How To Play the 5-string Banjo

[Trevor Boyd]

 

I recently picked up a second hand, 1962,  copy of this book by Pete Seeger,  and this reference to nylon strings and Fred Van Eps caught my eye. 

I thought other members might be interested to see it.  Is the American Banjo Fraternity still in existence?  Unfortunately, since this dates from 1962 there is no website address!

[Shawn McSweeny]

With reference to the BMG article :

1. There is little argument that the chanterelle (short string) predates Sweeny. It is found on the banjo's very early and primative antecedants such as the African aconting. It also appears in pre-Sweeny American graphic depictions of the instrument.  My understanding is that Sweeny is more properly credited with adding the fourth, what classic players call the bass, string.

2. So the presence of a chanterelle on the V&A banjo is not sufficient evidence to authenticate it as 18th century. In fact, the presence of a fourth string in the peghead suggests it is no earlier than Sweeny's time. When I visited the V&A in 1977, I saw this banjo and noted in my sketchbook that it was then dated by the museum as being from the 1830's or 1840's. (see pic). This would seem to be a more accurate reckoning. Some V&A revisionist history seems to have occurred since then.

[Trapdoor2]

Current research has not confirmed Sweeney's DNA in the design of the banjo at all. The Sweeney family makes no claims whatsoever and all the old stories appear to have been simply assigned to the earliest popular banjo player anyone could think of, Joel Sweeney. His life, etc., is well documented in Bob Carlin's recent book.

There exist several paintings which predate Mr. Sweeney that depict the chanterelle (also exhibited on the Akonting), the "4th string" (on a 5-string banjo) and the "hoop built" pot.

Now, let me see if I can finally upload my response to Jody's posting.

[Trapdoor2]

Jody,

First, let me apologize again for throwing out such smelly bait…

I do love that you took it into the realm of conspiracy theory, that’s always a fun place to go. ;-)

In all truthfulness, I believe that "folk music" on the banjo was concurrent with the rise of the banjo as a popular instrument. I don't know how one would otherwise classify the music played on the predecessor of the modern banjo (akonting, etc.) and/or its immediate Caribbean/American antecedents. I suspect it would be "folk" by definition.

I am, however, a style-skeptic.

I cringe a bit when told that Uncle Joe Whosis was playing any specific "folk style" (and I mean something like our modern clawhammer) back in the 19th cent. It is all hearsay evidence and even though I think it is very likely to be true, I want something solid to back it up…and there really isn’t anything solid.

Photographs tell us almost nothing about playing style. I just (in Nov.) sat thru a Bob Carlin slideshow which ran about 20min and “documented” dozens of three-finger players in North Carolina, pre-Scruggs (starting in the 1860’s). How did he know that guy in the tintype was a three-finger player? Somebody said he might have been...good enough for the folkies!

The first “folk” recordings (with banjo) I’m aware of happen to be the Polk Miller stuff. I’ve listened to them very closely. In my opinion, “Haul The Woodpile Down” is the only 19th Cent “stroke-style” banjo recording in existence. Polk Miller was in his late 40’s when he recorded it and he was a well known minstrel-show entertainer. All I can say is that I play both styles (“clawhammer” since the mid ‘80’s and “stroke” since the mid 90’s) and I hear "stroke". I believe I could write that tune out perfectly using Frank Converse's banjo-style notation.

How people learn an instrument, esp. within the folk process, is a seed-bed for variation. Human beings are not computers. They usually do not reproduce anything exactly…esp. if they learn it aurally/visually. Even with a fixed score, we put our own stamp on what we play.

Personally, I believe the evolution of these styles is more about chaos than some sort of linear progression. The problem (for me, simply academically) is that there is no hard documentation for these folk styles. Nobody, especially people who would have been interested in such stuff during the period, said a thing about it. They all talk about Guitar style and Banjo style. They all try to tie their banjo playing to some kind of black heritage...but what they write down isn’t clawhammer. Why?

Frankly, I think there are two simple possibilities:

1.) "Banjo style" (19th Cent) is an academic transliteration of the then-existing "folk style". The 19th cent banjo-tutor authors heard and saw one thing and adapted/arranged/transliterated it into something that best fit their capability to notate.

2) “Clawhammer style” didn’t exist at that time.

 

There is a third, but it deals with non-commerciality. If there was some hard evidence of a separate folk style documented in the period, but no written music, I would go with “no money in it”.

Frankly, absent any other evidence, I think that clawhammer evolved out of stroke style…and did so 2.5 nanoseconds after the big bang.

[Jody Stecher]

Thanks Marc. Because you've made so many points, I've replied between your lines in boldface. Ning won't let reply between the lines in non-italic letters.

