Word: banjo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...source. Chai was feted by the who all's y'all of country. Roy Acuff sang about the Wabash Cannonball. Minnie Pearl taught him square dancin'. Johnny Cash gave the Ambassador his own guitar. Glamorous Barbara Mandrell did an impromptu duet with the envoy on banjo. Chai toasted mutual friendship, but he sashayed a diplomatic do-si-do around the hope behind the hoedown: whether and when his hosts can export American min ge to China...
...predictable Fleetwood Mac song--strong, throbbing percussion, acoustic guitar, and lyrics often unintelligable and always accompanied by lots of "oooh-waahs" or "sha-la-las". True, there is some experimentation with different musical styles--"That's Enough for Me" sounds like an Appalachian hoedown with its folk banjo and "Yeah, yeah, y'alls" while "Not That Funny" is somewhat new wave with its synthesizer solos--but nearly all the cuts seem forced to fit into Fleetwood Mac's formulaic style. Tusk is from the same mold as Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, the other albums recorded by the present members...
...however, has turned an already obvious plot into a play that has the subtlety of a bulldozer. You know when somebody says something prophetic (thunder claps in the background) and you know when the witches are coming (bizarre piano medleys screech behind the gauze curtains). The best musicians, meanwhile--banjo and fiddle players Thornton Lewis and Matthew Brown--make one stage appearance and, sad to say, disappear...
Most of the performers are young, though an occasional patriarch emerges, like the banjo-playing retired executive vice president of Filene's department store in Boston. Some are music students or card-carrying professionals. Others are moonlighting (or sunlighting) engineers, carpenters, bookkeepers. Among the assortment on this summer's scene...
When Wade hunches over his banjo, he is a figure of rapturous communion, a man lost in a love affair with an instrument. The songs may be poignantly plaintive, boisterously celebratory or ironically funny. His fingers pluck the strings with steely precision or waft over them like a passing zephyr. Always there is the pulsing drive of his ever moving feet, percussively accenting the chords and the words...