Links

Here are links to some of my favorite artists and resources for music making. I’m working on a detailed resource list for learning about music of all sorts to go with my Capital-M Music project (see Teaching/Writing Tab), but for now, this will be a shorter list. I do have many links and videos embedded in my writing under Capital-M Music, but I think it’s good to have a lot of things in one place, and I don’t have reasons to mention all of these things in those guides yet.

Folk Artists

One of my primary genres that I work with in my own music making is various folk and folk-adjacent styles. I like a lot of artists who are perhaps somewhat off the beaten track, so while I can mention folk icons like Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, or The Chieftains for Irish Traditional Music, I will mention many of the people who I’ve listened to a lot over the years who are perhaps less well-known.

Tania Opland and Mike Freeman - These first few groups I’m mentioning are the groups that I listened to in my formative years around Jr. High and high school, along with a lot of classical music. Tania Opland and Mike Freeman were the first people that I found that really started me down the road towards pursuing music as a possible career. I ran across them in connection with the Masterharper of Pern CD, having just gotten into the Dragonriders of Pern series of novels by Anne McCaffrey who worked with them on the project (and they later added a second CD to that series, Sunset’s Gold). My other favorite album of theirs is Cut to Rhythms, which I listened to a lot in those formative years! They were also the group that got me interested in the hammered dulcimer, and the group from which I learned about the concept of the Multi-Instrumentalist (as opposed to just a person who played different instruments). I got to go to a show they did near Chicago when I was in high school and meet them in person as well.

William Pint and Felicia Dale - I poked around on Opland/Freeman’s website and looked at their links page, and ran across this duo, and then I was in our local folk-music store one day and found one of their albums, so I got it and started listening to them too. Their primary focus is sea shanties (well before TikTok briefly popularized them a few years ago!). They also have been working towards a strong folk-rock sound on many of their albums, but their main instruments are acoustic guitar, bouzouki, hurdy-gurdy(!), tin whistle and fiddle (and harmony vocals). They perform a lot these days with Opland/Freeman as well. My favorite albums from them are the two most recent, Midnight on the Sea and Blue Divide, and three from earlier, Hearts of Gold, White Horses, and Round the Corner. I saw them perform once at the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin, also during my high school years.

Magical Strings - Another group I think I found through Opland/Freeman. All three of these groups are based in Seattle at least some of the time. I really got into this group with the hammered dulcimer as the core of the group is the duo of Pam and Phillip Boulding, who play hammered dulcimer and harp. They also play other instruments like tin whistle and accordion, and with their extended multi-generational family joining in over the years they have fiddle, cello, and a variety of other instruments, so they are another group that led me down the multi-instrumental approach to music. My favorite albums from their large collection are Where Dragons Dance and Legend of Inishcahey. Their album Beneath the Moon is one of my favorites for relaxing with.

Kat Eggleston - Many people think of Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell when they think of singer-songwriters, but the quintessential singer-songwriter in my listening experience is Kat Eggleston. I found her in connection with Opland/Freeman and Pint/Dale, and she was active in Chicago for a while, but I never saw her live. But I’ve listened to her recordings for well over half my life at this point, and my favorite one is her 2009 album Speak. It’s very simply produced, just a singer/songwriter in her natural habitat, with solo voice and guitar, but the guitar parts are quite impressive. The song lyrics themselves also speak to me, even more than they used to as I’ve gained more life experience. I like her other albums too, but this is the one I come back to the most these days.

Sarah Wilfong-Joblin - a good personal friend of mine. She is the one who initially taught me Irish fiddle when I was a young kid, as she was an older student of my primary violin teacher. She went to Berklee several years before me, and we re-connected when I decided I wanted to go to Berklee and have remained friends since then. I consider her to be the violinist who has had the biggest influence on my life and the direction I’ve gone, and I’ve listened to almost everything she’s released on recording. You can find a couple of her solo albums Fiddle Soup and Faucets on the standard platforms.

More recently, I’ve gotten into several other groups as well, some of whom I’ve met, and some that I haven’t. As I’ve gotten into banjo over the past several years, I’ve learned some old-time artists, and as a member of the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles I’ve spent more time listening to some of that music, though I found several of these people before I joined that group.

Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas - if you read other parts of my website, you might notice that I just recently (as I write this) got to perform with these two as part of the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles! But I’ve known about them for a lot longer, and in fact they’ve been two of my “fiddle heroes” for much of my fiddle life. I first found out about Alasdair Fraser either from a project he was involved with called Skyedance, a Celtic-Fusion band (and their album Way on Out to Hope Street), or from a collaboration he did with violin super-star Rachel Barton Pine, when she recorded Max Bruch’s piece Scottish Fantasy and studied real Scottish fiddling with Alasdair Fraser. Either of those would have been around middle school or Jr. High for me. I ran across Natalie Haas as a Berklee professor for part of the time I was there, and I’ve listened to their duo albums for much of the time since then. My favorites of their duo sets are Highlander’s Farewell and Fire & Grace.

Bonnie Rideout - another name I ran across early in my Scottish fiddle studies back in high school. I picked up a book of transcriptions for one of her albums at the local folk music store in our town, and got into her music sideways from that. That album remains my favorite of hers, Scottish Fire. I also particularly like her more recent albums (several years old now, but she had to stop making them). She has an album that’s half music album and half radio show (or podcast), about a famous battle in Scottish history called the Battle of Harlaw. The album is called Harlaw, Scotland, 1411. And I also like her most recent albums Scotland’s Fiddle Piobaireachd, Vols. 1+2.

The Barra MacNeils - This group came to my attention when they headlined Chicago’s Celtic Fest one year while I was in high school. I’ve liked them ever since. They combine a lot of pop influences with Celtic music. A lot of their tunes are Irish, but they’re from Cape Breton (Canada) and the piano style they use is Cape Breton piano (Irish music doesn’t often use piano), and they are as likely to use synthesizers as they are to use other instruments. They have a large discography, so if you want to get into them, I’d start with the 20th Anniversary Collection Album. I also particularly like their three Christmas albums (I listen to them a lot around Christmas time these days), and their most recent album, On the Bright Side.

Bruce Molsky - Probably the most well-known old-time fiddler around today. He taught (teaches?) at Berklee College of Music as an artist in residence, at least while I was there, though I never studied with him then. I met him a few years later when I did a couple of workshops with him at the Fiddle Hell camp near Boston in 2019. He has several solo albums out, and I like tracks on most of them. If I had to pick one to recommend, it would be his album with the Old-Time Tiki Parlor, Can’t Stay Here This-a Way. I’ve also been listening to his newer album with them Everywhere You Go, and just the past couple of weeks as I write this, I’ve been obsessed with his new album with Darol Anger (another Berklee instructor), Lockdown Breakdown. He also plays guitar and old-time banjo, and one of his big “party tricks” is singing while he plays the fiddle. This used to be a common part of Appalachian Old-Time fiddle, but is less common today than it once was.

Molsky’s Mountain Drifters - Another group that Bruce Molsky is involved with, with Alison de Groot on Banjo, and (on the recordings) Stash Wyslouch on Guitar. Stash has since moved on, but the only albums I’m aware of have him on guitar. I’ve taken workshops with all three of them at Fiddle Hell over the years I did that camp. I like both of their albums, but if you’re trying to pick which one to start with I’d suggest the more recent one, Closing the Gap.

Pete’s Posse - Formed by Pete Sutherland and one of his students, Oliver Scanlon, along with guitarist Tristan Henderson. This is one of my favorite groups that created an original sound within existing traditions (or perhaps across traditions). Pete was a well-known fiddler (among other things), and a songwriter of what he termed “history songs”, writing ballads about the history of Vermont, his home region. Some of those stories made it into the history books I learned in school in northern Chicago, and some maybe not so much. I met Pete Sutherland at the Fiddle Hell camp in 2019, and Oliver was there too though I didn’t do much with him. Tristan wasn’t there that year. Unfortunately Pete Sutherland died a couple of years ago, so the group is defunct now, but they have several albums. The first couple are fairly traditional old-time, but my favorite is their last album, Ya Know, Ya Never Know, which was recorded and released during the COVID-19 pandemic and I think is their best synthesis of their original sound and tradition.

Ken and Brad Kolodner - I ran across Ken Kolodner’s name while I was working on hammered dulcimer, but he’s also a great old-time fiddler, and his son Brad has become quite a banjo player. I did a banjo workshop with him at Fiddle Hell online during the COVID-19 lockdown period. This group is really a quartet, at least on most of their albums. My favorite right now is the most recent one, Stoney Run.