Trapdoor2 said:

Jody,

First, let me apologize again for throwing out such smelly bait…

I do love that you took it into the realm of conspiracy theory, that’s always a fun place to go. ;-)

It was Joel who introduced that theme. I just took the ball and ran with it.

In all truthfulness, I believe that "folk music" on the banjo was concurrent with the rise of the banjo as a popular instrument.

then we are in agreement. 

I don't know how one would otherwise classify the music played on the predecessor of the modern banjo (akonting, etc.) and/or its immediate Caribbean/American antecedents. I suspect it would be "folk" by definition.

I am, however, a style-skeptic.

I cringe a bit when told that Uncle Joe Whosis was playing any specific "folk style" (and I mean something like our modern clawhammer) back in the 19th cent.

Read my posts again and note the birth dates. Most of the people I heard play clawhammer banjo in the 1950s and 60s were born in the 19th century. All of them claim to have learned from even older players. Absent a conspiracy there is no other explanation for their unanimity on this point except that they are telling the truth. Add Dave Macon to the list. He was born in 1870. He, as all the others did, learned his technique as a young man. Add Wade Ward to the list. He was born in 1892. None of these players claim to have invented a thing. If they had invented a technique they would have been proud to say so.

It is all hearsay evidence and even though I think it is very likely to be true, I want something solid to back it up…and there really isn’t anything solid.

Real live human beings (they were alive when I met them) may be mostly made of water but they seem pretty solid to me.

Photographs tell us almost nothing about playing style. I just (in Nov.) sat thru a Bob Carlin slideshow which ran about 20min and “documented” dozens of three-finger players in North Carolina, pre-Scruggs (starting in the 1860’s). How did he know that guy in the tintype was a three-finger player?

Perhaps by the hand position? 

Somebody said he might have been...good enough for the folkies!

The first “folk” recordings (with banjo) I’m aware of happen to be the Polk Miller stuff. I’ve listened to them very closely. In my opinion, “Haul The Woodpile Down” is the only 19th Cent “stroke-style” banjo recording in existence. Polk Miller was in his late 40’s when he recorded it and he was a well known minstrel-show entertainer. All I can say is that I play both styles (“clawhammer” since the mid ‘80’s and “stroke” since the mid 90’s) and I hear "stroke".

Marc, will you explain the difference between stroke and clawhammer please? To me only the repertoire is different. The banjoist plays with a downstroke on the long strings. The thumb depresses the high drone string and then releases it. Sometimes the thumb makes the same movement on a long string. There is a downbeat and an offbeat in a more obvious way in the clawhammer repertoire than in the stroke repertoire but from a technical point of view, the styles seem identical to me. OK, generally no thimbles are used in clawhammer but the hand movement is the same. There is an absence of separate finger movement. The word "clawhammer" represents how the hand looks. The word "stroke" indicates a downward movement. The word "frail" means "flail", again describing the movement. 

I believe I could write that tune out perfectly using Frank Converse's banjo-style notation.

How people learn an instrument, esp. within the folk process, is a seed-bed for variation. Human beings are not computers. They usually do not reproduce anything exactly…esp. if they learn it aurally/visually. Even with a fixed score, we put our own stamp on what we play.

yes

Personally, I believe the evolution of these styles is more about chaos than some sort of linear progression.

yes

The problem (for me, simply academically) is that there is no hard documentation for these folk styles.

thousands of hours of recorded music by nineteenth century banjo players seems like pretty hard evidence to me.

Nobody, especially people who would have been interested in such stuff during the period, said a thing about it. They all talk about Guitar style and Banjo style. They all try to tie their banjo playing to some kind of black heritage...but what they write down isn’t clawhammer. Why?

Who do you mean? I'm not following. I don't know of any old banjo players who wrote anything down or knew how, so I'm confused now. Or are you talking about Converse and the other compilers of printed "tutors"? 

Frankly, I think there are two simple possibilities:

1.) "Banjo style" (19th Cent) is an academic transliteration of the then-existing "folk style". The 19th cent banjo-tutor authors heard and saw one thing and adapted/arranged/transliterated it into something that best fit their capability to notate.

2) “Clawhammer style” didn’t exist at that time.

 

There is a third, but it deals with non-commerciality. If there was some hard evidence of a separate folk style documented in the period, but no written music, I would go with “no money in it”.

Frankly, absent any other evidence, I think that clawhammer evolved out of stroke style…and did so 2.5 nanoseconds after the big bang.

[Trapdoor2]

I'm going to go for the same "in between the lines" technique...but bear with me. This little box ain't much for long postings... I guess I'll go with a double quote on my replies...I've snipped out stuff that needs no comment.

