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Reviews
Echo in the Canyon (2018)
A showcase for Jakob Dylan. The history of the canyon is given short shrift.
So much history was neglected. And attention was given to musicians who live nowhere near the canyon. The contemporary renditions of the original music that had no resonance and lacked the energy and spirit of those seminal recordings. Color me disappointed.
Sprout Wings and Fly (1983)
It's not Bluegrass, it's Old-Time Music!
Scott, the reason that you like this music is not because it's bluegrass, it's because it's Old-Time Music. Old-Time was the communal, front porch music that was popular between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. By the advent of the 1900s, only a few rural musicians persisted in playing "the old way". Bluegrass actually corrupted old-time music, converting it into more of a performance art and feeding egos with solos. Luckily, Old-Time Music lovers in the 1970s and 1980s were able to visit legendary fiddlers like Tommy Jarrell of Toast, NC, who opened his home to whoever wanted to come and learn his style of fiddling. Les Blank's wonderful film paints a portrait of Tommy and his family, and many of the young musicians who visited him and became his friend. Tommy was quirky, gregarious and generous, and this film shows him at his best, in fine fiddling form.