Thanks!

[Joel Hooks]

For the Normandie March and Love and Beauty Waltz. 

I gave the Normandie a read through this evening and though it is not spectacular, it is certainly serviceable. Consistent with that era but with a bit more meat.

I'll play with this some more and perhaps work it up on the Banjeaurine.

Love and Beauty will get played with tomorrow. I have found a lot of these waltzes somewhat interchangeable, so...

Normandie was #518 in the Stewart catalog, Love and Beauty was #539.

Mike, keep up the great work on this stuff.  I can't get enough.

[Mike Moss]

I think the key to their popularity was that they were some of the first pieces published specifically for banjo clubs at a time when there were very few, and not many club leaders had the technical know-how to produce satisfactory arrangements, creating a bottleneck on the amount of pieces available. The low supply and high demand of such music during the banjo craze was probably the main factor behind their widespread piracy during the early days.

In hindsight, it is clear that the banjo club, like all other fad instrument clubs, was more or less doomed to fail on the short term, but this was probably compounded by the fact that creating and selling orchestra instruments when there was still very little (if any) music available for them strikes me as a bad case of putting the cart before the horse!