Jody Stecher said:

Thanks Marc. Because you've made so many points, I've replied between your lines in boldface. Ning won't let reply between the lines in non-italic letters.

Trapdoor2 said:

I am, however, a style-skeptic.

I cringe a bit when told that Uncle Joe Whosis was playing any specific "folk style" (and I mean something like our modern clawhammer) back in the 19th cent.

Read my posts again and note the birth dates. Most of the people I heard play clawhammer banjo in the 1950s and 60s were born in the 19th century. All of them claim to have learned from even older players. Absent a conspiracy there is no other explanation for their unanimity on this point except that they are telling the truth. Add Dave Macon to the list. He was born in 1870. He, as all the others did, learned his technique as a young man. Add Wade Ward to the list. He was born in 1892. None of these players claim to have invented a thing. If they had invented a technique they would have been proud to say so.

 

"They all "claim" to play what they were taught...but the reality is that they changed it. To what extent, we don't know. That they were born prior to 1900 means very little, their teachers might have been born in the stroke-style era and played/taught stroke style...and it came out 'clawhammer'. We will never know. They didn't claim anything new because they didn't know it was new or different...they just played."

It is all hearsay evidence and even though I think it is very likely to be true, I want something solid to back it up…and there really isn’t anything solid.

Real live human beings (they were alive when I met them) may be mostly made of water but they seem pretty solid to me.

"Real Live Humans cannot control their own memories. The human mind is a terrible hard-drive."

Marc, will you explain the difference between stroke and clawhammer please? To me only the repertoire is different. 

 

"Um, I'll try to make it short...but it is gonna be difficult. Stroke style is much more a melody-driven style than clawhammer. There is very little drone used, the 5th string is more apt to be used as a single note than a drone. No bum-ditty at all. The thumb is often used as a rhythm or melodic lead on the long strings. The index finger is usually stipulated, and often used multiple times in a row (for every note, very much like rock 'n' roll downpicking). Because the thumb is not used much for sounding the 5th string drone, it is often used as a physical support structure for the index finger. Converse calls this the "hammer stroke". Really interesting (well, to me at least) figures are developed with the RH to allow the melody to be played...and many tunes end up sounding like Ken Perlman's melodic clawhammer. Lots of snaps, fewer slurs, almost no slides...but many clawhammer-strange things like straight-eights arpeggiated chords (not triplets), odd syncopations involving rests, etc., etc. Crossovers (index on 4th string followed by thumb on 3rd or 2nd). Your sometimes partner, Bill Evans, plays "Injun Rubber Overcoat" in his shows. To me, after a few times thru it wants strongly to be swung into a rock 'n' roll lope. I've gotten to where I cannot play it without thinking of Chuck Berry. Two of Converse's Irish tunes (from 1865), "Bully For All" and "St. Patrick's Day" are played almost without ever using the thumb (ok, it is used...just sparingly, the tunes are simply full of downstrokes). It is a strange and wonderful style if you follow the tutors...the pieces/repretiore can often be played using clawhammer techniques but I can hear the difference immediately (and there are scads of CDs out there that purport to be accurate and are not anywhere close).

When I started playing stroke style, I just played whatever the book told me to play. I started with Bob Flesher's book and then moved to working from the original tutors. It finally dawned on me one day that clawhammer is stroke-style with most of the hard parts removed."

 

The problem (for me, simply academically) is that there is no hard documentation for these folk styles.

thousands of hours of recorded music by nineteenth century banjo players seems like pretty hard evidence to me.

"What I meant (I think) is that these recordings do not provide sufficient evidence of the style existing prior to their recording. No, I'm not saying it appeared (poof!) out of thin air in 1922, I'm just saying that we cannot definitely pin down when it actually started. With the Stroke Style, all we have is the earliest edition of the Briggs book (1855). Surely this style existed prior to that date...but there is no 'real' evidence to prove it did. Provenance is what I'm getting at. "Aunt Millie said Grandpa Joe played clawhammer style" isn't sufficient for me. Such evidence is widely accepted in folk circles."

 

Nobody, especially people who would have been interested in such stuff during the period, said a thing about it. They all talk about Guitar style and Banjo style. They all try to tie their banjo playing to some kind of black heritage...but what they write down isn’t clawhammer. Why?

Who do you mean? I'm not following. I don't know of any old banjo players who wrote anything down or knew how, so I'm confused now. Or are you talking about Converse and the other compilers of printed "tutors"? 

