Current Issue | Home | Other Mel Bay Sites | Purchase Banjo Products
Banjo On The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal | Jingle Bells Banjo...
Wyatt Fawley and the Retrotone Banjo

Banjo On The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal

by Patricia Brown

I'm not a professional musician but I do play the banjo as part of my job as a National Park Ranger on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. My co-workers and I operate an 18- ton, mule-drawn barge as part of a living history interpretive program. We wear period clothes from the 1870's and try to give our visitors a sense of what life was like for the families who worked on the canal.

There was no electricity along the 184.5-mile canal so at the end of a long day's work the family would have to tell stories or make their own music for the evening's entertainment. Since canal boats didn't have a lot of extra space and boatmen had modest incomes, they might have played small and inexpensive instruments like harmonicas, concertinas, fiddles, guitars and banjos.

Stephen Foster's music would have been played along the canal since he was one of the most popular composers of the time. He wrote great songs like Oh! Susanna, Camptown Races, Swanee River and the hauntingly sad Hard Times. These songs are still popular today and they're easy to play. I have included my clawhammer arrangement of My Old Kentucky Home.

Patricia Brown
C&O Canal NHP - Georgetown
1057 Thomas Jefferson Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20007