Artist:Chris Pandolfi Hometown: Golden, Colorado Latest Album:Trance Banjo Personal nicknames: Panda
Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?
From one perspective, this is a really tough question for me because there are many sides to my music, and many influences that have factored in really heavily at different periods. But from another perspective, it’s easy. I wouldn’t be playing the banjo if it wasn’t for Béla Fleck. I discovered the Flecktones in high school and was just blown away in every possible way. It was a moment of pure inspiration, and after a handful of shows all I wanted to do was learn how to play the banjo. That was the start of my journey as a musician, and none of that happens had I not discovered Béla’s music.
But his influence doesn’t end there. He’s a legendary improviser on the instrument, and that’s a big part of what the Stringdusters do. But maybe even more importantly, he’s made his mark by recontextualizing the banjo, combining it with so many eclectic sounds and bringing it to many new genres. That’s a big goal of mine as well, and that’s very much inspired by Béla. He didn’t leave too much undiscovered territory! But the bigger your imagination, the more territory there is to explore, and I love that challenge.
What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?
I have many great memories of being on stage, but the night that we played in Covington, Kentucky, in the summer of 2019 stands out. It was an electric show, and the moment we walked off stage we all sort of simultaneously decided that we had just made a live album. That has only happened a handful of times in our career, even though we have had many gratifying shows. But this was one of those stand out nights where something connected on a deeper level. It seemed like everything we did just hit the crowd with maximum power, and then they were feeding us with so much energy and emotion. That’s what can happen at a show. It can happen any night, even when a venue is not packed out, and that possibility is one of the great thrills of this career. On a night like that, everyone there is an equal participant in the performance. There’s no divide between the performers and the crowd, and the possibilities are endless.
What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?
I get inspiration from a lot of places, but books and visual art are high on that list. I love artists and writers who surprise you. It may not inspire a specific melody or song, but it definitely stokes the idea inside me that anything is possible, and with imagination and creativity you can always find new paths to travel. Lately, I have really enjoyed the work of Clyfford Still. Still was an American, abstract painter whos work is bold and stunning. There’s a beautiful museum dedicated to his work here in Denver, and it turned me into a big fan.
I also love reading science fiction, mainly because the imagination factor of good sci-fi is off the charts. I read a trilogy of books in recent years called The Three Body Problem by a Chinese author named Cixin Liu that blew my mind. The story is gripping and endlessly creative. Two song titles on my new record, Trance Banjo, are references to that trilogy, both from the second book, Dark Forest, which is my favorite. Great art of any kind transports you to a place that feels very free, where there’s no strong sense of self. I get a lot of inspiration from that feeling.
What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?
Playing music is one challenge, but performing is a whole other hill to climb. When I am getting ready to play live or record, I always try to spend some time with my instrument (15-45 minutes or so) playing really mindfully and getting in the zone. That zone of being deeply focused on the music has seemed like a mystery at points in my career, and will forever be elusive in some way. But there is also something methodical about it, and that’s where practice comes in. When I practice I spend some time focusing on more mechanical elements, a new technique, transcribing or that sort of thing. But ultimately, I want to devote a good chunk of every practice session to building that zone. A good practice session should be like a meditation. The more time you can log in that focused zone, the more you know what it feels like and the easier it will be to conjure up in a performance setting. It’s a lifelong journey, and it certainly keeps you humble! But it’s not magic, it just takes practice.
If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?
I think my most consistent goal is to sound like myself as a player, and craft music that is unique as a producer. Bluegrass is the banjo’s native territory, and a common goal among proficient bluegrass players is to study and copy the styles of the early masters. For banjo players, that’s Earl Scruggs, and I would give anything to sound like Earl! There is so much great knowledge there, and so much expression as well. It’s a bedrock element of the instrument that practically every great player has a deep knowledge of.
While I have spent much time working on the fundamentals of Earl’s style, that is more of a starting point for me, and not an end-game. There are times on stage when I really try to emulate that older sound. But when it comes to crafting my own style and my own music, I try to use those old school bluegrass rudiments — timing, power, tone — but then add my own voice as well. The same goes for producing. It’s all about identifying and connecting with sounds that move you, and then using your imagination to grow from there and utilize those tools to bring your own vision to life.
I first heard the music of Etta Baker on a record in 1957. Not until thirty years later did I see her perform live, in the context of a bluegrass-oriented event, on September 26, 1987 at Gardner-Webb College’s Second Annual Earl Scruggs Music Celebration.
Gardner-Webb (G-W) is in Boiling Springs, N.C., an hour’s drive south of Baker’s Morganton home and a few miles southwest of Shelby. Scruggs’ birthplace, Flint Hill, is close by.