 

"Yes, Converse, et al." Nobody else, no trade papers, no journals, no diaries, no postcards, nothing. Not even a tweet. We have Dan Emmett's diaries, he travelled widely and documented tons of stuff (and notated tons of tunes)...no mention of a different style of banjo playing. Same for William Sydney Mount (artist and player). I think nobody really cared until folks like Lomax and Jabbour and Krassen started their quests. Nobody ever asked them (early banjo players) where their style came from and it wasn't really a commercially viable quantity until "hillbilly" recordings became popular in the 3o's, 40's and 50's. By that time, who could remember clearly what style their mid-19th cent grandparent played? Heck, after one week with Ancestry.com, my family tree is competely different from what I was told as a kid. How can you trust what somebody heard about their g-g-grandparent?  

[Jody Stecher]

Much food for thought and very well stated, Marc. I will wait a bit before replying. First thing is food for belly, it's dinner time in California. I'll get back to you before too terribly long, but maybe not today.

Trapdoor2 said:

I'm going to go for the same "in between the lines" technique...but bear with me. This little box ain't much for long postings... I guess I'll go with a double quote on my replies...I've snipped out stuff that needs no comment.

Jody Stecher said:

Thanks Marc. Because you've made so many points, I've replied between your lines in boldface. Ning won't let reply between the lines in non-italic letters.

Trapdoor2 said:

I am, however, a style-skeptic.

I cringe a bit when told that Uncle Joe Whosis was playing any specific "folk style" (and I mean something like our modern clawhammer) back in the 19th cent.

Read my posts again and note the birth dates. Most of the people I heard play clawhammer banjo in the 1950s and 60s were born in the 19th century. All of them claim to have learned from even older players. Absent a conspiracy there is no other explanation for their unanimity on this point except that they are telling the truth. Add Dave Macon to the list. He was born in 1870. He, as all the others did, learned his technique as a young man. Add Wade Ward to the list. He was born in 1892. None of these players claim to have invented a thing. If they had invented a technique they would have been proud to say so.

 

"They all "claim" to play what they were taught...but the reality is that they changed it. To what extent, we don't know. That they were born prior to 1900 means very little, their teachers might have been born in the stroke-style era and played/taught stroke style...and it came out 'clawhammer'. We will never know. They didn't claim anything new because they didn't know it was new or different...they just played."

It is all hearsay evidence and even though I think it is very likely to be true, I want something solid to back it up…and there really isn’t anything solid.

Real live human beings (they were alive when I met them) may be mostly made of water but they seem pretty solid to me.

"Real Live Humans cannot control their own memories. The human mind is a terrible hard-drive."

Marc, will you explain the difference between stroke and clawhammer please? To me only the repertoire is different. 

 

"Um, I'll try to make it short...but it is gonna be difficult. Stroke style is much more a melody-driven style than clawhammer. There is very little drone used, the 5th string is more apt to be used as a single note than a drone. No bum-ditty at all. The thumb is often used as a rhythm or melodic lead on the long strings. The index finger is usually stipulated, and often used multiple times in a row (for every note, very much like rock 'n' roll downpicking). Because the thumb is not used much for sounding the 5th string drone, it is often used as a physical support structure for the index finger. Converse calls this the "hammer stroke". Really interesting (well, to me at least) figures are developed with the RH to allow the melody to be played...and many tunes end up sounding like Ken Perlman's melodic clawhammer. Lots of snaps, fewer slurs, almost no slides...but many clawhammer-strange things like straight-eights arpeggiated chords (not triplets), odd syncopations involving rests, etc., etc. Crossovers (index on 4th string followed by thumb on 3rd or 2nd). Your sometimes partner, Bill Evans, plays "Injun Rubber Overcoat" in his shows. To me, after a few times thru it wants strongly to be swung into a rock 'n' roll lope. I've gotten to where I cannot play it without thinking of Chuck Berry. Two of Converse's Irish tunes (from 1865), "Bully For All" and "St. Patrick's Day" are played almost without ever using the thumb (ok, it is used...just sparingly, the tunes are simply full of downstrokes). It is a strange and wonderful style if you follow the tutors...the pieces/repretiore can often be played using clawhammer techniques but I can hear the difference immediately (and there are scads of CDs out there that purport to be accurate and are not anywhere close).

When I started playing stroke style, I just played whatever the book told me to play. I started with Bob Flesher's book and then moved to working from the original tutors. It finally dawned on me one day that clawhammer is stroke-style with most of the hard parts removed."

 

The problem (for me, simply academically) is that there is no hard documentation for these folk styles.

thousands of hours of recorded music by nineteenth century banjo players seems like pretty hard evidence to me.

