Vance Lowry and the classic banjo?

[RitonMousquetaire]

Hello everybody,

While searching for banjo records on a french radio website I stumbled upon this emission broadcasted in 2013, in which you can listen to two banjo records (which I find really enjoyable), played by Vance Lowry around 1926 : http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-fabuleux-monde-des-archives...

While listening to the first one (it starts at 11'53, following a few explanations by the person who curated the program) I thought he was playing a 4-string banjo (wether plectrum or tenor I'm not sure - there are some moments where it also sounds a bit like a 5-string, but I don't know the subject well enough to be sure), but the second (which starts around 12'30) seems to be a 5 string banjo played in the classic way (which would maybe explain that title, "l'harpo-banjo", which can be translated as "the harp-banjo" I think).

I'm quite curious about this player; does anybody knows exactly what kind of banjo he's playing in each of these records? Were his arrangements ever published? Do you have more informations about his life and other pieces or records? There are some informations on his life in France in the programme (where he apparently knew the poet Jean Cocteau), and somebody called Tony Thomas posted some interesting informations on this youtube video in which Lowry's playing can also be heard : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKXzR8a-_DE

Just in case he wouldn't be playing classic banjo and that discussion would be irrelevant to the present website, here is an other broadcast from the same website which features several classic banjo records (and this time I'm sure of it :) ) : http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-fabuleux-monde-des-archives...

[Jody Stecher]

The photo is a bit too small for my aging eyes to be sure, but the banjolin appears to have 4 single courses, instead of double courses. Can anyone confirm this?

[thereallyniceman]

Looks like 4 strings to me too, and the Banjo is a CE not a Weaver... check the 12th fret MOP.

[Richard William Ineson]

The banjolin has got 4 strings, you can see that from the pegs. I've got the remains of one of these Weaver banjolins somewhere. What am I looking for on the twelfth fret on the banjo? Eyes very bad nowadays.

[marc dalmasso]

Would say first today is a sad day in France for the democraty ; but i am not surprised at all  ; about 8 years ago , the same kind of muslims  treated me & my bluegrass band of " sons of a b.............. ; f.............. your mother   etc ..........." only because we wera playing american music in the Streets of Cannes , official gig for the city ;

Looks like Vance is a cool guy and i think the banjo is a 11  1/2 or 12 ' Weaver because of the 20 frets & 12 hooks

[thereallyniceman]

Maybe I am mistaken. I thought that Weaver used dots at the 12th  and there is clearly (!) a set of diamond MOP markers across the 12th position.... but yet again they could be dots as it is quite blurred!

Marc, I am sure that  all decent people in the UK will condemn this mindless act of terrorism. 

[marc dalmasso]

i have a 11  1/2 Weaver with  a diamond at 12th position

I LOVE your  false picture of me LOL

[Trapdoor2]

Make that decent people everywhere.

I think that the banjo is a Gibson "Special Export" model, the one without a tailpiece.

Also, Lowery clearly does not have a 5th string mounted and I can see the word "Fender" on the plectrum he's using.

;-)

 

[thereallyniceman]

Marc nailed that then!

Now Marc, take your tablets and go and sit in the corner where Matron told you to sit when you get one of your headaches . :-)

[Richard William Ineson]

Oui Marc, tres triste, un mal jour pour le monde et France.

I cannot see the dots or the diamonds,so I surrender. I found the Weaver banjolin neck, I got this along time ago, I use the buttons from the pegs as spares, for my banjos.

[Richard William Ineson]

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

A bit busy being drawn back into the minstrel period and into efforts to characterize the whole place of minstrelsy in 19th century society,  LOL,  distracted me.  But  I have an interest in Lowry which brought me here though I am always wanting to help HIS NICENESS.

It certainly looks like a five string banjo, but I see no sign of a fifth string being on the banjo.  In that era plectrum and tenor players often used a five-string without the fifth string

Before I was pulled into the antebellum period by OUP I was developing an interest in Lowry and some of his Ciro club peers precisely as a link between the age of five-string guitar banjo playing and the tenor banjoists of the jazz age which he may be.  Unfortunately,  I am still immersed in trying to figure out where T.D, Rice was between August 1830 and May 1831, LOL.

In the Black newspapers of the first decade of the 20th century,  Lowry is frequently described as a comedian and banjoist, something that seemed to be standard as this is the way earlier newspapers also described James Bland before he too went to the soggy island.  Lowry's notices as a banjoist come from a period BEFORE tenor banjoists existed or at least before tenors were formally marketed in 1910.

