The banjo/fiddle duet holds an iconic place in the history and development of bluegrass music. From the earliest days of Appalachian string music, a fiddle and a banjo was enough to set folks dancing, and as the style has evolved from a dance to a performance vehicle, the tradition has held.
Should you suspect that your Christmas celebrations would be found lacking absent some holiday-themed fiddle and banjo numbers, you can be grateful to Ned Luberecki & Megan Lynch, who have assembled a half dozen instrumental versions of yuletide classics into the aforementioned format.
Fiddle & Banjo Christmas includes:
- Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
- I’ll Be Home For Christmas
- Joy To The World
- It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
- Jingle Bells
- I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day
Ned tells us that the focus of the project selected itself.
“Megan and I had been planning on recording a fiddle and banjo CD for a while. So we booked time at our friend Stephen Mougin’s recording studio and the day before the session, when we got together to rehearse, we just started playing Christmas tunes. We had so much fun playing them that we decided right then to switch gears and make it a Christmas EP.”
Here are a couple of samples to get you in the fiddle tune holiday spirit:
Joy To The World: [http://traffic.libsyn.com/thegrasscast/joy.mp3]
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town: [http://traffic.libsyn.com/thegrasscast/santa.mp3]
