The

Banjo Clubhouse

Resources for Early Banjo

Hosted by Tim Twiss 

Do you like this site? Do you enjoy the resource this offers? Do you download my material? Please consider a voluntary small donation with this secure PayPal donation link. Since it is unlikely that I will be publishing a book in the near future and such a wide variety of new music, tab, recordings, lessons, and demos will be appearing here on a regular basis, this really helps. Just a small amount makes this this labor worthwhile.  The internet is fabulous and free...but still worth something, right?

"The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles, and slate pencils. But give me the banjo. . . . When you want genuine music — music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strycnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose — when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo." 

Mark Twain, “Enthusiastic Eloquence,”
San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, June 23, 1865.

NEW THIS WEEK (1/23/2010) Selections from Dobson's New System for the Banjo of 1877

Audio and Video

Songs are listed by tutor. Just click the book to find the tunes and hear them played by various members of the Early Banjo Community. This is the single greatest source of Early Banjo Music available for your listening reference. There are hundreds of songs to see and hear.

• Stroke Style Instruction

• The Ning Minstrel Banjo Discussion Group

• Early American Music 1830-1865 by Daniel Partner

• Early Banjo Gathering 2007

• Early Banjo Gathering 2006

• The Banjo Database by Greg Adams and George Wunderlich

• Bob Winans on Syncopation from the Early Banjo Gathering 2006

• Greg Adams  Vocal Music and the Minstrel Banjo:Expanding the Repertoire from the Early Banjo Gathering 2006

• Links To Great Resources for Early Banjo

• The Jake Wallace Diary

• Videos

• Chuck Krepley on 19th Century Fiddling from the Early Banjo Gathering 2006   

  Part 1    Part 2

  Send your audio file to banjosnapper and share your songs. Home recordings are fine.  Another version of one already up here is okay....even encouraged. We want to hear everybody. 

 All files are WMA. Mac users can download a free Windows Media Player at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=windowsmedia

Since January 2010