I've listened to a handful of these as I work making banjo thimbles or scan sheet music. Some of the pronunciation is off and makes me question if the voice is AI. I wish I could tell.

Recently I listened to one that repeated the myth that Samantha Bumgarner was the first to record 5 string banjo. This is VERY stupid. Bumgarner was not even the first woman to record 5 string banjo, that was Shirley Spaulding. In the comments the channel doubles down when someone pointed out Vess Ossman and the channel claimed that Ossman played plectrum style--- also a very ignorant thing to say.

Joel, thnx for pointing that out,, I also questioned the S Bumgarner comment, but I thought maybe they meant in OT Appalachian music. The Ossian comment is ridiculous tho. Nevertheless, I’ll keep watching them,, I won’t throw out the baby with the dirty bath water , as they were wont to say in Dickens-onian England ;-)

I've generally enjoyed the series, but also noted problems with historical detail, such as a suggestion that the Grand Ole Opry started at the Ryman Auditorium. At the 50,000 foot level, just take it with a grain of salt.

I tuned into it to learn about the origins of the tunes. But most of the time is spent on detailed biographical information of particular players of the tunes. Although interesting, it’s tangential to the stated theme of the series. The origin portion comes at the end and typically lasts for only a couple of minutes.

The whole channel is obviously AI, the idea that this is how people now learn about music is horrifying.

Hey guys, I guess I need to chime in here. I’m the dude behind “Hoedown History”. And I can assure you that I am not AI, my script is not AI generated and I put a lot of work in researching information for the videos and I try my best to communicate my love of this music and the history, people and stories behind them. That being said I did use some AI generated graphics in my first couple videos when I started out (because I thought it was cool and didn’t even know about all the bad AI videos out there). Anyway, you can critique my videos all you want (and there is a lot to critique- I’m just an amateur YouTuber with a low budget and an amateur banjo player on top of that )but calling the whole thing AI is just frankly wrong and spreading lies (which is kind of sucky).

Geez Chuck .......... are things falling into place or what??  You might recall that I find learning/making music pretty easy [cough, hack, cough].  The video opens with Emmett William Lundy 1864-1963, and Lundy is a name that appears somewhere in my family tree.   I dunno why I never saw the [obvious?] connection before.   

Actually one of my older brothers has the book of our family genealogy (?) and I'm gonna ask him to check our relationship to Ol' Uncle Emmett.  

Thanks.... and to hoedown history too.

hoedown history Thanks for chiming in and defending your work. I enjoy the vids, , keep’em coming.

chuckv97 details are important and "first to record old time banjo from Appalachia" is a very different statement from "first to record banjo".

Now, to the defense of the video, this false narrative has been thrown around a lot and even shows up if you google it. Also wiki. And every time it is questioned there is the "oh, I meant the first to record (insert very specific qualifiers).

This obscures/dismisses the fact of the real first woman to record.

"But, but, they were playing fingerstyle and Bumgarner was playing old time (or clawhammer or frailing)." Yeah, still not the first to record striking down.

Joel, if you want perfection have at it. There’s enough in those videos of great value. I don’t go for Sunday drives out in the country to complain about the odd paper wrapper in the ditches... (and I respect your work as a banjo historian 

I agree, and I will continue to listen to them.


Still, I remain fascinated that over 6 decades of a worldwide phenomenon is dismissed because it does not fit with a very specific narrative of a handful of people taking place at a remote geographic location with a vague and nonspecific timeline.

quote:

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Originally posted by hoedown history

Hey guys, I guess I need to chime in here. I’m the dude behind “Hoedown History”. And I can assure you that I am not AI, my script is not AI generated and I put a lot of work in researching information for the videos and I try my best to communicate my love of this music and the history, people and stories behind them. That being said I did use some AI generated graphics in my first couple videos when I started out (because I thought it was cool and didn’t even know about all the bad AI videos out there). Anyway, you can critique my videos all you want (and there is a lot to critique- I’m just an amateur YouTuber with a low budget and an amateur banjo player on top of that )but calling the whole thing AI is just frankly wrong and spreading lies (which is kind of sucky).

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Is the voiceover AI?

Nope. It’s my voice. Although I did see that YouTube automatically set some of my videos to “autodubbng” for some viewers outside of the US. I don’t know why or when they started doing this but I had to “opt out of it “ but it’s a big problem for a lot of small YouTubers out there as no one asked for this.

quote:

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Originally posted by Owen

Geez Chuck .......... are things falling into place or what??  You might recall that I find learning/making music pretty easy [cough, hack, cough].  The video opens with Emmett William Lundy 1864-1963, and Lundy is a name that appears somewhere in my family tree.   I dunno why I never saw the [obvious?] connection before.   

Actually one of my older brothers has the book of our family genealogy (?) and I'm gonna ask him to check our relationship to Ol' Uncle Emmett.  

Thanks.... and to hoedown history too.

---

Update .... my brother did a cursory check .... found lots of Lundys, but no E.W.    

He says they seemed to be mostly from Delaware and Pennsylvania ... Delaware to Grayson County, Virginia???   Heck that's almost next door, no?

