VERANDAH DANCES WITH THE BRUTONS

Here’s a tenth birthday present from Verandah Music, courtesy of Rob Willis:

The late Les Bruton was a versatile musician playing fiddle, accordion and a number of other instruments. His wife, June, learnt slide guitar at an early age and accompanied Les, it was indeed a unique and wonderful sound. Les learnt many of his dance tunes from older players, including his Uncle Charlie and he tells us the story of Uncle Charlie and the Verandah dances. June and Les play us one of Uncle Charlie's tunes, a Schottische. We recorded the Brutons for the National Library of Australia and they are online at Youtube here (double click if it doesn’t work first time and follow the redirect prompt – we don’t know why, either).

https://youtu.be/QBHEgQtejuo  

OUR TENTH BIRTHDAY!

This year, Verandah Music is ten years old. We’ve put up around 150 posts and had around forty-six thousand visitors from Australia and around the world. (In recent times, they seem to like us best in America, followed by Australia, then Singapore, followed by many more countries). 

Our three most popular posts are ‘The First Bush Bands’, followed by Sue Brian on making a cabbage tree hat, then the post on the Ethiopian Serenaders - still stars almost 175 years after they toured here - take that, Taylor Swift!

The most popular section of the blog is the ‘Articles’. We’re especially pleased about that because one of our main aims was to provide readers with information about Australian traditional music in its many different forms.

So, mission accomplished. And looking forward to another decade of sharing Verandah Music with all.