"What I meant (I think) is that these recordings do not provide sufficient evidence of the style existing prior to their recording. No, I'm not saying it appeared (poof!) out of thin air in 1922, I'm just saying that we cannot definitely pin down when it actually started. With the Stroke Style, all we have is the earliest edition of the Briggs book (1855). Surely this style existed prior to that date...but there is no 'real' evidence to prove it did. Provenance is what I'm getting at. "Aunt Millie said Grandpa Joe played clawhammer style" isn't sufficient for me. Such evidence is widely accepted in folk circles."

 

Nobody, especially people who would have been interested in such stuff during the period, said a thing about it. They all talk about Guitar style and Banjo style. They all try to tie their banjo playing to some kind of black heritage...but what they write down isn’t clawhammer. Why?

Who do you mean? I'm not following. I don't know of any old banjo players who wrote anything down or knew how, so I'm confused now. Or are you talking about Converse and the other compilers of printed "tutors"? 

 

"Yes, Converse, et al." Nobody else, no trade papers, no journals, no diaries, no postcards, nothing. Not even a tweet. We have Dan Emmett's diaries, he travelled widely and documented tons of stuff (and notated tons of tunes)...no mention of a different style of banjo playing. Same for William Sydney Mount (artist and player). I think nobody really cared until folks like Lomax and Jabbour and Krassen started their quests. Nobody ever asked them (early banjo players) where their style came from and it wasn't really a commercially viable quantity until "hillbilly" recordings became popular in the 3o's, 40's and 50's. By that time, who could remember clearly what style their mid-19th cent grandparent played? Heck, after one week with Ancestry.com, my family tree is competely different from what I was told as a kid. How can you trust what somebody heard about their g-g-grandparent?  

[Joel Hooks]

This will be difficult and brief on my phone.

When the "folk revival" hit there was a problem with the banjo. The banjo (5 string) was still accocated with the cork opera. So, if you liked the banjo and wanted to play it, it was probably a good idea to distance yourself from the nastiness of the minstrel stage.

There was a reason why people orignally wanted to take up the banjo ( and not in the ironic hipster way) and that was because the cool people played it.

Same reason I wanted to play guitar as a teenager. The Internet was lousy and I did not have a teacher, but I still tried my damnedest to play like Kurt Cobain (or whoever). I did not succeed, but I gave it my all.

Cool kids played that banjo on stage. It became popular and sought after because of the cool kids.

The folk era banjo did all they could to remove mention of the minstrel show. Their banjo came from the hills and had nothing to do with popular culture.

And me trying to learn guitar as a teenager had nothing to do with Danzig.

[Joel Hooks]

Up until post turn of the century (or later?) Sweeney was said to have added the short string- or the bass string. He was not credited with inventing the concept of the short string.

He certainly popularized that version of the banjo.

The word "invented" added later.

Check out the facts surrounding eye witness testimony. Also check out the innocence project to learn about all the people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes based on the memories of witnesses. If we cannot properly remember important things, how well do we do with small outdated pop culture?

[Jody Stecher]

In some —not all — of its Appalachian setting — the figure of the banjo player was  akin to the figure of the rock guitarist or the motorcycle hoodlum of later times. The banjo in that culture was mostly used for song accompaniment and many of the songs were about murder and mayhem. I remember reading an account of a sheriff's orders to his deputies in Frankfort Kentucky in the early 20th century. If any officer spied any young men dressed in a spiffy way, with a certain type of hat, etc, and carrying a banjo, he must arrest him immediately. He may not have done anything illegal yet, but he's certainly Going To do something, and soon.  And many a parent kept young daughters away from gangs of boys with banjos singing Pretty Polly. They were the wild ones. 

In order to make an effort (or to conspire) to remove mention of the minstrel banjo it would be necessary to know about it. I started the banjo at age 12 in 1958. I was one of many.  None of the kids I knew who took up the banjo had a clue about the minstrel stage and neither did our immigrant parents and grandparents. Our banjo heroes were both young and old. The avant garde was playing on hillbilly radio and they were young and aggressive and creative.  In the bluegrass field, which did not yet have a name, it was just acoustic hillbilly music, the creative banjo players were just a few years older than ourselves, folks like Sonny Osborne and JD Crowe. They played like their life depended on it, with immense fire. We listened and tried to play in that way not because we wished to whitewash a history we knew nothing about but because we liked how they sounded, but also.  as you say, these were the cool kids --- in a later era than the one you mean.  We also listened to the older generations and emulated their music as well. I've mentioned those names in earlier posts in this thread. 