I recently watched the Hoedown History documentary about Whiskey Before Breakfast, and found it very interesting and extremely well researched. I first learned the tune in 1972 from a recording of fiddler Dick Barrett, off of a Voyageur compilation of contestants at the National Old Time Fiddler's Contest in Weiser, Idaho. It's still one of my favorites. I knew Barrett had learned it from a Canadian fiddler, but Hoedown History filled in it's Canadian ancestry in great detail, which I greatly enjoyed learning about.

For the nitpickers posting on here, try doing something as involved as one of these documentaries, or any major project, without occasionally making a mistake. I was taught by Jesuits, who had a motto, "Perfection belongs only to God."

While eating my dinner tonight I watched the first twenty minutes or so of a documentary made back in 1985 by Phillip Morgan, called Music in the Old Time Way, which was recently posted on YouTube by Whitetop Music. It is concentrating on old time music in Virginia and western North Carolina. I'm going to go back and watch the rest of it, but the part I have watched so far has focused on North Carolina fiddler Benton Flippen and banjo picker Ernest Rutherford. Watching Flippen play his tune Benton's Dream, and Rutherford later pick Sail Away Ladies was a real treat, and made my spaghetti with clam sauce go down even easier! But there were two statements made by the narrator that raised my eyebrows. First, as Flippen was playing, the narrator's voice over said that most fiddle tunes are in either D or A, but there were tunes in many other keys as well. Now, I would agree that those are the most popular keys, but in Appalachian old time music, there are really only two other significant keys, G and C.  Okay, once in a great while you will hear F or Bb, but they are extremely rare in Appalachian music. As Rutherford was picking, the narrator correctly said that his style was called clawhammer, which the narrator then described as picking down with the index or middle finger, and then up with the thumb. Now that would be a neat trick. But while these errors are not insignificant, they detract almost nothing from the overall quality and value of the video.

I spent 34 years mostly in local government, spending your tax dollars on what we called community development and neighborhood revitalization. I helped old people stay in their homes by assisting with the cost and management of overdue repairs, helped small businesses obtain financing and regulatory approval to expand and add jobs, created urban parks and open spaces, cleaned up contaminated sites, and a whole lot of other things. I made mistakes all the time. A few of them cost the taxpayers a lot of money. You do your best, but you can't completely avoid screwing up now and again. Perfection belongs only to God.

- Don B

quote:

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Originally posted by Owen

quote:

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Originally posted by Owen

Geez Chuck .......... are things falling into place or what??  You might recall that I find learning/making music pretty easy [cough, hack, cough].  The video opens with Emmett William Lundy 1864-1963, and Lundy is a name that appears somewhere in my family tree.   I dunno why I never saw the [obvious?] connection before.   

Actually one of my older brothers has the book of our family genealogy (?) and I'm gonna ask him to check our relationship to Ol' Uncle Emmett.  

Thanks.... and to hoedown history too.

---

Update .... my brother did a cursory check .... found lots of Lundys, but no E.W.    

He says they seemed to be mostly from Delaware and Pennsylvania ... Delaware to Grayson County, Virginia???   Heck that's almost next door, no?

---

You have semi-famous blood coursing through thine (Quaker) veins, pilgrim.  You have likely entranced your former pupils with tales of this brutal battle, letting them know there's more to Canadian history than the Riel Rebellion. 

I've watched many of the videos in this series, and will continue plowing through the rest of them. I find them to be very well done, entertaining and educational.

I think it's unfortunate this was posted in this particular forum; as I believe it would have been much better if it had come up in either Playing Advice: Clawhammer and Old-Time Styles or Other Banjo-Related Topics: Clawhammer/Old-Time, in regards to getting the word out about this outstanding series and having more of a discussion about it. I feel the series is a truly significant achievement and deserves far more attention.

Culloden Hi Mark, I recall you commented à while back on the source for “Cold Frosty Morning” .

Here’s a video about it.

youtu.be/GiWg5kE1IDU?si=k-aYQ3LcIp8_vpvn

Thanks, Chuck. I will have to explore this one more in depth this weekend.

What Alan Jabbour originally wrote for a description of the tune.

Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection

Recording Session: August 27, 1966

Frosty Morning [AFS 13035a34] "Frosty Morning" sounds like a classic fiddle tune of the old frontier, but no clear variants of it can be cited from elsewhere. The title crops up elsewhere (sometimes as "Cold Frosty Morning"), but not for this tune. Henry Reed played it twice, and both times he began it with the high strain, showing the predilection of fiddlers in the Upper South for beginning their tunes with the upper strain, often at or near the top of the tune's compass. In both sets of "Frosty Morning" he tended to conflate the high strain with other tunes--on this occasion, with the high strain of the tune presented elsewhere in this collection under the title "Betsy," and once with the low strain of "West Virginia Gals," which he had just played. On yet another occasion (AFS 13037a16), he began with another tune, the "Breakdown in A," then conflated it with "Frosty Morning." -A

I continue to enjoy plowing my way through this entire series, which I find highly worthwhile from a number of standpoints.

If it weren't for the certainty that it would be locked as a double-post, I'd put it on Playing Advice: Clawhammer and Old-Time Styles, where I think the value of this series would reverberate in a meaningful way.