BANJO!

I once encountered a book so demanding of attention that even with my peripheral vision, walking past the ML stacks at the library, its spine jumped out at me. It was KLEZMER! Ever since, I wish every book every had such a title. (LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA!) Today we’re not going to talk about banjo, we’re going to talk about BANJO! Because any instrument that loud and annoying (I say with the utmost affection) deserves capslock and exclamation marks.

One quick follow up on “Folk Music and Socialism” before moving on: I picked up a book called The Folk Music Revival in Scotland (Ailie Munro, 1985). It starts with a chapter on the American revival, and what do you know—the author begins the story of American folk with the founding of Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, and their labor-themed parodies of existing traditional songs. The IWW song history became very important in British folk revivals.

Munro describes protest music as a part of the American experience, so, I guess complaining is a defining trait of our national character.

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Now, onward! At the end of my last post, I shared two songs by an English folksinger and noted how one was American style, but sounded English when sung by a different person. I didn’t dive into the whys in that post, because that’s a big question, but it’s one that has been driving me crazy. It has led me to learn a little bit more about the history of the banjo and important dialogues within Anglo-Celtic-American folk music. This is going to get a bit long, but I think it’s better not to split this into separate posts. It’s a 10-15 minute read, plus time for listening.

When I say folk music, in these last few posts, I mean the entire body of English, Celtic/Gaelic, and Anglo-American musics. My usage is somewhere between the ethnomusicological definition of “folk” (any regional oral tradition) and the generic definition of a particular style of music (e.g. Joan Baez). I’m trying to train myself into more precise language, because the word “folk” is tricky as hell.

In brief, here’s the rundown on Anglo-centric Americana:

• Appalachian folk — the oldest roots, mostly preserved English and Scottish songs
• Old-time folk — a development in the 19th century from Appalachian folk that brings in contemporary non-folk influences, such as gospel, tin pan alley and minstrel songs. Probably what most people imagine when they think of “American traditional music.”
• Bluegrass — a style established c. 1940 by Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt. Involves traditional songs played in their new style, but also “remixed” and new songs incorporating blues harmonies and traits of jazz.
• Folk — usually refers to revival era music, a sort of meta style established between about 1945 and 1970 that combines English songs, old-time, bluegrass, rhythm & blues, etc. Can be traditional or original songs, played using a traits from the whole body of roots music.

As you can see, it’s a history of continually updating old songs with new information. Old school folkies like to emphasize tradition and purity, but the “melting pot” aspect of American history is not just unavoidable in folk music, it’s central.

There’s a hilarious but helpful and accurate comparison of bluegrass, old time folk, and Irish folk that was published by the New York American Bluegrass Association a while back. It’s a fun read if you want a primer on some of their traits. (“Old Time and Irish songs are about whiskey, food and struggle. Bluegrass songs are about God, mother and the girl who did me wrong. If the girl isn’t dead by the third verse, it ain’t Bluegrass. If everyone dies, it’s Irish.”)

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I come from Appalachia, and that’s the folk music I know best. The elephant in the room there is the contributions of African-Americans. Both now and historically, Appalachia is a predominately white region, because it is historically poor and as such there were few slaves. The 1860 census map is practically a topographic map.  In the 1790 census, the African-American population of the region (both enslaved and free) was 6%, which peaked around 10% in 1860. It has continued to fluctuate between about 6 and 10% since emancipation. As a whole, Appalachia is currently 80% white, significantly higher than the national makeup, which is 60% white.

Compare these numbers to statewide racial demographics of South Carolina and of the low country, which was the seat of the slave trade: now, SC is about 28% black. In 1790, it was 43% black and growing rapidly, reaching 60% in 1860. But most of this population is, and was, concentrated in the low country, where black populations ranged from about 62% to 86%.

So the sense of Appalachian folk as being really white is well supported by the demographics, BUT, “really white” is not “completely white.” African-Americans were not absent, and Anglo-American folk musics belong to them, too. The history of Anglo-American folk music (and in turn, the history of the British folk revival) was shaped by the contributions of Africans and their descendants.

One of those contributions is the banjo. To my ear, the banjo is a defining part of the American soundscape.

Bill Evans has an excellent 15 minute history of the banjo. In short: the banjo developed in the 19th century, from a family of West African instruments that are essentially gourds with a stick in them. The xalam and kologo are major examples, which have a lute-type construction, using half a calabash (or wood) with a hide stretched over it.

The slave trade brought these instruments to the colonies, and white folks decided they wanted in. (A popular banjo model in the 1880s was called—wait for it—The White Lady. I almost choked. It was marketed as a parlor instrument for women.) In its new colonial home, the lute-type body morphed into an instrument more like a tambourine on a stick, and the banjo continued to evolve as it left Southern farms and joined the national middle class.

How did it become middle class? Minstrelsy! It’s unfortunate, but it’s the reality. Bob Winans’ excellent short video on the banjo in minstrelsy demonstrates that the basic rhythm of American old-time music, the “bum-ditty” of clawhammer/frailing, comes from the music of slaves. Compare what he plays at 6:20 (an original version of “Jenny Baker”) to traditional xalam music. Xalams are often played with a bit of a ba-dum, ba-dum rhythm, where the player emphasizes the lower strings on a down stroke before strumming or finger picking the higher strings. And that exactly describes the clawhammer technique. Clawhammer isn’t just used in banjo playing, it spreads to all strummed instruments in old-time music.