The banjo music we pursued did come from the hills. We knew about tenor and plectrum banjo and were not keen on them but we also did not pretend it didn't exist. We did not know about minstrel banjo and blacking up. We DID know about classic banjo, which in those days was known as "Classical banjo". There were such players everywhere. We admired them but were more interested in music with a mountain "vibe".   When I listened to southern banjo pickers just out of their teens (and some still in their teens) I wanted to listen more and I wanted to play like them, not out of a motive to re-write history but because the sound of the music made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  All my pals were the same. 

Who is this propagandizing "they" that you are accusing of dishonesty? I am pretty sure there was no committee about "correcting" history.  If you think there was, please tell us their names.  It sure wasn't me and my friends. We were 12 and 13 years old after all.

The real situation is complex. Some of the Appalachian banjo music (both in repertoire and technique)came from the minstrel stage. Some came from the mothers of the banjoists.  Some came from the people who the blacked up minstrels learned their music from. Some of it came from (actually) black itinerant players who busked at coal camps. It was all intertwined. Minstrelsy taken as a whole, is a branch, not a root. 

The "folk" banjo of the 1950s and 60s DID come from the hills. But it had plenty to do with popular culture. Most of the well known "folk singers" were part of the recording industry and "show biz". But their hobbyist emulators were not. 

Southern vernacular banjo was what appealed to the young banjoists of my generation. We liked how it sounded. No ideology was involved.

Where is your evidence that *someone* or *someones* did "all they could" to remove mention of the minstrel show?  What events are you talking about? How was this enforced?  I recall the folk revival as anarchy. No one was in charge. 

Joel Hooks said:

This will be difficult and brief on my phone.

When the "folk revival" hit there was a problem with the banjo. The banjo (5 string) was still accocated with the cork opera. So, if you liked the banjo and wanted to play it, it was probably a good idea to distance yourself from the nastiness of the minstrel stage.

There was a reason why people orignally wanted to take up the banjo ( and not in the ironic hipster way) and that was because the cool people played it.

Same reason I wanted to play guitar as a teenager. The Internet was lousy and I did not have a teacher, but I still tried my damnedest to play like Kurt Cobain (or whoever). I did not succeed, but I gave it my all.

Cool kids played that banjo on stage. It became popular and sought after because of the cool kids.

The folk era banjo did all they could to remove mention of the minstrel show. Their banjo came from the hills and had nothing to do with popular culture.

And me trying to learn guitar as a teenager had nothing to do with Danzig.

[Jody Stecher]

For every last 19th century banjoist to recall the way their grandparents played and to report and replicate it in a very similar way, without  these banjoists knowing each other, without them being prompted to remember in a particular way, the only way such a thing could happen is as a result of mass hallucination or mass hypnosis.  How is it that they can remember the words to old songs but not banjo technique?  Being a casual witness to an event is not the same as being a participant in an activity that was done daily. I think the memories of old rural banjo technique is as reliable as the accounts of tree felling, house building, farming, the making of clothing, churning butter. Music making was a home activity. I have no doubts about the accuracy when the accounts are taken as a whole.

Joel Hooks said:

Check out the facts surrounding eye witness testimony. Also check out the innocence project to learn about all the people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes based on the memories of witnesses. If we cannot properly remember important things, how well do we do with small outdated pop culture?

[Jody Stecher]

 OK. I’ve had a chance to think it over, and also to *not* think it over, to just let it all bubble and braise and stew for a bit and here's what I think. My words are in italics. Marc is in upright letters.  This doesn’t symbolize anything about our characters, I don’t think.

"They all "claim" to play what they were taught...but the reality is that they changed it. 

Very few of the 19th century banjo players I met and heard about and that friends of mine met were directly *taught*anything. they picked it up by being around it, the same way they picked up all other aspects of their local culture and their families’ way of doing things. How could it be that thousands of banjo players all changed the music *in a similar way* without noticing that this happened? Wouldn’t it be much more likely that until the arrival of roads, rails, and radios (now THERE”s a good name for a book!) the music changed very little?  Cultural changes  can and do happen in a remarkably short time without the members of the culture realizing it, but I think this happens in different conditions than what existed in the rural south in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The 19th century southern players of the banjo that I referenced didn’t hear *about* how their grandparents played. They heard them play. Every day.  How could it be that they talked as their parents and grandparents talked but played differently? Why would that be? Why would they make the same bread but different banjo music?

