Rating: - Real Bluegrass, real people
The music seems so sweet, so well done, the voices so warm, the comedy so fresh. Maybe, it is my nostalgia for the days and rather naive ways on television of a homefolks show like this from the early 1960s, but the nostalgia in these programs for me is almost as great and as the music. This may be a result of my antiquity since I've been a Bluegrass fan and sometimes guitar player since shortly after the time these videos were made. A lot of the Flatt and Scruggs recordings in the early 1960s were oriented to reaching into the Folk audience and thus contained fewer real Bluegrass songs and more "traditional" material. Sometimes, the studio albums sounded pretty bad as they were multi track recorded, and sound a bit fishy and underwater.

The sound here is good enough for my ears. The songs are a good mix of country songs and sacred numbers. On this DVD Paul Warren seems to be the hot person in the band besides Earl. I've always treasured Earl's guitar playing and I am that there are two guitar leads by Earl here including Jimmie Brown the Newsboy, one of my long time favorites. Both on guitar and banjo, the advantage here for the shade-tree musician like myself is seein exactly how Earl, Lester, and the others pick.

The notes supplied with this DVD are first rate, so good I have used it as a source in a serious research article I am writing.

But what I love is the fun and friendliness that the shown transmits. Of course, as others mention, the old 1950s commercials for Martha White's various self-rising flours, with the reminded that each dish does not take as long as it did before with non-rising flour brings back to me my grandmother making pies and pastries on Friday or Saturday night for weekend company and the explosion of bakin gin general back when self-rise came out.

Tony