Baby, Book, and Banjo : Tim Westover's Blog

I’ve been reading a lot of folk song collections and essays on Appalachian music recently. Some are from the 1890′s to 1940′s, some are modern (or, at least, dating from the folk revival). The attitudes from the two time periods are very different, and, to me, quite striking.

Scholars of both time periods clearly care very much about the material — they have taken tremendous time and care to discover, collect, annotate, and compare ballads and folk songs. But it seems the earlier scholars are looking for artifacts of a previous civilization. They see in Appalachian music the fading remnants of some glorious English past. Part of this attitude is contempt for the contemporary singer of these songs, who is the unworthy inheritor and imperfect protector of the tradition.

Comments like these from Folk-Songs of the Southern Highlands (ed. Mellinger Edward Henry) from 1938 are representative of what I’ve read:

“['The Perjured Maid'], when I first saw it, impressed me as being what Child would call a ‘blurred, enfeebled, and disfigured form’ of something quite old and good.” (147)

“['My Pretty Little Pink'] is worthless as literature…. It is an extreme example of the patchwork of odds and ends so often found in these ‘love lorn songs.’ … It is really nothing at all but an illustration of the way minds of a certain sort work when they meet reverses in love; they think they are making poetry — instead they make up this sort of thing.” (262)

By contrast, the folk revival writers want material that is authentic to America. They have much more respect for the artistry and poetry of the American singer / interpreter of the material. Discovered artists are treated with reverence; many (deservedly) were plucked from mountain cabins and cotton fields and delivered to Carnegie Hall. They are perfect performers, and they need no antecedent.

For these later scholars, lyric coherence and stability is an argument against authenticity; the folk process hasn’t operated on songs that are too neat. A song written by “Anonymous” (or at least arranged by him / her) is better than a song with a noted author. Local variations are celebrated. There is no definitive version, nor definitive tune.

Personally, I agree with the latter scholars. I think the existing forms of Appalachian songs have artistic value in themselves, not just as clues to a “better” precursors. I like the disorder, remixing, and borrowing, and adaptation that created new songs out of European originals. Some of my favorite Appalachian songs aren’t descendants of Child ballads, nor are they even sensical, at least lyrically. The performer’s additional artistic choices — his selection of verses, his style of singing, his instrumental accompaniment (or lack thereof) — give additional coherence and meaning to the lyrics. And a looser overall structure doesn’t negate the impact of individual images and couplets, even if these couplets are used and re-used in different songs. It’s the sampling and name-checking of the 19th century.

Cecelia Conway in African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia makes a similar argument, though the text she chooses to champion is “puzzling, brief, and elliptical” (243). To call this song by Dink Roberts “cohesive” is a stretch:

Put poor John back in jail
Said, “I’d ask my captain for fifteen cents”
“Throw the time away”
“All I want is my .44 gun”
“Go out to Judge–”
“Go out to Judgement Day.”
Yeah, old John Hardy gonna be hung
Steel-driving man. (243)

Conway says “Some might interpret these songs as deteriorated or incoherent fragments of longer narrative songs about a public figure or historical event, by I do not. Dink consciously and intentionally performs these texts; his family enjoys them as they appear and considers them satisfying and complete, and, as I will show, their structure is meaningful and cohesive” (243). What follows are cultural and hermeneutic acrobatics to justify this claim. Some of her arguments are interesting, but still, the song really feels like assembled fragments. “John Hardy” and “John Henry” are completely different songs with antithetical protagonists: John Hardy is a desperate little murder, and John Henry is the “steel-driving man” that out-hammered the steam drill. In the lyrics that Conway quotes, they are conflated, and while I can’t call it a mistake, I can’t see the artistic reason for it, either.

I suppose the final decision rests with the listener; each makes his or her own determination about what’s meaningful and coherent.

Sometimes, a song isn’t about the words. “High ho, diddle dum day” and “King-kong kitchy ky-me-oh” are just as good for dancing as any other.

Just before Chloë was born, I ordered a Fireside banjo kit from BackyardMusic.com. The kit consisted of a simple wooden ring for the pot, a neck with the frets pre-installed, and piece of plywood instead of a plastic or skin head, plus the necessary hardware.  In the weeks after she arrived, I had a few minutes here and there to assemble the banjo, which I’ve been calling the “Chloë Special” on the theory that it would be a little lighter and quieter than the others that I have.  Actually, this little one puts out a significant noise for its size, much like its namesake.