Very interestingly enough in late 1910 and 1911 notices appeared that he was working up an act with C.P.  Stinson.  Stinson appears in Converse's memoirs as the first Black player allowed to participate in a banjo contest in the 1880s, and who famously won such a contest in Kansas City.  Stinson performed in the US and Europe in minstrel troops and as a banjo soloist.  He returned to Pittsburgh where it was headline news in the national Black press that the major white music store in Pittsburgh hired him as a banjo instructor.  For a time, at least one report says, Stinson was making banjos in Pittsburgh, but he eventually became more of an actor, and then a theater manager.  However, more pertinent to this research is that he definitely was a guitar banjo player.

Teaming up with Lowry probably would have been a duo but probably with jokes, and maybe singing.

Unfortunately,  Stinson died before the new show business season could start and never toured with Lowry,

Lowry was among the New York musicians associated with the Clef Club led initially by James Reese Europe.  The Clef Club had annual concerts to raise funds for formal music education for African American youth in New York.  At several of these concerts Lowry is listed as a banjo soloist.  Europe considered all stringed instruments to be African American particularly the banjo, and for these concerts he assembled orchestras that scores of banjos (and often as many as ten pianos as he considered that a stringed instrument too!).

However, Europe was one of the pioneers of the pick played banjos, the four string mandolin/violin played banjos.  Europe  was foremost an arranger who would often be pulled in to black Broadway or touring shows to rearrange the band and the singing, and had formal compositional skills.  He said he liked the various mandolin-descended banjos because he could score them like the violin or the viola or the cello.  His own dfance band the Europe Society Orchestra with about 10 pieces had 5 banjos, but only two pianos.

Lowry also played the Clarinet, and stayed in Europe until the Second World War.  He recorded with both tenor and clarinet.  He appeared in one avante-guard movive in the 1920s in France, playing, not the banjo but the clarinet.  He apparently lived in France during the interwar years (we show our age when to us the War was still WWII and not the ones that seemed to be permanently starting and stopping over the past 20 years).

I wish  I could do more but right now  I am kneed deep in other work, but keep in touch as I eventually aim to write about Lowry.

He seems to have died in the late 1940s, although continued to perform as a solo act after his return to the US and I found some notices for War bond and similar benefits from the WWII years.  A couple years ago I was briefly in contact with a relative of Lowry's through Ancestry.com,.

Probably if this had come up in 2012, I would have richer memories  about Lowry.  But he certainly is a candidate for someone who started as a five-string classic player who graduated to being a tenor player.Some day I will return to him.  LOL

I
 
thereallyniceman said:

Thank you RitonM ,

That is very interesting and Mr. Lowry certainly is/was a great player. It sure sounds like Classic Style to me, but I agree that many of his arpeggioed chords sound like he is using a plectrum.  The triplets, finger tremolo and Bass notes clinch it for me though... Classic Style !!

Here is a music player so that you we don't have to hunt for the track:

VANCE LOWRY on www.francemusique.fr Classic Banjo

By the way Tony Thomas is a site member on here, but we have not seen him for a while. Tony helped edit the site page  "WHAT IS CLASSIC BANJO?"

[Tony Thomas MFA Black Banjoist]

Just to add a few things. 

The Clef Club benefits were at formal concert venues like Carneige Hall, and were dominated by formal compositions by African American composers like Will Marion Cook.  They were seen as break throughs in the acceptance of African American musicians as legitimate musicians, though they often include pieces that were aimed welding formal music with ragtime.

Europe was considered the foremost Black musician in New York in the 1910-1919 period having gone for Black show business around the turn of the century, despite the efforts of his middle class family to provide him with formal musical education.  His society Orchestra (with the five banjoists) was considered to top "Society" dance band in New York, often playing in the private functions of the top US millionaires.  He was the musical director and provided music for the famous George and Irene Castle a dance duo who captivated US society in the pre Great War years, developing the Fox Trot with them based on Handy's Memphis Blues.  Politicians in New York helped Europe recruit black musicians from as far away as Cuba and Puerto Rico to put together a marching band for the Harlem Hellfighters regiment in the Great War in which my grandfather served.  The band became to toast of France and Europe introducing more of a Jazz sound.  Unfortunately, no room for banjoists in a marching band, the drum major the future singer and band leader Noble Sissle was a former mandolin banjoist in the Society Orchestra,  Sadly, after one recording session on returning from the War Europe was murdered by an insane band member in 1919, and unfortunately didn't seem to use banjos in his post WWI recordings.

It is often claimed that banjos were abandoned by black people because of an association with slavery or rural origins, but in the Clef Club musicians and later the great tenor and guitar banjoists of the 20s and 30s,  the last generation of Black banjoists in real memory, the banjo was associated with urban and urbane, sophisticated musicians several with international reputations like Vance Lowry