  Lonesome Road Blues Tom and Jerry Banjo Boogie Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home Across the Shannon Dear Old Dixie Bluegrass in the Backwoods Listen to the Mocking Bird Little Black Mustache Topeka Polka Fisher's Hornpipe Home Sweet Home Chinquapin Hunting Golden Slippers Little Stream of Whiskey Farewell Blues McMichen's Reel When You and I Were Young, Maggie Flowers of Edinburgh Rainbow Twinkle Little Star Whiskey Before Breakfast Lonesome Road Blues (reprise) Carroll Best - Pioneer of the melodic banjo style “That was really what I liked: playing those hornpipes. ... So I just started playing what the fiddle played.” ~ Carroll Best In 1945, lacking a fiddle player for a square dance, North Carolinian Carroll Best became the first three-finger, bluegrass-oriented [banjo] player to conjure a fiddle tune in the melodic style. --Tony Trischka, Introduction to Master Collection of Fiddle Tunes for Banjo, 2011 “Carroll definitely played a role in the evolution of the melodic banjo style. There are minor examples of melodic banjo playing dating back to the minstrel banjo era (mid-1800s) and to the classic banjo style (c. 1900). But no one ever developed a full-blown melodic style until Carroll came along. Bobby Thompson also independently created a melodic style for himself in the 1950s. Then, of course, Bill Keith put melodics on the map during his tenure with Bill Monroe. He was not influenced to do so by Carroll or Bobby. As they did, he just came up with it.” -- Tony Trischka (from a 2014 interview) |
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