Fireside Banjo Kit

Assembly was pretty easy.  I sanded all the major pieces, sculpted the headstock, stained the neck, and put a clear tung oil on the pot and sound disk.

Fireside Banjo: Stained Neck

Elmer’s Glue holds the pieces together.  At first, I put steel strings on the banjo, but there was buzzing on the third fret for the lower strings. As I was putting in the fifth-string tuner, I split the wood and bent the fret up.  I backed out the screw and repaired the wood, but the fret buzz remained, so I got a few replacement parts from Elderly Instruments, including a higher 3/4″ bridge and nylgut strings, a nylon simulation of old-fashioned gut strings.  Just like gut, the strings are incredibly stretchy, and it took forever to wind and tune them. With the nylgut, the instrument is a little quieter, and it has a very different sound from either my Gold-Tone CC-OT or Hatfield Crushinator.

After everything has been finished and settled in, the Chloë Special looks like this:

Chloe Special

And sounds like this:

Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy

You Are My Sunshine

Waterbound

And here’s Chloë on the Chloë Special:

I’ve been learning clawhammer banjo for about a year now, and back in January, I started practicing with Scruggs-style, three-finger banjo as well.  The two playing styles are very different on the right (plucking / strumming / frailing) hand, but very similar on the left (fretting) hand.  Traditionally, the two styles are playing on different kinds of banjos — clawhammer on a more “primitive” open-back banjo, and three-finger on a resonator, bluegrass banjo.  But there isn’t anything heretical with mixing and matching banjos and playing styles, and least as far as I’m aware. I practice both styles on both banjos, but maybe there’s something against that in the Old Testament somewhere.

My Open-Back Banjo

My open-back banjo is a GoldTone CC-OT, which is an entry-level Chinese-made banjo that I got for my birthday last May.  The OT (for Old Time) is a little fancier than the base model.  First, it has a frailing scoop — the highest frets, just above the pot (the circular body) have been removed, and the fingerboard is “scooped out.”  This makes it easier to play in that spot, which, because of the structure of the instrument, gives a more mellow, “old-timey” sound.  When I play closer to the bridge, the sound is brighter and louder.  After the New Year, I started playing with a towel rolled-up behind the banjo head, because that’s what all the cool kids who play down at Manuel’s Tavern were doing.  This lowers the volume and takes a lot of ring / overtones out of the banjo. When I start playing the banjo without the towel as a mute, I feel like I’m playing in a tiled bathroom.  Then when I put the towel in, it almost feels like my ears are stopped up.

Here’s a clip of me playing a fiddle song called “Jubilee” on the open-back CC-OT.  First I play it with towel mute, then I take out the mute and play it through again.

Jubilee on the openback banjo (with and then without muting)

My Resonator Banjo

A few weeks ago, I drove to Louisville, KY, for an Esperanto literary seminar.  On the way back, I stopped in Glasglow, KY, and met Arthur Hatfield, who builds very nice resonator banjos.  His banjos start at $2,600, which is beyond my price range.  But while I was watching him in his workshop, I noticed a poor little banjo, covered in dust and wood shavings, beneath a lathe.  Arthur told me that it was a project that had been hanging around the shop for awhile.  It had an old pot from the 50′s — he’d put a new head on it (the white circle — traditionally some kind of skin, but now all synthetic) and a new neck and fingerboard.  It was already strung, but it didn’t have a bridge, so Arthur made one of his signature compensated bridges freehand in about two minutes (see how it’s squiggly?). It plays like a charm and costs a lot less than an Arthur Hatfield original.  It’s a little ugly — the neck doesn’t really match the pot; the back is scratched up — but it has a lot of character, and I like the sound.

Here’s “Jubilee” again, this time on the resonator banjo.  I’m not playing in the three-finger style — this is clawhammer again, exactly like above.  On this banjo, because it doesn’t have a frailing scoop, I play just below where the neck meets the pot.  The sound is a little mellower there than when it’s played closer to the bridge, which IS where I play three-finger with finger picks.

Jubilee on the resonator banjo