I love Bluegrass Music – the sheer virtuosity and the powerful raciness gets me every time.
And the most amazing protagonists are the ubiquitous kid bands in the Bluegrass States.
My favourite in this group is the tiny girl playing uke bass. Confident as all get out, she never misses a beat 😄
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
That was just wonderful Emm, thanks.
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Three times now i have tried to leave a (complimentary) comment. I don’t like WordPress anymore. Grrrrrrr
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Check this out …..
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Are you a guitar player, by any chance? (I am not, but I do like listening to it.)
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I wish I actually practiced. I have two Maton (Aussie made acoustic and semi-acoustic guitars) and a beautiful Gretz Electromatic.
But I have short fingers and I’m a much better ukulele player.
I have maybe 6 Ukes – one Chinese steel body resonator (cost me $400 – a national steel Uke costs $4k ! ). My daughter bought me a banjolele – small 4 string banjo, different sized acoustics – soprano, concert and my favourite- a semi- acoustic tenor made in Colorado – called a Riptide. It has a beautiful tone and is made from solid mahogany. I also have a bass Uke – amplified with really big fat polymer strings that does a fairly good job of putting a base line under a group of Uke players. The little girl playing base is using one of these – great for tiny hands. Like bass guitars it’s a really different beast – you play notes, not chords.
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If you lived in Myrtleford, you could join the very peppy ukulele group. Several of the members are good guitarists, so they’d get you practising.
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Hi Yvonne.
What’s it like living in Myrtleford ? My partner and I are nudging retirement and sick of racing rats in Sydney. It’s waay too crowded and transport is ridiculous.
There is a Uke group here in Townsville but they are depressingly bad, poorly run, and not very social.
This is in stark contrast with Cairns which has several Uke groups and when I was there in 2018/9 I was jamming three times a week with a dozen other fans of the pros.
In Sydney we have loads of Uke groups. Too many to follow but I jam with mates at the Botany Circle once a month. There is a core band of really experienced players who call themselves Lindy and the Loose Units ! Great fun.
Glad you and ‘shoe like the last batch of posts at the pub 😁
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Myrtleford (and the surrounding region/towns) is pretty good to live in. I’ve gone from Adelaide to Mackay to Atherton to here, and this’ll be my final resting place!
City life is getting too expensive, too hectic it seems. We get cranky when we have to wait to let 2 cars through the roundabouts. 🙂
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Townsville has nearly 200,000 inhabitants and it’s so easy to live here if you have an air conditioned house and a job. It has a great road system but everyone complains about the public transport.
Driving around here is a weird experience. You could eat your lunch waiting for the traffic lights to change, but nobody seems to mind and people generally obey the speed limits and are courteous. (Might be my NSW plates).
But it’s a very dull and boring garrison town. There’s a child care centre or a gun shop on every corner, interspersed with a plethora of welfare agencies. And a frightening number of empty shops.
The white population seems to be relaxed and happy.
Unemployed indigenous youth not so much.
People are generally very approachable but it’s a bogan culture and I could not cope with retiring here.
I prefer Cairns, but like here, the monsoon/ cyclone season is oppressive and if there was no aircon, the heat and humidity would be a killer.
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It’ll be interesting to see where you move (if you do).
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Darn Block editor, I never know if my pearls of wisdom have been delivered, or not.
Anyhoo, I just wanted to say I like this style of music too. And to ask you if there is a name to the style of playing the guitar in a horizontal manner?
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Before electric guitars were invented, somewhere between 1930 and 1940, there were many attempts to get a bigger voice for the acoustic guitar. One prominent inventor was a chap called Dopyera and he and a brother produced a metal conic device like today’s loudspeakers- called a resonator. Fitted inside the wooden guitar. It was a big success and the style of guitar was referred to as a Dobro – Dopyera Brothers.
The technology was developed further and the whole guitar was fitted with a metal body (bell brass or nickel -plated steel) and one or three cones – tricone resonator.
The most famous brand was and still is National – metal body with lots of different finishes including highly polished nickel some with Hawaiian scenes etched into the metal.
These come with either a square neck – played horizontally – usually with a metal or glass slide (bottleneck or slide style) or a conventional neck where the guitar is held and played like a regular guitar. Cheap – and not too bad Chinese knock-offs cost a few hundred dollars. The real deal Nationals cost between $5,000 and US$10,000 new and I heard that a vintage 1930s National can set you back $30k-$100k – but they are so rare that the sellers just set the price and guys like Mark Knopfler or Ry Cooder pay that if they want one badly enough. Conditions is critical- a neck that isn’t straight will cost a lot to replace.
The boy is playing a slide dobro of unknown origin. Dobros are mostly tuned to common chords – so say a blues song might see the guitar tuned in open E, but there are other similar chords tunings like Open D.
Slide up the neck and you get an F, G, A etc – and you will see the players add a finger or two – pressing strings other than the slide to get say a minor or a seventh.
Cheers 😄
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Thank you so much for the detailed information. (That was one of the comments I thought wasn’t delivered.)
Mark Knopfler and Ry Cooder had better outlive me!
I saw Leo Kottke twice in Adelaide. How do you rate his playing?
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Well, if that wasn’t a treat for my old eyes and ears! I like that style of music too.
What do they call it when they play the guitar in a horizontal plane?
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I did a huge essay – but the style is usually referred to as slide or sometimes Dobro style. The inter web tubes have lots of info on Dobro guitars. And the Rolls Royce brand are called “Nationals”.
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Thanks, I was the devoted person who posted all of those comments.
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