The Patuxent Banjo Project cover

The Patuxent Banjo Project

Various Artists

Compilation · 2014 · Patuxent Music

The Patuxent Banjo Project is a two-CD set released by Patuxent Music (CD-250) in July 2014. It has forty tracks by banjo players who have been part of bluegrass and old-time music in the Washington–Baltimore area. Two of them, Mark Delaney and Randy Barrett, co-produced the set, and each has a track of his own, “Bird Bath” and “Things in Life.”

Several of the players go back to the region’s early bluegrass scene. Don Bryant, heard on Folkways’ 1957 album American Banjo, Scruggs Style, plays “Paddy on the Turnpike.” Roni Stoneman, who played with the Bluegrass Champs and was on the same Folkways album, plays “Going Home.” The Country Gentlemen’s early banjo players Bill Emerson, Pete Kuykendall and Eddie Adcock contribute “My Little Home in West Virginia,” “Sawmill Shuffle” and “Cedar City Blues.” Walter Hensley, who worked with Earl Taylor in Baltimore before leading his own band, plays “Upper Elk Creek.” Tom Neal and Billy Wheeler, who both worked with Cliff Waldron in the 1970s, play “Banjoland” and “Crossing the Blue Ridge,” and Tom Adams, formerly of the Johnson Mountain Boys, plays “Sugarfoot Rag.”

The other contributors include Mike Munford (“Hot Burrito Breakdown,” which opens the set), Murphy Henry, Casey Henry, Ira Gitlin, Mark Schatz, Stephen Wade, Reed Martin, Doug McKelway and Russ Carson. Two tracks are duets: “Scramble” by John Brunschwyler and Brennen Ernst, and “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” by Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer. Patuxent’s page for the album carries an essay by the historian Ivan M. Tribe, dated April 2014. It traces the area’s banjo players from the wartime and postwar migration out of the southern mountains to Washington and Baltimore, through clubs such as the Shamrock, the Red Fox Inn and the Birchmere.

Tracklist

  1. 1 Hot Burrito Breakdown 2:09
  2. 2 Going Home 2:55
  3. 3 Sugarfoot Rag alt version 1:50
  4. 4 The Ghost on Hippie Hill 3:09
  5. 5 Paddy on the Turnpike alt version 2:26
  6. 6 Things in Life alt version 3:07
  7. 7 Hazel Creek 4:03
  8. 8 Bird Bath 2:48
  9. 9 Marching Through Glenville 3:52
  10. 10 Allegretto Con Melanzane 4:40
  11. 11 Farewell Blues alt version 3:10
  12. 12 Ninety Degrees 2:46
  13. 13 Lickity Split 2:34
  14. 14 Dazed 4:01
  15. 15 Cumberland Gap alt version 3:06
  16. 16 Goldfield 2:07
  17. 17 Ceder City Blues 2:43
  18. 18 Banjoland 4:06
  19. 19 Scramble 2:41
  20. 20 Dear Old Dixie alt version 2:57
  21. 21 Blue Grass Stomp 2:37
  22. 22 Man Gave Names to All the Animals 5:23
  23. 23 Follow the Leader 1:51
  24. 24 Dying on the Field of Battle 3:08
  25. 25 Lori Ann 2:42
  26. 26 Phoebe's Lullaby 4:06
  27. 27 Bolen's Bounce 3:15
  28. 28 Once I Had an Old Banjo / Billy in the Low Ground 4:23
  29. 29 My Little Home in West Virginia 2:55
  30. 30 Angeline the Baker alt version 4:28
  31. 31 Crossing the Blue Ridge 2:58
  32. 32 The Drunken Fiddler 3:14
  33. 33 Cripple Creek alt version 2:18
  34. 34 Rocky the Wonder Dog 2:30
  35. 35 Sawmill Shuffle 1:29
  36. 36 Big Sciota Source Recording Traditional · key G · 125 bpm 3:13
  37. 37 The Baltimore Fire 2:42
  38. 38 Purple Creek 3:24
  39. 39 Upper Elk Creek 2:33
  40. 40 My Old Home in Baltimore 1:46

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