2nd South Carolina String Band

2nd South Carolina String Band

The 2nd South Carolina String Band is a band of Civil War re-enactors who recreate American popular music of the 1820s to 1860s with authentic instruments and in period style. The group claims to "perform Civil War music as authentically as possible . . . as it truly sounded to the soldiers of the Civil War."

According to the band's official website, the group formed in August 1989. The founding members--consisting of Joe Ewers, Fred Ewers, John Frayler, Dave Goss and Bob Beeman-- were amateurs who played a variety of 19th-century instruments, including banjo, bones, drum, fiddle, guitar, and tambourine. They began by playing informally during re-enactment campaigns. They eventually moved to playing dances and concerts. Today, the roster comprises eight members, including players of the fife, flute, and pennywhistle.

The 2nd South Carolina String Band has released four albums through Palmetto Productions. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has featured their music in his films Mark Twain and Jazz. The band appears in the film Gods and Generals, directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, and their music appears on the soundtrack. In November 2004, the band received the Stephen Collins Foster Award for their preservation of 19th-century American song. The band's current personnel includes: Joe Ewers (banjo), Fred Ewers (fiddle), Dave Goss (guitar), Bob Beeman (tambourine & bones), Mike Paul (fiddle), Greg Hernandez (fife), Joe Whitney (flute) and Tom DiGiuseppe (banjo).

Past band members have included Marty Grody (fife, tin whistle) and John Frayler (military drum).

Read more about 2nd South Carolina String Band:  Discography, Videos

Famous quotes containing the words south, carolina, string and/or band:

    Up from the South at break of day,
    Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,
    The affrighted air with a shudder bore,
    Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain’s door,
    The terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar,
    Telling the battle was on once more,
    And Sheridan twenty miles away.
    Thomas Buchanan Read (1822–1872)

    Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.
    Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)

    A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.
    Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)

    And the heavy night hung dark
    The hills and waters o’er,
    When a band of exiles moored their bark
    On the wild New England shore.
    Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1783–1835)