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I too thought that the show tried to do a lot and ended up not doing enough in those areas I was inaterested in. But that minstral era banjo was mentioned at all is something of a miracle.... Not too many years ago it was simply not talked about in polite academic society and broad casting of it on this scale would simply not have happened. I suspect that even on a web site as esoteric as this there may be a bump in participation for a while at least.
My hope is that (early) banjo will not become so mainstream that I lose interest in it.... I am getting too old to develope another musical interest. Or maybe not....
You naysayers are nuts. Cover the whole history of banjo in 82 minutes? Sure, the four-string banjo is going to end up on the cutting room floor (Steve Martin said right at the beginning "the 5-string banjo," so you know that was going to happen), as are a lot of things that have been mentioned above. I really don't see how this documentary could have been done any better to bring a layperson up to some kind of speed on the history of the banjo in 1 hr. 22 min. Sure, personal taste comes into it, but you can't please everyone all of the time. I would just think that anytime people like Jerron Paxton and the Carolina Chocolate Drops get on national television, and minstrelsy, coon songs, and jug bands get spoken about for more than ten seconds, that the people on this site would be jumping up and down in jubilant celebration.
I do hope the DVD does contain a lot of extras and fills in more gaps, but as a fan of nearly all kinds of banjo (especially pre-bluegrass), I think this was an A+ as far as the musicians covered, music and musicians presented, and the production (camera work, editing, narration).
I think we have a lot to be thankful for, and you all need to go "like" The Banjo Project on Facebook and send them some money so the things that you complained about being MIA can show up as extras in the DVD and be collected by the project's efforts.
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