Bonanzaville Old Time Family Jam

Bonanzaville provides a home for a weekly jam session for all Traditional musicians. This jam session will be held every Saturday from 1 to 5 PM in Dawson Hall at Bonanzaville. Everybody is welcome, it is open to all traditions, all ages, and all skill levels. This is a strictly unstructured leisure activity for traditional music lovers.

As of 09-24-07 we are back to Saturday afternoons. We will be in the Main Museum Building through the end of 2007.

For particular Saturdays such as holidays please look here to see if a jam will happen.

Non-Jamming dates.

Rules

1. Have fun and enjoy yourself.
2. Help others to follow Rule 1.

Playing will usually be in the "old time" jam style, with all musicians playing together, rather than the "bluegrass" style in which musician take individual "breaks". Hopefully that is enough rules.

This is intended to be a very informal, social, low pressure event. It is intended to complement private instruction and more public performing oportunities. We hope to provide an opportunity for musicians to get together and have fun making music. If you are a skilled musician, please come and share your knowledge. If you are just starting, come and learn. If you want to start playing, come and get recommendations for instructors, books, videos or whatever and then come play with us.

Feel free to come at any time and leave at anytime. If you want to take a break from playing, do so. Come which ever weekends work for you. We expect to have different musicians each week.

While accoustic stringed instruments will be most common, the jam is not limited to them. Flutes, recorders, clarinets and other instruments are welcome. Amplified instruments will need to limit their volume to be compatible with accoustic instruments.

Tunes

Here is a list of tunes that are likely to be played at our jam sessions. You will almost certainly find someone to play these with at any given jam session.

• Shortenin' Bread
• Polly Wolly Doodle
• Buffalo Gals
• Camptown Races
• French Waltz
• Bile Them Cabbage' Down
• Redwing
• Flop Eared Mule
• Cock of the North
• Swallowtail Jig
• Golden Slippers
• Soldiers Joy
• Red Haired Boy
• Cluck Old Hen
• Whiskey Before Breakfast
• Country Waltz
• Peek-a-Boo Waltz
• Casey Jones
• Eighth of January

Transcriptions of some songs as we play them are available here. You can download an ABC file (8.6K) or a postscript file (148K) or a pdf file (225K). For information on using these files click here.These are all traditional songs and in the public domain. Check back again for more songs in ABC format and mp3's of us playing these songs.

Here are some images of our jam session during Holidays on the Prairie, Dec. 3, 2005.

For more information email Francis