Just Around the Bend: Survival and Revival in Southern Banjo Sounds

A few months after completing filming for yet another major musicological project, multi-instrumentalist-folklorist Mike Seeger discontinued treatment he had been receiving for multiple myeloma, an incurable form of cancer. On August 7 2009, Seeger died peacefully at his home in Virginia surrounded by his wife, sons and sister. Ten years later, in September, Smithsonian Folkways released Just Around the Bend: Survival and Revival in Southern Banjo Styles – Mike Seeger's last documentary. The two-CD plus DVD set contains the cream of the documentarian's crop, harvested from a journey through the Appalachian region in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina in search of exponents and practitioners of old-time banjo music. An 80-page book of notes accompanies the music and film.

For Just Around the Bend, Seeger recorded 19 banjo masters performing in home settings and outdoors on home grounds nestled among picturesque hills, hollers and woodsy environs. Through careful editing and blocking, the viewer gets the sense of being on-site with Seeger, Alexia Smith (Seeger's wife, assistant and producer) and filmmaker Yasha Aginsky as the performers relate their personal histories with the banjo, accompanied by renditions of the music that moves them. Brien Fein, a young player from North Carolina, observes that his father and fellow musicians probably would have stopped playing altogether were it not for ‘enough people coming in from the North wanting to hear [old-time traditional music]’ during the folk revival era of the 50s and 60s. Among those people was Pete Seeger, who influenced a generation of musicians including Peter Gott, who relates to Mike the experience of seeing his elder half-brother in concert at Cornell University. And so it goes throughout the film and on the album tracks, which are packed with insightful commentary and remarkable performances by Rhiannon Giddens, Riley Baugus, George Gibson, Marsha Bowman Todd and many more contemporary old-time banjo virtuosos.