A Banjo Revel

[Jody Stecher]

A Banjo Revel is a Joe Morley tune I learned from some very large sheet music I won on ebay. I've never heard a recording of it. It seems to be the only one of Morley's compositions to be published by Larking. (Larking's Banjo Budget #1). It anticipates "melodic" bluegrass technique by several decades not to mention the theme of The Ballad of Davy Crocket ("born on a mountain top in Tennessee....." ). I'm playing it on an anonymous American banjo with a 12.5 inch metal clad pot and a playing scale of nearly 29 inches. I have it strung with wide gauge nylon strings which are tuned low. It has a calf skin head. The frets are very low. The pegs are violin type. I think the banjo is from the 1890s but I suppose it could be a bit newer or older than that.

[Jody Stecher]

Morley indicated fingerings that along with the corresponding right hand movements are similar and/or identical to a banjo technique that blossomed within the bluegrass field in the 1960s and was known as The Melodic Style. Morley's tune A Banjo Revel was the first place/first time I found this technique in older music, it was my a-ha moment. But he wasn't the first to do it.

[Trapdoor2]

Very cool bit of Morley, nicely played and very, very deep. ;-) I love his stuff and it is always a hoot to work thru. Any chance you could post the dots?

Morley was quite a player, his fingerings are always just a bit more "modern" than other players of the period. I wonder if he was actually responsible for the published fingerings? He may have just submitted manuscript and the publisher added fingerings. I guess we ought to ask David Wade about that, he's the Morley guru.

Morley's fingerings are one of the reasons I don't feel so bad when I "go melodic" on a piece of vintage music (rather than follow the published fingerings). ;-)

[Jody Stecher]

Sure, I'll post the dots as soon as I figure out how. You see the music paper is larger than my scanner's glass plate. The publisher is Larking about whom I know nothing but yeah, Dave Wade probably does know.

[Jody Stecher]

I was able to scan A Banjo Revel after all, it just fit. Here she comes. Valse de Concert was just too big. I'll figure it out.....

[Trapdoor2]

Yeah, I have the same problem for much of my vintage sheet music. Too big for the scanner. You can scan 'em in bits and then 'stitch' them together but it is a real pain. We used to have a nice copier here in the office that would do 11X17 (and shrink 'em down as much as you wanted) but since we've gone "paperless" we no longer needed a copier...they got rid of it.

I've been working on a "light box" to digitally photograph the large format stuff. I need to finish it.