“David Holt interviews Percy Danforth in 1988”
When I stuck this video here I kind of assumed there would be an obvious link to a website about Percy Danforth but after searching for over an hour (!) I am giving up so if you know of such a page please comment.
Instead here’s a link to one of the only available academic resources on the bones. An unpublished College paper from about 1975 written by Sue Ellen Barber. She was a graduate student in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan. The thrust of her research interests lie in the area of the relationship of music to social change:
THE BONES: ANCIENT TO MODERN
PREFACE
What folk instrument is
- eminently portable (in a pocket)
- inexpensive to buy or make (from various scrap materials)
- easy to play (compared to other instruments)
- entertaining to hear and watch (evoking laughter and hand-claps)
- still played (especially at folk and ragtime festivals)
- relatively little known?
One more hint. The generic name identifies the scraps from which the original models were made. Ah yes. This has to be the bones… Continue Reading…