Al Petteway and Amy White - If I was going to give a prize to the best guitarist I know about, I’d be torn today between Al Petteway and Kat Eggleston (this was a real assignment I had once, by the way, though I didn’t know about either of these players at that time). Al was a phenomenal guitarist, and he had several great solo albums as well as the series he made with his wife, pianist and singer Amy White. They lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Asheville, NC for many years. Unfortunately Al died fairly recently, but Amy is still around. I like many of their albums, but I think my personal favorites are Dream Guitars Vol. 1 by Al (solo), and Acoustic Journey and Golden Wing by Al and Amy.

Tom Collins - I should start by mentioning that he is the closest thing I have to a banjo teacher. He plays and teaches clawhammer banjo through a youtube channel (Tom Collins) and a Patreon project called Banjo Quest. I’ve been using it almost the whole time I’ve been studying clawhammer banjo, and I also took several workshops with him at Fiddle Hell when I went there in 2019 (and online in the years after that), so I’ve worked with him in person as well. That being said, I do think he’s a great banjo player. He has one album that I’m aware of (Sinful to Flirt: Tom and Jon Play Old-Time Music), but he also has several video recordings on his youtube page from the Banjo Quest project, and many of them are really pretty creative. By the way, if you’d like to learn banjo, I’d really recommend Banjo Quest, and do the Patreon as well as that’s much more active than his youtube channel is. Also, if you think you don’t like banjo, give old-time clawhammer a chance - it’s a quite different sound than the bluegrass twang that can sound harsh, and I particularly like solo banjo and voice or some slower banjo / fiddle vocal duets.

There are many other worthy artists out there - if I tried to list them all this page would never end! While I’ve focused mostly on people I have some personal connection to here, if you’d like to learn more about some of this music you should of course be aware of some of the major commercial groups as well. I’ll just list a few of them here:

Irish:

The Chieftains (the quintessential Irish band for over 60 years);

Altan (Exemplars of the fiddle tradition in Co. Donegal, my favorite regional style in Ireland);

Solas;

The Bothy Band

Cape Breton (Eastern Canadian based largely on Scottish music):

Natalie MacMaster (& Donnell Leahy);

Andrea Beaton & Troy MacGillivray;

an album called The Heart of Cape Breton

Bluegrass:

Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys (the ones who coined the term Bluegrass);

Tim O’Brien;

Allison Krauss;

Gillian Welch (& David Rawlings)

Also, I tend not to like books that cover a wide variety of styles in one book as they can be generic to the point of uselessness (or even actively harmful) for each style, but I will recommend The Fiddle Handbook by Chris Haigh. This one is worth the price alone for the lists of influential artists in each of the dozen or so genres it covers (Irish, Scottish, Klezmer, “Eastern European”, Old-Time, Bluegrass, Country, and even Jazz and Rock among others). He does also briefly cover some specific techniques and tunes in each style, though again, I’m not sure I care that much for that part of each chapter. The history sections and lists of artists to check out are much more useful.

Folk Music Books (and Videos)

See the Multi-Genreism section of my Capital-M Music paper for some caveats to learning this material from books and videos, but with those out of the way, they can be useful resources. Here are some that I like for various folk-related instruments and styles.

I mentioned The Fiddle Handbook just above this entry as the multi-genre fiddle book I’d recommend, but in general I’d recommend picking a style to start with and getting books about that style specifically rather than looking for one book that does it all. More specific books are usually going to be much more detailed for any given genre. Then once you feel comfortable in one style and/or instrument, start branching out to others with specific resources as well.

For anything folk related, my go-to publisher is Mel Bay. I have a lot of their books for several instruments and genres, and have generally liked them.

Berklee Press (from my alma mater) also has a lot of good material, covering a wide range of topics. I use them in particular for music theory and music production, but they also have a variety of books about various kinds of folk music. The string department in particular has some good material for “general fiddlers” today, people playing a variety of styles and using techniques that cross genres, which is a big deal at Berklee. They teach you how to be fluent (and more importantly, how to learn to be fluent) in a wide variety of scenarios.

YouTube has a lot of very good material on just about anything, including all of these topics, but it also has a lot of garbage, and when you are starting out it can be hard to tell the difference. For professionally produced videos on folk music topics, I like the publisher HomeSpun Videos. I’ll mention some videos in particular below.

