Author Description

These four essays look at: -- Dwight’s banjo playing in the 1970s, before he began recording the CDs that enshrined the music making of the Hammonses and other elders from Dwight’s slice of the high mountain forests of West Virginia; -- The arsenal of his tunes that derived from his friendship with Hamp Carpenter, his deep learning from Lee Hammons, his admiration for the deeply rhythmic fiddling and banjo playing of Sherman Hammons, and his association with a host of other West Virginian fiddlers and banjo players including Mose Coffman, Glen Smith, Lee Triplett, and others; -- The complexity of the list of musicians who influenced Dwight: what Dwight mean by “influence;” what he considered to be the sonic themes that percolated in his mind, resonated in his ears, throughout his childhood; how those sounds, that music, shaped his way of hearing and thinking about the old tunes that threaded their way into his life; -- The stories he told, and how those stories telegraphed his thinking about the Old People and the old ways of living life in the isolating quiet of Pocahontas County.