This heritage of minstrelsy is something that’s probably known to most banjo players, but its influence on what we perceive as “American folk music” is perhaps more unexpected. When we think of folk music, we probably think of a body of music that is not just primarily white in demographic, but essentially white. Blues are black, bluegrass is white, right? My past few posts have been about how “folk” as a descriptor is always a loaded term, and part of that load is the weight of ethnic heritage, even ethnic purity. You simply cannot use the term “folk music” without immediately tapping into a Western, Victorian, nationalist legacy. So no matter what influences exist in Anglo-Celtic folk musics, we hear the resulting body as white, because we are conditioned to hear it as ethnic heritage.

That’s the remarkable, sinister feat of colonization. In minstrelsy, even while painting themselves black, while claiming to sing “authentic plantation melodies,” these white performers were laying exclusive claim to the music. That’s the function of such a blatant parody: by design, blackface highlights the exclusion of African-Americans from the space.

Minstrel music was a fusion of black and white musics. You cannot separate them. Even before minstrelsy shows became popular in Northern cities in the 1830s-40s, folk music in America shows African influence. Slaves were generally prohibited from playing African music, so they played English and Irish music and brought their own histories to it. And of course, there were many mixed race descendants who grew up among Anglo-Celtic traditions, so the black inheritance of this music is not just by force. Everyone heard each other and learned from each other.

Let’s look at a few different version of “Pretty Polly.” This song is an American standard that originates from the British Isles. Traditional English ballads were usually sung without accompaniment. I can’t find an a capella version of “Pretty Polly,” but the first song on this collection of Appalachian ballads demonstrates a similar song:

Now, here’s “Pretty Polly,” with the traditional banjo accompaniment.

When you take that same kind of melody and singing and put a banjo with it, suddenly, it sounds American, right? Have someone with a pronounced English accent sing it and it’s still going to sound American, because it’s the instrumental style that sets it apart. Now that we know about the influences on the banjo and its style of playing, we can see that there is no “American music” without African legacies, even in white Appalachia.

Here, Pete Seeger plays “Pretty Polly” with the rolling 3-finger style credited to Earl Scruggs. It develops in the ’30s, I think.

This style of banjo playing is one of the defining traits of bluegrass. Bluegrass players usually wouldn’t say they play folk music, but this demonstrates how the lines can blur. It’s a traditional song, but the technique is specific to bluegrass. So, is it old-time, or is it bluegrass?

Lastly, here’s another recording from the ’50s, a rendition with a full bluegrass band. I’m going to run with bluegrass, because it’s a distinctly modern style. (It’s about 80 years old.)

In addition to the 3-finger picking style, there are three things that I’d pick out as defining features: the bass, the “high, lonesome” singing, and the occasional solo break. This version only has short solos, but here and there, during verses, one instrument will come forward for a few seconds—an ensemble technique that bluegrass takes from traditional jazz.

For the sake of argument, pretend that Sidney’s clarinet is a singer, and listen to the interaction of the other instruments.

There are all of these little flourishes of counterpoint during what we might consider the “verses” of the song. During solos, the band takes a step back and plays rhythm, but when they come back to the head (the tune), it’s quite a lively texture. Now go back and compare to the full bluegrass “Pretty Polly.”

See where bluegrass got it?

Next, the bass. Bluegrass bands usually have an upright bass, and the basic pattern is oompah, where you play I and V chords on beats 1 and 3. This is Western tonal harmony, by way of 19th century popular music, but, one way it becomes popular in country music is Maybelle Carter’s guitar playing. Carter-style picking is roughly a clawhammer style with an oompah bass line, and in bluegrass, that line gets mirrored by an actual bass. Bluegrass bassists also use walking bass lines, which are a major part of blues and jazz. So, there’s an interesting stew of white and black histories here.

The “high, lonesome” singing of bluegrass draws from the English ballad tradition, I think, but there are certainly some gospel and blues elements, too.

I think most of us would say that bluegrass is hella white, but it wouldn’t be what it is without the influence of black musicians, decade by decade, for more than a century. And as I was saying above, let’s not forget that “black musics,” such as blues, didn’t develop in a vacuum, either! Delta blues show the close relationship of early traditional blues and country-folk music. There’s no better example than Lead Belly:

“In the Pines” is a traditional song. In Lead Belly’s hands, the guitar clearly echoes old-time music, but with his way of singing (including the spoken interjections), it takes on the blues.

Here’s the same song, played by Bill Monroe’s band:

That’s the same song. Same melody, and the same harmony. It’s barely faster than Lead Belly’s, but it feels so much livelier. The Bluegrass Boys amble; Lead Belly reluctantly drags his feet. The differences of vocal inflection, instrumental timbres, and additional vocal harmony aren’t inconsequential. These are all important traits that distinguish genres. But hearing how different these songs two songs can be while being fundamentally the same underscores the close relationship of white and black musics, and how ultimately futile the idea of ethnic purity and “authenticity” is.