Since I am the webmaster for the West Michigan Bluegrass Music Association, I got contacted by another site owner looking to promote his site recently, and I’m glad I did because it’s a great resource for lovers of bluegrass music, and useful to pickers, including of course banjo players. The site I’m speaking of is www.bluegrassonthetube.com, and I highly recommend you check this site out. It’s a site that filters out the bluegrass content that’s available on YouTube and other video sources, and delivers it to you in an alphabetized format so that you can watch some great bluegrass performances from over the years.
At first glance, I found this to be a great way to pass some time and watch some great videos of bluegrass performers. So much of the footage that’s out there on YouTube wouldn’t be seen by anywhere near the amount of people that get to see it if it weren’t for the internet and a site like YouTube, and now it’s being harnessed by www.bluegrassonthetube.com for a filtered, easy way to view some awesome bluegrass footage. I personally am quite thrilled to get to sit back and watch clips of performances dating as far back as the 60′s sometimes. I used to play with my group Apple Blossom Bluegrass Band in a 3-state area and attend a lot of the popular bluegrass festivals on the circuit in my area, but never really branched out much beyond my area. And, I haven’t been to a lot of the festivals and concerts over the past 5 years or so, so really, even though I used to be in a fairly active band on the bluegrass circuit (the two bands I’m in currently don’t seem to play a lot of festivals) I still haven’t seen many of the mover’s and shaker’s of our art form in person. I’ve seen some on the television, but not many overall. So for me, it’s especially interesting to get to put faces to the well established names that I’ve been listening to on CD or have been hearing people talk about for so long.
I spent a few minutes looking around on www.bluegrassonthetube.com before I started writing this blog post, and I quickly realized how addicting it is. I wanted to simply capture a screen shot for the picture at the top of this article, yet I found myself getting immersed in all the content on the site, such as the video of one of my favorite banjo players, Tom Adams, playing Shenandoah Breakdown. I had to actually force myself to shut it off to get my work done!
As I did a little more thinking about www.bluegrassonthetube.com, it occurred to me that there is another angle to explore regarding this site’s usefulness: this site is a great learning tool. For decades, bluegrass banjo players have been learning new songs strictly from listening to either records or tapes or CD’s. I even read an article that quoted Bela Fleck as saying that when he was young, he sat front row in a little honky-tonk several nights in a row to listen, and more importantly to watch, the hot banjo player that was gigging there that week. Bela watched and learned from the banjo player’s technique every night for several nights. What better than to have the audio AND video of many bluegrass songs available to you on www.bluegrassonthetube.com? If there’s a song you want to learn that’s available in the choice of videos, you’ll have a great opportunity to watch the video an unlimited amount of times, and back it up or fast forward it as much as necessary to try and copy that banjo player’s licks. Thousands of banjo players over the years would have been thrilled to have the visual aspect of the songs that they were trying to learn from a record or a tape or a CD along with the audio portion. We’re lucky in this day and age to have so many of the tools that we do at our disposal, and now we can add www.bluegrassonthetube.com to the list of available resources. Check it out. You’ll be glad you did!