Well I'll be goddamned.

If you want to hear one of the tracks that made me decide I wanted to learn clawhammer banjo (versus bluegrass) a million years ago, listen to John Sosebee's recording of Elkhorn Ridge, which I downloaded on July 17 2002 and which as far as I know has not been available anywhere on the internet since MP3.com imploded in 2003. I can't even guess the last time I would have listened to it myself.

I just came across a CD-rom of stuff I burned that September, and I'm so happy to have found the entire folder of banjo stuff I downloaded from hither and yon while researching banjo styles; I had begun saving up for a banjo that spring as an abstract goal, not really knowing much of anything about them... I think I probably did a in internet search for 'beginner banjo recommendation' which would have led me down the bluegrass vs clawhammer rabbit hole. I gravitated to clawhammer pretty quickly.

I just about fell out of my chair when I found the subfolder called 'Minstrel' with a few tracks in it; I remember finding Bob Flesher's web site at the time and reading about stroke style playing, but wouldn't have said I had heard any until about 8 years later.

It's also a weird slightly dizzying 'time doubling back on itself' effect to see the subfolder of Vess Ossman cylinder recordings I had saved; I remember listening to those classic style tracks that summer and being unable to wrap my head around this banjo music that was neither folky nor jazzy, and I wrote it off for another 12 years or so.

Anyway, I've looked for this recording on and off over the years and I'm delighted to have found it.

...also I had never really found anything about John Sosebee until now, because I think I was always specifically including the search term 'Elkhorn Ridge'. Turns out he's younger than I am, which is also a slightly dizzying revelation; when 27 year-old me went looking for info about old-time banjo on the internet in 2002, there was a whole a lot of heavily romanticisized stuff that painted a mental picture of your average clawhammer banjo player as a grizzled appalachian man of some indeterminate age between like 45 and 80, but I think he would have been in his early 20s. I'll have to drop him a line.

https://archive.org/details/elkhorn-ridge #banjo #oldtime #elkhornridge #onionbelt