In 1986 G-W awarded Scruggs an honorary doctorate. Ill health kept him from attending that Celebration, but his long-time friend John Hartford came and led a seminar about him and performed at a concert honoring him. UNC folklorists taped the proceedings. Their recordings are available online at UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection.
After the success of the 1986 program a committee, chaired by G-W English professor Dr. Joyce Brown and including Shelby journalist and G-W grad Joe DePriest, began planning the 1987 celebration. They received assistance, a grant, from the Folklife Section of the N.C. Arts Council.
In August, a headline appeared on the front page of the Shelby Star: “Scruggs Celebration to get return engagement at G-W.” An article by DePriest quoted Brown: “We hope to make this an annual event — the most significant bluegrass event in the country. This is the logical place to center a recognition of our musical heritage.” DePriest added: “The program is not limited to bluegrass but will also focus on pre-bluegrass string music along with Afro-American contributions.”
The article described an action-packed day of music, with a morning concert-workshop by Etta Baker; an appearance by Riverbend Grass, the band in which Earl’s brother Horace played guitar; an afternoon of performances by six bands with Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrill and The Hired Hands opening; and afternoon workshops “on the history of bluegrass, its early radio days, and the Scruggs contributions.” In the evening was a concert by a popular new Nashville-based group, the Doug Dillard Band.
A scan of the first portions of the Earl Scruggs Celebration announcement from the Shelby ‘Star.’
By then Professor Brown had invited me to participate in the Celebration. My name and picture ran with DePriest’s article next to that of Jenkins, Sherrill, and The Hired Hands, who were slated to “head up the talent” of the Celebration. Touted as “an internationally known music scholar,” I was to conduct the workshop on bluegrass history with Jenkins and Sherrill.
I had never been to North Carolina, a formative location for the bluegrass business I began writing about in the ’60s. In 1974 the Country Music Foundation published my illustrated Bill Monroe discography, and in 1981 I began a regular column in Bluegrass Unlimited, “Thirty Years Ago This Month.” Since 1985, when my second book, Bluegrass: A History, was published, I’d been giving public lectures on bluegrass history.
My early bluegrass experience began in the late ’50s as a musician in the Midwest and northern California. Most of the history I wrote about came to me through research. I’d read Billboard from the early ’40s onward, eagerly followed the writing of people like Bill Vernon and Pete Kuykendall in fan magazines, and interviewed key figures.
I first heard of G-W in the early ’80s during one of those interviews. I asked Flatt & Scruggs manager Louise Scruggs when their first bluegrass college concert took place. She paused: “Gardner-Webb, maybe?” But she was tentative, particularly since she didn’t think it would be easy to document — she hadn’t started managing Lester and Earl until 1956. Not until my 1987 trip to Boiling Springs did I learn the full story of Flatt and Scruggs playing the first college bluegrass concert — I’ll say more about that later.
In 1976, when I wrote about my research on folk and country music in Canada’s Maritime provinces, I opened by saying “I attended many events, taking notes in my omnipresent 3 ½ x 5″ notebooks. As soon afterward as possible, a description of the event was written up in a diary-like journal.” Throughout my visit to Boiling Springs I had a notebook in my pocket. Soon after returning home I wrote a detailed diary of the six-day trip based on my notes. Direct quotes (in italics) follow.
Leaving Wednesday September 23rd, I was met at the Raleigh-Durham airport by Dan Patterson, head of UNC’s Folklore Curriculum. The next afternoon I gave a public lecture hosted by the Curriculum: “Reality and Revival in Bluegrass.” After my talk I was introduced to Tom Hanchett who, with his wife Carol Sawyer, was to drive me to Boiling Springs. We made plans for an early start the next day. Here’s what I wrote in my diary:
Tom Hanchett is in his late twenties, grew up in the Blue Ridge of Virginia and in upstate New York. Went to school at Cornell, was introduced to bluegrass by Country Cooking (Trischka, Wernick, etc.), and plays a bit of old-time fiddle. Had, until about five months ago, been working with the Charlotte (N.C.) Mecklenburg Historic Properties Commission as a historian. He had organized “The Charlotte Country Music Story,” a series of concerts there which recognized the town as an early historic center for recording and broadcasting of country music. And he is now working on a Ph.D. in southern urban history at UNC. His wife, Carol Sawyer, is a curator in a Museum of Technological history.
Tom charted our trip from Chapel Hill, in the northeastern Piedmont, to Boiling Springs, in the southwest, with a route that reflected the interest in local history and historic preservation that made him a perfect guide for our trip.
Tom had warned me beforehand that he was not an interstate man, so we followed a route that paralleled the old main railroad line (The Southern) that still runs from Washington to New Orleans.
