Cotton Eyed Joe-Lester McCumbers

The link is below. I'll rework these video posts later so that you can click the photo to get to the video. I'll also add some simple titling to the video.

The video posted here is Lester McCumbers playing the tune Cotton-Eyed Joe in his room at the Conrad Motel during the West Virginia State Folk Festival in Glenville, June 17, 2006. Kim Johnson is playing banjo. Lester has his fiddle tuned GDGD (low to high). All the older fiddlers around here play this tune, but I've never heard it better than this.

Quicktime movie 11.2 MB

m4v format for iPod video 11.1 MB

Old Mother Flanagan-Lester McCumbers

The video linked below is Lester McCumbers playing the tune Old Mother Flanagan in his room at the Conrad Motel during the West Virginia State Folk Festival in Glenville, June 17, 2006. Kim Johnson is playing banjo. Lester has his fiddle tuned GDGD (low to high).

I'll be posting more video clips of Lester soon. I'm still figuring out how best to keep the file size down and still show his amazing bowing. The link to the video may change as I experiment with different compressions and formats. The link(s) in the post will always be correct (hopefully), so bookmark this post rather than the movie itself.

The links below are fairly large files. If you click the link, your browser will start loading (or playing-depending on your settings) the movie. You may also right click and choose to save the movie to your computer, then you'll have it available without having to download again later. The downloads are taking about a minute for me with broadband (and should be faster than that).

Quicktime Movie 10.9 MB

Mpeg 4 file format for iPod video-11.1 MB. I don't know that I'll have the server space to continue posting in this format, so download it now if you want it.

Pictures from Lester and Linda McCumbers's house

Lester and Linda at WSPZ in 1963.










Another nice old snapshot.

Click on the pictures for a bigger view.

Lester McCumbers; Nicut, W.Va.

January 27 Jay Best, Josh Wanstreet, and I went down to Nicut for a visit with fiddle player Lester McCumbers. Kim Johnson, his regular banjo player, met up with us there. Lester was playing great and we had a wonderful day. I shot a couple hours of video, including quite a bit with Lester playing in G cross. I haven't edited yet, but I'm pretty sure he played a couple tunes that I had not taped before.

And, finally, I got a nice photo. I've been just not quite getting it for so long that I was started to get frustrated. Oddly enough, after Jay and I swore allegiance to film the night before, I bailed out on my Leica (with Tri-X ) and switched to my point and shoot digital camera. It was far from perfect for the situation, but the combination of color, autofocus, and greater depth of field made the difference this time.