 |
When I was 19 years old I heard clawhammer banjo for the first time. My next-door neighbor had a house guest who "made the banjo ring." I was transfixed. I had to have that sound! I haunted the junk dealers' shops until I found a terrible mess of a civil war era open-back banjo that had been salvaged from a fire. I badgered a lesson out of the victim I had heard playing, and went "into the woodshed" to learn the little phrase he had given me. That is to say, I did not eat nor sleep until I had learned it, and then went back for more.
Now let me explain what clawhammer style banjo playing is. It seems that everybody knows what bluegrass banjo sounds like: fast, driving, loud, twangy.....Earl Scruggs, the dean of early five-string bluegrass-style banjo, made his "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" justifiably famous. Clawhammer banjo is NOT THAT.
Clawhammer banjo means you HAMMER the strings with your CLAW. Rather than plucking UP with your right hand, you use the fingernails of your right hand to strike the strings, causing them to ring in a way that is at the same time mellow and full of overtones and harmonics and standing waves and interference. Am I in love with it? Now more than ever, more than thirty years later.
I was on a new mission. I absolutely wore my first mentor out. We were playing in a band together at that time and I was officially on flute, but I followed him around copping banjo licks to the point that he (I am not kidding) started playing with a handkerchief over his left hand to thwart my intentions of lick larceny. But to no avail, since by then I didn't have to see it to hear it and then lickety-split learn it.
Before I knew it, I was out on the street. Well, Harvard Square. I played in doorways in the Square, filled in with the Brattle Street Band (Patty Larkin on guitar), played in all the coffeehouses in Cambridge and Boston, and for dances, parties, and whatever else would pay the rent. I ended up on several other peoples' records but never really thought of doing any recording myself.
1976 found me hitting the festival trail in the Southern Mountains. Fiddlers' Conventions, as they were called, were held almost every weekend from May to September. Back then, almost every little town had its old-timey fiddlers and banjo pickers that would come out of the woods to sing and play, stay up all night and drink white liquor, tell jokes and "have another tune." You could see the finest flat-foot dancing, looked like their feet were hovering just above the floor, with small, neat movements that exactly played the tune. Sometimes a musician would team up with a dancer and they'd have a duet, just as subtle and elegant as could be.
My modus operandi was to find someone who played better than I did and follow them around until either I learned all their licks or they caught onto me and kicked me out. I never did get kicked out, but I made a lot of good friends who taught me, sometimes patiently and sometimes not.
The great Tommy J. Jarrell (may he rest in peace) was my most important mentor. He is mostly known for his unique, scratchy, sexy style of fiddling; but he was a crackerjack old-timey banjo player, a master of the instrument. I showed up, quite literally, on his doorstep in 1978. I wasn't the first one there, as evidenced by a sign on his door that said something like, "If you're coming here to learn music go away." I guess he was already beleaguered by the waves of young old-time hopefuls, not the least of whom were John Cohen and Mike Seeger of the New Lost City Ramblers. Then there were the rest of us.
Tommy didn't have a phone, and I had traveled all the way from Chicago to see him so I was not to be deterred by his sign. Or by his big black dog ("Bolliver (rhymes with "Oliver"), named after that guy Simon, you know, who conquered South Amerikay"). So I knocked and stood on his doorstep until he finally gave up and came to the door.
I guess he must have had a soft spot for pretty young girls, because he let me in and first thing asked me if I could cook because his daughter had gone "off" to visit relatives and he had no one to "do" for him. I jumped at that chance. He evicted his grown son from his bedroom so I would have a place to stay. I stayed with Tommy, on and off, throughout that summer, and the next. It was exactly the way I imagined heaven, hanging out with Tommy and whoever came to play with him.
Kyle Creed, the famous fretless banjo maker and player, was a frequent visitor. I stuck close by him, even though he was rather prickly and without patience. That paid off, though, because he would say "you don't play it THAT way, girl, THIS is how you play it," and then he would make me note-for-note, nuance-for-nuance reproduce his sound EXACTLY. Wow.
Some of them made "white liquor," also known as moonshine. There was a clearly defined protocol for drinking it, ...
|
|
