Right on! Much more difficult to play slowly and accurately. My old friend Stan Shapin used to play very deliberate sparse versions of banjo tunes but if you tried to immitate him, you found that what he was playing was quite difficult. He could really dig in and get the heart out of a tune.

It's also my impression that the traditional sources for much of the music we love didn't necessarily have extensive repertoires. Instead, by the time they were documented, they had spent a lifetime honing every nuance of the tunes they knew, trying to make them seem fresh. We are now presented with the sum total of all the collected songs and I suspect most of us can perform more songs than most of the original sources could, just not as heartfully.

      - Mark