Yesterday we fawned over the fiddle. Today, let’s marvel at the mandolin. Though the mandolin, Italy’s regional variant of the ancient and widespread lute, started to appear in the United States as early as the 1850s, many Italian immigrants brought their mandolins with them when they immigrated to America in the 1880s. At the turn of the 20th century the mandolin was a familiar Vaudeville instrument, and also became popular among the middle class youth on college campuses and in towns throughout the South, though inthe ’30s and ’40s bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, who you can see tearin’ it up in this video, was the first mandolin virtuoso to take the instrument to the country music-loving masses.
We are revising the AllAroundThisWorld.com site — the information you’re seeking may still be here, but a lot of links are broken and details may be out of date. We are currently using a new (better!) site — ExploreEverywhere.com — to tell you all about our class offerings, our “pen pal” program and how to become one of our teachers, and will eventually be moving all the goodies from here over to there. So, GO TO THE NEW SITE!
