aschweigert - Posted - 04/25/2025:  04:53:35

Hi friends -



I was surprised no one had picked this tune yet and after having another tune from the Hammons family last week I figured this might be a fun one for folks. One of my all-time favorite banjo tunes, it was fun to dust off a bit.



This is Calloway which I mostly have from the playing of Lee Hammons. Here's a recording of him playing it: youtube.com/watch?v=EFHfWsSKKz0.



Dwight Diller, as the collector of a lot of these Hammons family tunes, also recorded this on one of his albums. Here's a video of him playing it: youtube.com/watch?v=A1sn3U26bzI. There's also a slightly different version of the tune from Maggie and Burl Hammons in his tab book.

The tuning is really kind of the magical bit here, it's in double C tuning with the 5th string tuned down to E (eCGCD). Messing around with it here, I'm playing it on a six string banjo and have variation that goes down to the low string which in this case is tuned to another G an octave below the 3rd string.

Here's a few spins through it from me: youtu.be/4TcIV15gqSY.

For a more modern take (on electric guitar) I also love this lovely recording by Laurel Premo: youtube.com/watch?v=cy7oZ-Y45tI

It's a really nice tune with lots of opportunities to throw in some different variations so I hope you'll give a listen to the recording of Lee playing it and give it a shot this week!

VIDEO: Calloway (Lee Hammons) - Clawhammer Banjo
(click to view)

 

cmic - Posted - 04/25/2025:  06:46:13

Calloway, nice tune and well played. I played this on f#DADE but

It reminds me of Three Forks Of Hell played by Sheila Adams :

Same tune, different name, so...

duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=t...mp;ia=web

 

Edited by - cmic on 04/25/2025 06:46:54

Don Borchelt - Posted - 04/26/2025:  05:09:59

A great pick for Tune of the Week, Adam, and you do a great job of picking on it. I learned this tune from Braxton County, West Virginia fiddler Ralph Roberts, one of two tunes he calls Calloway. This one he learned from Dwight Diller, who learned it from fiddler Lee Hammons. Dwight was a good friend of Ralph's.



banjr.com\hangout\ralph charlie and dwight.jpg" style="width: 400px; height: 224px;" />

           Ralph, Charlee and Dwight on Geezer Hill, at Clifftop

Ralph is kin to Maggie, Burl and Sherman Hammons, three of the ten children of Paris Hammons, who lived in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, who were visited and recorded by Alan Jabbour for the Library of Congress in 1970 (Dwight, as a young man, was along on those visits). Ralph’s grandfather John Roberts married Emmy Hammons, who was a sister of Maggie, Burl, and Sherman, and Ralph knew them all well, and learned tunes from them when he was a young man. But Lee Hammons, the source of this Calloway, is not directly related to the Pocahontus County Hammons family.



Ralph plays this tune a bit different than the way Dwight plays it. Of special note is the extra beat Ralph inserts at the end of two phrases in the melody. Like all of the tunes he has learned over the years, Ralph makes it his own, which is pretty much what all the old mountain fiddlers did. 



I visited Ralph in Frametown in August, 2021.  This is us playing the tune on his porch.

I played this tune in our local fiddle/banjo contest in Lowell, Massachusetts last September, and won the blue ribbon.  It took me 74 years to learn that sometimes simple is best.

There is another tune that Ralph plays that he also calls Calloway, that he learned from the Pocahontus Hammons folks, if I remember right.  Here is Ralph playing that Calloway on fiddle at Clifftop, in 2012.  That's Don Couchie on guitar; I'm on banjo:



banjr.com/sounds/mp3/roberts/c...berts.mp3



- Don B.

Edited by - Don Borchelt on 04/26/2025 05:21:00