To what extent, we don't know. That they were born prior to 1900 means very little, their teachers might have been born in the stroke-style era and played/taught stroke style...

they had models but very few had teachers or were taught. Do you really think that in 1880 a black resident of, let’s say Alabama, since you live there, learned banjo technique from someone who learned it from a book? Same question for a white resident of rural Kentucky, for example. No, there is too much uniformity in every old rural banjo player’s story for the story to be the product of a mass communal forgetting. How could it be that they all mis-remembered in the same way? they didn’t. They played a different music with a similar technique. More on this in a moment.

and it came out 'clawhammer'. We will never know. They didn't claim anything new because they didn't know it was new or different...they just played."

How do you suppose it could be that they changed the music, but not the way of speaking, not the way of preparing food, not the traditions of raising a family, not the knowledge of using tools, in other words, not the rest of the culture?

Also, every old banjo player I’ve met knew exactly what he or she had changed and what had been kept the same. 

"Real Live Humans cannot control their own memories. The human mind is a terrible hard-drive."

Haven’t you noticed that the folks in the Birmingham near you, speak differently than the folks in the Birmingham in England. That’s part of what we call “culture”. Individually our memories may be defective on some points but collectively we carry forward local customs. I’ve lived in the west coast of the usa most of my life and my vowels have changed a bit but the rhythms of my speech are the same as the people living in my native Brooklyn now. Some things are imprinted too deep to be changed.  I think southern banjo rhythm is one of those things. 

 Stroke style is much more a melody-driven style than clawhammer. There is very little drone used, the 5th string is more apt to be used as a single note than a drone. 

I would say this is a function of repertoire and also it reflects the function of the music. The music that was transcribed as stroke-style is music for the stage, to be played to ---to be played *at* a passive audience.  The rural southern banjo (not just in the mountains) was used to accompany songs, both for one’s own family, and also in solitude for one’s own comfort and soul-development,  and also, to move dancers around. It is necessarily rhythmic because the music itself has a steady beat when its function is to fuel the steps of a solo dancer or to play for a group dancing a Virginia Reel etc.  

No bum-ditty at all.

I have two responses to this. First of all, bum-ditty is the default rhythm of the uppicking style of Samantha Bumgarner, Virgil Anderson, Creed Birchfield, etc. The index comes up. The middle finger comes down. The thumb rings the fifth string. This is what Pete Seeger called the basic strum. It is not a defining element of clawhammer banjo playing. It shows up maybe 20% of the time. If you listen to old recordings of young players in the 1920s or mid 20th century recordings of old players (sometimes the same young ones on the  older recordings) virtually every time you hear a steady bum-ditty rhythm you are hearing banjo played with this technique, not with clawhammer. Secondly, it seems that at one time bum-ditty may have been central to stroke style. If you look at Ellis’s big pink book, the Thorough School of Banjo picking, there’s a page (53) on “thimble playing”, which I think you will agree indicates stroke style. Exercise #2 is all bum-ditty, and the subsequent exercises combine bum-ditty with other rhythms.

The thumb is often used as a rhythm or melodic lead on the long strings. The index finger is usually stipulated, and often used multiple times in a row (for every note, very much like rock 'n' roll downpicking). 

but this is because this is how the music goes. It’s not a different technique, it’s a different music.

Because the thumb is not used much for sounding the 5th string drone, it is often used as a physical support structure for the index finger. Converse calls this the "hammer stroke". 

same thing is sometimes done by players who call their technique “clawhammer” . By the way, rural guitarists used the term “clawhammer” as well. It means beating down on the strings. It’s not descriptive of a kind of music or a type of rhythm, only of a hand position.

Really interesting (well, to me at least) figures are developed with the RH to allow the melody to be played...and many tunes end up sounding like Ken Perlman's melodic clawhammer. Lots of snaps, fewer slurs, almost no slides...

few slides indicates support for your theory about the limits of the abilities of the transcribers of stroke style banjo. How could it be that a Black Southerner would slide on the violin, (and later on guitar ) but would refrain from sliding on the banjo? Especially when the banjo had no frets. How could it be that southern black vocal music had slides, the violin had slides, but not the banjo? It doesn’t seem likely to me.

but many clawhammer-strange things like straight-eights arpeggiated chords (not triplets), odd syncopations involving rests, etc., etc. Crossovers (index on 4th string followed by thumb on 3rd or 2nd).

yes, I’m familiar with all of this. But this is a difference in type of repertoire.

Your sometimes partner, Bill Evans, plays "Injun Rubber Overcoat" in his shows.

yup. he played it in almost every concert we did in The Secret Life Of Banjos.

They all talk about Guitar style and Banjo style. They all try to tie their banjo playing to some kind of black heritage...but what they write down isn’t clawhammer. Why?

because it’s a different repertoire with a different function and a different history.

