Album Notes

Bennett Hammond was picking and yodeling folk songs at the age of twelve, learned about old time, blues and bluegrass in highschool, started playing guitar professionally in college. Never too late: he started playing the banjo at 60.

About The RockaFolky Banjo Tapes:
THOUGH we don’t remember the ‘60s, we do agree that there was such an over-cooked, herb-rolled and patchouli-dipped Epoch. But in their own beer-battered way, the ’50s were raunchier and more revolutionary than the ‘60s, and no one now admits that the Grey Flannel Decade ever even happened.
FOURTH of July, 1957.* Barry Manlynow jams his skin-head banjo onto a motorcycle-driving rhythm guitar, sends the vocal out the exhaust manifold, and calls the rebel rumble RockaFolky. Perl “Lonesome” Mee’s fretless adds a sizzling BBQ sound, and Floco de Nieve puts a pirate mumbo-Gumbo into it.
ONE BY one, “Charcoal” Bree Kay’s inscrutable Native menace, the Southern-fried twin brothers Gole and Pick deLochs, and finally Slacjzaw Djoekel’s French Polish finish, go on to redefine the RockaFolky Banjo instrumental into something essentially beyond description.
THE DAY sobered up a bit for “Memento” Maury Carre-Pediam’s graveyard gospel, but then Barry Manlynow introduced “Yukon” duDotte’s smugly suggestive right-hand bottleneck guitar to end the show, and all Hell broke loose.
VICE-President Nixon was outraged, although the Surgeon General’s report soon found banjo music infectiously uplifting. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI suppressed the report, calling it subversive and un-American. Political correctness relegated 5-string banjos to Bluegrass and slap-stick comedy, allowing State-sanctioned electric guitars, dripping morosely with self-pity, to dominate popular expression from then on.
ALL THE OLD RockaFolky banjo stars are long gone now. Only this brief, Archival CD remains. The original mud-covered reel-to-reel archives it was made from were not so much lost in the process as never really in existence to begin with.