Down a Lonesome Road : Dock Boggs, Life in Music "Let us now praise famous men." Dock Boggs belongs among them. Most of his life was lived in the obscurity this Biblical passage celebrates. He deserves fame for his efforts to live true to what he believed...

One voice seized me more than the rest. Over a simply picked banjo, the voice sang mournfully about a mole in the ground. Elsewhere, the same voice preached, over that same simple banjo, about dry bones. Like so many folk tunes, these told strange, elliptical...

It’s the first of July 1929, and at Brunswick Records’ studio in Chicago a recording supervisor invites a banjo-pickin’, tabacker-chawin’, moonshine-swiggin’ hillbilly to sit in front of a microphone (“Mike who?” the yokel asks) and make a record. The...

North Carolina fiddle & fretless banjo The fiddle and fretless banjo duets played by Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham distill the music down to its very essence. For those hearing these two great rural country musicians for the first time, this stark...