Slow Jam With Murphy and Casey You’ve got a few tunes under your belt and now you want to play with other people. Only there’s no one around. The answer? Jam with Murphy and Casey! Swap solos with us as we play 17 songs at really slow speeds and leave a space for you to play along while we chord. All songs include banjo, guitar and mandolin or fiddle. Guitar chords are shown in a small box on screen. For all instruments. Two hours of jamming joy!

Cripple Creek, Boil Them Cabbage Down, Banjo in the Hollow, Do Lord, Cumberland Gap, Worried Gal, Foggy Mountain Breakdown, John Hardy, Two Dollar Bill, Blue Ridge Cabin Home, Bury Me Beneath the Willow, Foggy Mountain Top, Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Lonesome Road Blues and Old Joe Clark. (2 hours)

DVD or Digital Download

$29.95

Want to learn breaks to these songs? Here's a list of where you can find them!

Review:

SLOW JAM WITH MURPHY AND CASEY, FEATURING MURPHY HENRY AND CASEY HENRY

Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine - June 2008

For all those who have picked up an instrument in the last few months and are not quite ready to pick "Rawhide" at the prescribed 160 beats per minute, or even "Cripple Creek" at 90 beats per minute, this DVD should do nicely. Murphy Henry (on banjo), along with daughter, Casey (on rhythm guitar), and either Tracey Rohrbaugh on mandolin or Malia Furtado on fiddle, work through 18 slowjam tunes at a pace that most beginners should be able to handle. All of the tunes are standards, there are vocals, and the band even leaves a spot open for a break by the viewer on each tune. A separate corner screen shows Casey's fingering of the guitar chords as each song progresses.

The tunes are graded into "Easy Songs," "Intermediate Songs," and "Harder Songs" (six of each). The pace picks up slightly as one moves from the easy to the harder tunes (they're not all songs), with the first of the easy ones ("Banjo In The Hollow") kicking off at around 52 beats per minute and "Bury Me Beneath The Willow," toward the end of the harder ones, clocking in at about 63.

The lead work on banjo, mandolin, and fiddle is fairly basic and unadorned, in keeping, no doubt, with the versions offered on Murphy's beginning instructional DVDs which teach these same tunes. And, let's face it, having Béla Fleck singlestringing up and down the neck would be a little intimidating in a slowjam setting.

This DVD should work nicely for all instruments, though the banjo gets some extra mention here. A good share of the tunes are in G, with occasional capoing up to higher keys. Anyone wishing their local jams would just ratchet down to about halfspeed (and keep it there) should find this DVD very, very useful. And, it comes complete(ly) without tab.AW

© Copyright 2008. Bluegrass Unlimited, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this journal may be reproduced, stored for retrieval, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

$29.95