities this entertainer had and how as he says like Elvis, he energized the whole music world by combining African American and white musics in a new form of entertainment. We do get the sense of how Sweeney's banjo playing and his real background in African American music and his own skills made him widely popular in Britain and America. Yet, the book also showed how age and changing fashions in minstrelsy and entertainment in general meant that Sweeney's star eventually fell.
   
   This book is good, hard, serious work, put forward in a clear manner and will be one of the bedrocks of study of the banjo, minstrelsy, and American popular culture.