More specifically:

Irish:

Fiddle:

Mel Bay’s Complete Irish Fiddler

Irish Fiddle Music, Vol. 1 and Irish Fiddle Music, Vol. 2 by Philip John Berthould

Flute / Whistle:

The Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistle by Grey Larsen - I cannot recommend this one highly enough, even for players of other instruments (I’ve recommended it in several places on my website, and I really do endorse it as highly as I can!). This is a mammoth 400+ page book looking pretty comprehensively at Irish Trad Music in general, and of course at techniques for Irish Flute and Tin Whistle in particular. But the conceptual parts can be applied to all instruments, and I’ve learned the most about how to play this music from this book. After you read this book (and a book about your instrument specifically if it’s not one of these instruments), the rest is practice and as much listening to people as you can make yourself do (hundreds or thousands of hours over the years minimum. I’ve often joked that if you haven’t driven the people around you completely insane with repetitive listening, then you haven’t listened enough yet, though that may be less relevant with personal audio today 🙂). There isn’t a shortcut, but you need to set yourself up so the time you put in is useful, and this book is one of the best places to start for that part of the process for Irish music.

I would also mention again a point I make in my Capital-M Music “Life Tips” guide, under General Musicianship Tip No. 1, that music is based on patterns and learning to see the bigger picture patterns over the masses of single notes is also critical to learning music effectively. This is true in every genre of music, and what you will be learning from this book is what some of those patterns are in Irish music, which will then set you up to learn much more quickly and fully from all the listening and playing it yourself. Once you start with the patterns approach to music and learn something about how it applies to any particular style, then you just need to put in the time with listening, practicing, and playing; but until you get the initial concepts, listening and playing is only partially effective.

Hammered Dulcimer:

Playing the Hammered Dulcimer in the Irish Tradition by Karen Ashbrook

Harp:

Anything by Sylvia Wood (for folk harp)

Mandolin:

Not a book, but my most used resource is Baron Collins-Hill’s youtube channel MandoLessons (and Mandolessons.com). He covers primarily old-time and bluegrass mandolin, but some Irish as well.

Guitar:

Take your pick, there are thousands of guitar books out there. Again, I’d start by looking at Mel Bay if you’re looking for folk material specifically, though my favorite fingerstyle book is called Fingerstyle Guitar by Ken Perlman (not from Mel Bay).

Bodhran:

Bodhran Basics by Stefan Hannigan (my first book for bodhran)

The Bodhran Primer by Andy Kruspe - This is one of the most comprehensive books for bodhran technique, with exercises to drill the many sounds you can get from a bodhran and some of the common grooves you’ll use.

Playing the Tune by Andy Kruspe - This one looks more at how to use the bodhran in Irish music specifically. The Bodhran Primer is a general purpose technique book, but Playing the Tune gets more in the weeds of the tunes types and ways to use the various effects on the bodran in that music. I’d say get both of them, as they compliment each other well, especially if you plan to play in mostly Irish contexts. Disclosure: I’ve met Andy in person, and he used to play in a band called Mithril with two of my other good friends in the Irish world, Tom Morley and Andra Bohnet.

Old-Time:

Fiddle:

Old-Time Fiddle Across America by David Reiner and Peter Anick - Written a few decades ago now, but still one of the most useful books I found. I actually like the essay in the front as much as the tunes the book contains (transcriptions from field recordings in various regions). Many people skip the front matter in books like this, but here I almost think that’s more useful and interesting than the bulk of the book. The other interesting thing about this book is its breadth. Many people associate old-time music generally with Southern Appalachian Old-Time specifically, but there was fiddle music in the rest of America back then as well, and this book looks at New England Old-Time and even Midwest Old-Time fiddle, something I haven’t seen in many other places.

Old Time Fiddle Style by Ken Kolodner - Focused more on Appalachian Old-Time, this book covers that style in great detail, including bowing techniques and altered tunings (so-called Cross Tunings), as well as several popular jam session tunes and ways to play them.

Homespun videos: Several, including two by Bruce Molsky, Singing with the Fiddle, and Southern Old-Time Fiddle Tour (??)

Banjo:

A variety of Mel Bay books:

Another plug for Tom Collins’ Banjo Quest on Youtube and Patreon - the source I’ve used for much of my banjo material.

More Homespun videos: Mike Seeger’s series on “Southern Banjo Styles”, and Cathy Fink’s video “Singing with the Banjo”