(Vocal/instrumental duo, 1949–65) Of all the banjoists that Bill Monroe hired to fill the shoes of the departed Earl Scruggs, Don Reno (banjo, vocals, guitar, 1927–84) came closer than any. Reno developed his own style by playing single-string guitar-like runs on the banjo. He also found his own equivalent of Lester Flatt when he met Arthur ...
1948, Monroe hired one virtuoso after another. Carter Stanley, Jimmy Martin, Benny Martin, Vassar Clements, Mac Wiseman, Sonny Osborne, Bobby Hicks, Don Reno, Don Stover, Kenny Baker, Buddy Spicher, Peter Rowan, Del McCoury, Bill Keith, Richard Greene, Jim Eanes, Carl Story, Roland White ...
pianist that would emerge when he next recorded in 1936. A lot happened during that four-year blackout. After Moten’s sudden death in 1935, Basie took a job at the Reno Club in Kansas City, hiring players from the old Moten unit as well as former Blue Devils. By early 1936 many of the key men were in place, ...
(Vocals, guitar, 1930–93) After three years of pioneering three-part ‘high-lead’ harmonies with The Osborne Brothers, Red Allen split with his Ohio pals, convinced he could be a bluegrass star in his own right. He and another Dayton friend, mandolinist Frank Wakefield, moved to Washington in 1960 and recorded with musicians such as Chubby Wise and ...
audiences loved the combination of string-band picking and modern rhythm. They were voted CMA Vocal Group Of The Year in 1971. Styles & Forms | Bluegrass | Country Personalities | Reno & Smiley | Bluegrass | Country ...
audiences by occasionally refashioning pop songs of the day like ‘Love Letters In The Sand’ into bluegrass odes. Other ensembles, like the great, innovative banjo-guitar-vocal duet team Don Reno and Red Smiley and fiddler Kenny Baker, would enrich and expand upon bluegrass’s traditional roots throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Bluegrass To Newgrass Young, progressive bluegrass artists like ...
brother Ralph and their Monroe-like mandolinist Pee Wee Lambert perfected a kind of close, three-part harmony that made their vocals even higher and ‘lonesomer’ than their role model. Don Reno refined the Scruggs style of banjo playing by adding guitar-like runs on the instrument. Jesse McReynolds (never a Blue Grass Boy) adapted the Scruggs roll to the mandolin with his ...
A musical ensemble is a group of two or more musicians who have come together to play music. In theory, an ensemble could contain any number of instruments in any combination, but in practice, certain combinations just don’t work very well, either for musical reasons or because of the sheer practicality of getting particular instruments and players ...
In 1905, and probably for several decades before that, there were more pianos in the United States than there were bathtubs. In Europe, throughout the nineteenth century, piano sales increased at a greater rate than the population. English, French and German makers dispatched veritable armies of pianos to every corner of the Earth. It was the ...
Aida, set in Ancient Egypt, was not composed to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, as has often been suggested. Nor was it commissioned by the Khedive of Egypt to mark the opening of the Cairo Opera House that same year. It happened that the French Egyptologist, Auguste Mariette, keeper of monuments to ...
‘The Knight of the Rose’ For the follow-up to Elektra, Strauss declared he wanted to write a Mozart opera. Despite Hofmannsthal’s protests about a light, Renaissance subject set in the past, the librettist soon came up with a scenario that delighted Strauss. The correspondence between librettist and composer was good-natured and respectful. Each made suggestions to the other ...
‘Julius Cesar in Egypt’ Handel’s operas usually revolve around the voices and particular gifts of the singers that were available to him. Giulio Cesare in Egitto was created in 1724 as a vehicle for Senesino and Cuzzoni, although the characteristic trademark of Handel’s best operas is that the emotions and experience of the characters are not sacrificed to the virtuosity ...
Puccini visited the Metropolitan Opera in New York during 1907 to see the US premieres of Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly. While there he saw David Belasco’s play The Girl of the Golden West and his next opera began to take shape. La fanciulla del West is notable particularly for the vital part the vast orchestra plays in depicting the characters’ ...
Le Comte Ory (1828) was another of Rossini’s bright, brilliant operas buffa. This one, based on an old Picardy legend, premiered at the Paris Opéra on 20 August 1828. The first performance in London took place at the Haymarket on 28 February 1829, and was possibly intended as a celebration for Rossini’s thirty-seventh birthday, the best ...
‘The Marriage of Figaro’ The librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote that Le nozze di Figaro offered ‘a new kind of spectacle … to a public of such assured taste and refined understanding’, and it would be fair to say that after Figaro’s premiere on 1 May 1786, opera buffa was never quite the same again. There were precedents, of ...
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