Given that Sunday was the 107th anniversary of Woody Guthrie's birth, I wanted to put up a rendering of one of his songs about migrants, Pastures of Plenty, that seems to be perpetually relevant, perhaps even more than usual these days. Woody had a couple of alternative sets of lyrics for this song, relevant to the times in which the song was performed. I have followed suit, tweaking a couple of lines to speak more directly to today's world.
My playing here is a demonstration of where I'm at with my clawhammer playing these days following a stroke on 10 May 2019 left me initially with a non-functional right arm and hand. People who have been following this series of videos about my recovery of my banjo playing skills since that stroke may have noticed the relative paucity of videos featuring my clawhammer playing. This is because I have generally not been able to get my right arm to cooperate enough to get video performances that I'm happy enough with to share.
My clawhammer playing is still very laboured, and I'm noticing that the muscles in my shoulder and wrist are tending to over-contract, bunching up, and stiffening my arm when I try to do the clawhammer motion. And the problem becomes worse the more intensely I concentrate - the harder I work, the more my muscles tend to seize up.
I've started today to work on consciously relaxing those muscles while using the muscles in my forearm and hand to achieve the desired action. It's a weirdly complicated process - relaxing certain muscles while simultaneously flexing others.
But I did feel I made enough progress at it when practicing today to have gotten a video worth sharing by the end.
This was recorded on a 1927 Vega Whyte Laydie banjo pot (with a more recent replacement neck) tuned gDGCD.
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