Dan Campbell (Banjodan), Member of the Month for September, has emerged as one of SMITH’s funniest and most prolific Six-Word Memoirists —accruing a fan base among the other sixers along the way.
Be sure to check out the Banjo Newsletter Facebook site 
Also the BNL website has recently added some new features:
- Updated - How to Read Tablature
- Updated - 20 Questions by Eddie Collins
Steve Martin Extends $50,000 Prize, Invitation to Late Night Show
November 11, 2011; Written by Craig Shelburne 
At the end of September, Sammy Shelor could be found relaxing in his ragged tour bus during the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass week. It was a rare moment of calm in a week he calls “bluegrass music overload.”
As fervent bluegrass followers know, Shelor leads the Lonesome River Band, which turned 30 this year. Their calendar is booked with a never-ending highway of clubs, fairs and festivals. And, oh, by the way, on Friday (Nov. 11), he’s performing on the Late Show With David Letterman at the invitation of Steve Martin, a banjo enthusiast.
The low-key banjo player from Meadows of Dan, Va., was shocked to realize that he won — and many would say earned – that trip to New York City.
Martin, his wife, and other members of the banjo elite — if those last two words can be coined — determined Shelor would receive a $50,000 cash prize as a reward for his steadfast career as a banjo player. He is just the second winner of the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, and the Letterman gig is part of the package deal.
By Timothy Malcolml - Times Herald-Record - 09/02/11
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones will bring their wild fusion of Americana, jazz and more to the Belleayre Music Festival on Saturday night. A benefit for those affected by Tropical Storm Irene, Fleck’s show will help bring some solace to those hit hard.
Fleck spoke about Irene and his banjo playing in a Q&A with Timothy Malcolm.
Q&A: Bela Fleck
Q: How’s 2011 been thus far, with the original band back together? 
Fleck: It’s been fantastic – not to be cheesball, but it’s kind of like a homecoming.
Q: What kind of crowds are you seeing on tour? Same as before, or new fans to the sound?
Fleck: Crowds have been up since the last touring we did. There are folks that never heard the original band, but are curious, and some folks that used to come all the time but drifted away are now back. The old friends admit to very sentimental feelings about hearing Howard [Levy’s] harmonica and piano back in the band.
Q: Proceeds of your show at Belleayre are going toward victims of Tropical Storm Irene’s impact this weekend in the Catskills. As your life has been heavily based in the northeast, what’s your response to the storm?
Fleck:It’s pretty hard to believe, and very upsetting, and the weather has changed so much in recent years, we probably should be prepared for anything now. Living in Nashville as we do, we know about flooding – which hit us hard last year. My house was damaged in the Nashville flood, but I was lucky overall.
“My father was born with this instrument,” Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta says. “This is part of our history.”
- Link to audio/video - http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139880625/the-banjos-roots-reconsidered?sc=tw&cc=twmp
Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He’s holding an akonting: a three-stringed instrument with a long neck and a body made from a calabash gourd with a goat skin stretched over it.
Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta plays the akonting, an African instrument that may be a precursor to the banjo.
Jatta’s father and cousins played the instrument, but he didn’t think much about it himself until 1974, when he was visiting the U.S. from Gambia, attending a junior college in South Carolina. He recalls watching a football game on TV with some of the other students.
“When the football ended, there was this music program from Tennessee, and they called it country music,” Jatta says. “I watched the program and saw the modern banjo being used. And the sound just sounded like my father’s akonting.”
That experience put Jatta on a journey to explore the banjo’s connections with the instrument he grew up with.
The banjo came to America with the slaves, and musicologists have long looked in West Africa for its predecessors. Much of the speculation has centered on the ngoni and the xalam, two hide-covered stringed instruments from West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo. But they’re just two of more than 60 similar plucked stringed instruments found in the region.
After a stroke, a musician discovered the healing power of song, By Gwendolyn Purdom
Music had always come easily for Lynn Morris. At age 54, the Winchester, Virginia, resident was a two-time winner of the National Bluegrass Banjo Championship and the only woman to earn the title. She’d been named female vocalist of the year three times by the International Bluegrass Music Association and ten times by the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America.
She and her Lynn Morris Band had just released their fifth album when she suffered a stroke in March of 2003.
A doctor told Lynn Morris she might never play music again. She proved him wrong. Photograph by Benjamin C. Tankersley
“It was the darkest, most frightening time of my life,” says Morris’s husband and former bandmate, Marshall Wilborn. “Having no experience and no knowledge of stroke recovery, I thought that in six months she would be in great shape and we’d just pick up where we left off. But it didn’t work that way.”
Morris’s right arm was incapacitated and she suffered from aphasia, which impaired her ability to understand and use language. Without her, the band broke up.
Wilborn recalls a doctor’s appointment he went to with Morris, who was weeks into her recovery and barely able to speak: “He said, ‘If and when you return to your music . . .’ and when he got that much of his sentence out, Lynn, without a struggle for one single word, said to him, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t, because I’m gonna do it.’ The doctor and I both had our jaws on the floor.”
The couple turned to the Stroke Comeback Center in Vienna, where speech pathologist Darlene Williamson uses group therapy to provide communication rehabilitation for stroke victims after their traditional health-care coverage runs out.
“Lynn from day one was convinced she would sing again,” Williamson says.
As part of their weekly sessions, Morris used an electronic keyboard to exercise her fingers and motor skills.
“She definitely maintained her ear for music, her pitch, her rhythm,” Williamson says. “She had an extraordinarily strong ability to listen and say, ‘Nope, nope, nope, the banjo is a little slower than the bass.’ ”
