Customer Reviews

Bayou Bluegrass

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This CD is great! It makes you want to hit the floor and dance a jig! You can't help but feel good when you listen to this music. It has so much energy! Jim Smoak is my all time favorite banjo picker. This is a great sampling of his unique style.

Finally reissued on CD, this is fine bluegrass/old time music by Smoak's band. Smoak once belonged to Bill Monroes seminal Bluegrass Boys and the bassist Lum York was a long time member of the great Hank Williams' band. The CD is full of good music and a joy to listen to through and through.

Jim Smoak is my Banjo teacher but even I was surprised to find such solid Banjo and Fiddle playing. This is old time music and you can hear that 'High Lonesome Sound'.
I was also surprise to hear Jim do most of the singing.
Although called 'Bayou Bluegrass', I hear that same old down home sound I heard in the backroads of Kentucky a long time ago.

Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun (above).... This is some truly blistering old-fashioned bluegrass from this sharp Louisiana combo. In the 1950s, hotshot banjo plunker Jim Smoak was a longtime member of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, and later on part of Hylo Brown's band. In the early '60s he formed his own band, the Honeydrippers, which he headed up until 1972, when this album originally came out. In addition to Smoak's hot, old-fashioned five-string banjo playing, the group had a great fiddler and a tireless rhythm section. Fans of the lively, rougher end of old-school bluegrass will want to check this one out. It smokes! (This disc is an expanded version of an old Arhoolie LP, and now includes several tunes recorded in 1961, when the band first got together...)