Crosspost by Ulf Jagfors FYI (For Ya'll's Information), I just played akonting at The 27th annual Lowell Banjo and Fiddle Contests in Lowell, MA yesterday (Saturday, 09-09). They have various categories-- Old Time Banjo, Bluegrbutt Banjo, Banjo and Fiddle, Twin Fiddle, etc. Well, they have a category called "Banjo Other" (usually this translates into people playing dobro bajos, banjo ukes, banjo mandolins, etc.) I have entered in the category and played Minstrel Stroke style in the past with good success.

With my newly honed akonting skills and the ability to sing a few songs I felt comfortable enough to enter "Banjo Other" with an akonting. I was able to take the opportunity to talk up the akonting and the work going on in Gambia. I was received enthusiastically. I don't know the results of the contest yet (and that really isn't important anyway) because I had my 8-year-old daughter Virginia with me (we were entered in the Banjo and Fiddle category) and we had to leave to get back to house and child sitting for in-laws. If anything noteworthy came out of it, I'll let everybody know.

Uh... Jim Bollman, former owner of Music Emporium in Boston, was one of the judges.

I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO THE OFFICIAL START OF MY TIME WORKING ON THE ONE-MAN BANJO HISTORY SHOW. In case you aren't aware, I have taken all of this school year off from teaching fulltime in order to focus all of my energies on developing a history of the banjo program for children and adults. My girls started school last Thursday. Adam heading off to school tomorrow will mark the beginning of my time. I am excited.

Paul Sedgwick Boston Paul Sedgwick is a theatre teacher, banjo player, and gourd enthusiast living in Boston, Mbuttachusetts. He holds a BA in Dramatic Art; AA in Bluegrbutt Music (South Plains College, '85); MFA in Playwriting; and Masters in Education. He has taken this coming school year off from teaching full time to develop a one-man show concerning the history of the banjo utilizing drama, mask performance and music. You can read more about Pauls latest visit this summer to Senegambia on www.myspace.com-akonting Blog entries THE JOLA AKONTING: A LIVING "MISSING LINK" CONNECTING THE BANJO TO ITS WEST AFRICAN HERITAGE Of all the myriad variety of West African plucked lutes, the Jola akonting stands out as the one instrument today that bears the strongest resemblance to the early New World gourd banjos. We see this not just in its phsyiology but also in the traditional technique used to play the akonting, called o'teck (literally, "to stroke"), which is basically the same as the stroke style, considered to be the oldest extant technique for playing the banjo. Both the akonting o'teck and the banjo stroke style are forms of down-picking, a technique in which the fingernail of a single finger-- either the index or middle finger-- is used to strike the individual melody strings in a downward motion, like a plectrum. This action is immediately followed by the player's thumb catching on the top short "thumb string" to create a rhythmic back-beat accompaniment. It was the stroke style of banjo down-picking that European American performers, who came to be known as blackface minstrels, initially learned from African American musicians in the early 19th century. This was the most prevalent form of playing the 5-string banjo until the advent of the "guitar style" of up-picking in the late 1860s, which was also called finger-picking, the term we use nowadays. The stroke style of down-picking has survived to this very day in the folk traditions of both the black and white communities of the rural South, where it's commonly referred to as frailing, clawhammer, thumping, and so on. Shlomo Pestcoe