....it wasn't really a commercially viable quantity until "hillbilly" recordings became popular in the 3o's, 40's and 50's. By that time, who could remember clearly what style their mid-19th cent grandparent played?

just about any musical person can remember such a thing accurately. Early memories are burned on the brain.  I can remember exactly how my grandfather talked and how he sang. Like many musicians I have a “phonographic” memory. It’s not as good now as when I was a kid. But until I was about 15 or so, I could hear any song, including ballads of 20 verses and I could sing it back to you word-perfect after one hearing. I have a friend, an autistic girl, who as a youngster could sing back any song she heard —days or years later— in the same key and tempo as she first heard it.  There are many such people.

 Heck, after one week with Ancestry.com, my family tree is competely different from what I was told as a kid. How can you trust what somebody heard about their g-g-grandparent?  

you can’t trust what you heard *about*  an ancestor but you can trust that your memory of what you heard *from* them directly, over and over and over again, is probably pretty durn accurate. Especially when there are thousands of others who remember the  same type of repertoire and the same collection of techniques. 

[Trapdoor2]

I really dislike the “line-by-line” method (it gets messy after a few iterations). I'm going to try to simplify (I hope it works!).

Frankly, I still don't trust the human brain. Lyrics, for example, are consistently mis-remembered (and mis-heard) from person to person. If we were so good at remembering and replicating, we'd be singing all the original lyrics to "The Cat Came Back" (for example)...and nobody does (and, we'd all admit that "Redwing" was a tin-pan-alley tune and not some OT construct...but I digress). I'm well aware that there are exceptions to every rule...and savant-like capabilities. My brother Gordon was playing the piano (both hands) @ age 6 without ever having had a formal lesson. He watched Liberace on TV and off he went (no, he wasn't as good...). By the time he was in his teens, he would come back from the movies and play all the music he heard…not after some muddling about either, right then.

These are exceptions. The bulk of banjo players cannot understand the lyrics to “Roustabout” (from the recording of Fred Cockerham, I think) and make up their own. I think that is more common.

We are just now finding that 19th century America was far better connected than previously thought. Isolated communities are turning out to have had lots of opportunities for interaction. Itinerant musicians travelled extensively (Sweeney hit just about every podunk community from Richmond to Buffalo and then across the pond to the UK) and it makes complete sense to me that a widespread, popular method (stroke style) was afterwards altered into something else (clawhammer) that also became widespread. Of course, you are well aware that by the 1960's, there were as many OT styles (which I lump into the term "clawhammer") as there were players. This fits my model quite well actually, I think. This OT genre wasn’t/isn't as homogeneous as we like to think…and neither was the stroke style, but we only have a small number of tunes to contemplate (stroke) and no performances (well, one, I think)…we can only speculate. I see no conspiracy, no magic. I see humans doing what they do best. Alter, vary, invent, confuse and obfuscate (i just like those words).

For stroke style, the repertoire argument just doesn't make sense to me, there are too many crossover tunes (almost all fiddle tunes). We have only what was written down as a window into the stroke style and no clue what else was played. It is easy to imagine that only the most saleable were included (and the authors stole from each other a lot). OTOH, why could a style not move into a local repertoire and be altered to suit the tunes these folks wanted to play? Humans are clever!

Frankly, I suspect the reason OT uses so many tunings is due to the limitations of style more than anything else. Humans are clever and we’re hard-wired to be lazy too (if you don’t like “lazy”, substitute “efficient”). Why learn some goofy stroke-style technique (and there are plenty) when you can alter the tuning and take the easy route? Close enough!

We also are forgetting that there is a third style in this basket of kittens, fingerstyle. It is my contention that fingerstyle followed a very similar model, that is, disseminated via minstrel show/circus/travelling musician and then altered to suit the player and local repertoire. Here again, we have a written account (Converse again) in 1865 and a lot of OT variation by the time a century has passed.

Because it was well suited to the popular urban music of the day, in the urban areas it got written out and formalized. Because it was strongly promoted to the upper classes (elevated!), it became popular with them as a hobby…and in the UK, it got stuck in time…where the US dropped it like (insert faded pop star) for the next fad style coming down the track. But it didn’t completely go away. It was kept by those who enjoyed it, passed on either via sheet music or person-to-person. It was adapted and transfigured and re-codified. Some of those adaptations became popular again in the 1940’s. We all know where that went. I’m going to a Bela Fleck concert (the concerto) tonight!

If Shakespeare can eventually be written by infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters, I suspect that any given style of banjo playing can pop up in a lot shorter length of time. We’re limited to strings and fingers. Fingers can only attack the strings in a couple of comfortable ways (up-picking, down-striking, strumming). Give a banjo to an interested human and he or she will figure out a way to make it work.