Hobart Smith (May 10, 1897—January 11, 1965) was an American old-time musician. He was most notable for his appearance with his sister, Texas Gladden, on a series of Library of Congress recordings in the 1940s and his later appearances at various festivals during the folk music revival of the 1960s. Smith is often remembered for his virtuosic performances on the banjo, and had also mastered various other instruments, including the fiddle, piano, guitar, piano, harmonica, accordion, and organ. – Wikipedia

Be sure to find In Sacred Trust; The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes, which features 35 more excellent banjo, guitar, and fiddle performances by Hobart.

“Parchman Farm” is the title of a number of songs about Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm, a hard time prison because of the Trusty system which was later outlawed.

There have been a number of blues songs written about Parchman Farm and several blues musicians were imprisoned there, including Bukka White (who wrote “Parchman Farm Blues”), and Son House. In 1939, folklorist Alan Lomax recorded White and others at the farm for the Library of Congress.

Robert Johnson learned Walking Blues from Son House, and Muddy Waters learned it from Robert:

I really like the staccato runs he plays on his handcrafted guitar-banjo.

Jerry’s Map is an art project involving the procedural evolution of an enormous map. Watch this video, then read the artist’s blog.

I recently came across this interesting catalog of small (simple, undirected, unlabeled, and connected) graphs. It will tell you that the graph pictured above (the complete graph on three vertices, or the cycle of length three) has order, size, and girth 3 and six automorphisms, along with a variety of other potentially useful data.  It looks like the author’s site contains a number of other interesting things too.