Near Asheboro we stopped to visit Mac Whatley, mayor of Franklinville. He took us on a tour of this historic textile-mill region. I noted:
Whatley drove us out of town to the North and West, following Deep River, the source of textile mill power. We located the birthplace of Charlie Poole and looked at it from the road. There was a big “no trespassing, keep out” sign there.
We continued on toward Charlotte.
Somewhere along here we were passed by a new Toyota 4-wheel drive pickup with a yellow and black bumper sticker that read “Ralph Stanley for President.”
>We were truly in bluegrass country, I thought. Stopping for lunch and errands in Charlotte, Tom pointed out the hotel where RCA Victor had recorded the Monroe Brothers and many others during the thirties.
We reached the Shelby Star office in the early afternoon and met Joe DePriest, who gave us a quick introduction to the local cultural landscape. A leisurely drive took us to the Cleveland County Historical Museum (lots of famous people there, mainly mill owners), the graveyard, and past the old Lily Mills building in the neighborhood where Earl Scruggs lived while working there. Heading south towards Boiling Springs, we drove past Flint Hill Church. Joe promised Horace would give us a tour of this neighborhood, where Earl grew up, later.
At G-W, I met Dr. Brown, who showed me my room and filled me in on the evening’s itinerary. A group of us involved in tomorrow’s event would be getting acquainted over dinner at Kelly’s Steakhouse, just across the South Carolina line near Blacksburg. At 5:30 we all met outside G-W’s Dover Library to drive there. Here I met Horace Scruggs and his wife Maida. I wrote in my diary:
Earl’s older brother Horace turned out to be a very friendly and easy-going person, not as shy and quiet as Earl, though with (not surprisingly) a very similar voice and accent. His wife, Maida (pronounced May-Ida), is also very friendly. Horace is retired, he worked as a maintenance man for Gardner-Webb and later for the city of Boiling Springs. He is on the Earl Scruggs celebration committee.
Joe and I rode with the Scruggses that night. We both asked questions. I made notes during our drive and dinner. I began by mentioning that Louise had told me Flatt & Scruggs had once played at G-W.
I asked about that and Horace said, yes, they did, that he thought it was when they were working out of Bristol (May 1948 to March 1949, according to my calculations), around 1950. It was a spur of the moment thing, in midweek, and there was not much advertising and not a full house. The crowd was a mixture of townspeople and local students.
Over dinner I asked him a bit about his own musical career.
… he didn’t try music because he didn’t think he could make a living at it. He married in 1941 and went into the army soon after that. His father played clawhammer banjo, and he remembers being awakened in the morning by the sound of his father’s banjo. His father would build a fire in the stove and then play the banjo. Earl and Horace would come in and sit on his knees while he played.
He told me about running the farm after his father died in 1930:
They grew cotton — a crop was 3 bales a year, which they sold at 36 cents a pound (bale is 500 lbs, so that works out to $540.00 a year). They grew corn for feed and meal. Had a mule and a buggy which was originally rubber tired but eventually they ran it on the rims.
He was Earl’s first guitar accompanist, so I asked him if people thought Earl was special as a musician back then.
He said yes, they did, people would come by the house to hear him pick, etc. And when he was still quite young, they entered a banjo contest and Earl beat Snuffy Jenkins. Of course, as Horace was quick to point out, part of this had to do with his age, the youngsters have an advantage in those contests where audience applause decides the issue.
Earl and his mother moved into Shelby when Horace went into the Army, and Earl went to work at Lily Mills.
Earl had been turned down for the draft because he had a nervous stomach. He worked long hours for the mill but later on in the war he would take time off to play music at various places, and, as Horace recalls, was repeatedly lectured by his boss for wasting his time playing the banjo when he should be working to better himself at the mill. His mother was, Horace said, not happy either about Earl’s musical career and just as he was dropping us off at the Library, he told us that his mother had made a prediction which came true that he, Horace, had never told Earl: she said when he left to play professionally that “when I die, he won’t be able to come to my funeral.” And this happened — Earl and Louise were in an accident rushing to her bedside, she died while they were in hospital recovering.
After dinner Horace spoke of Earl’s adventures on the road:
He told me that Earl roomed with Uncle Dave Macon when he traveled to shows with Monroe and the band, and that Uncle Dave always carried with him an old-fashioned doctor’s satchel in which he kept one of his own country hams. He slept on it, used it as a pillow. And he would take it into restaurants, have it sliced and fried for him.
Talk turned to local foodways and Maida and Horace told us about livermush.
This local delicacy consists of hog’s liver and lean hog meat ground and fried, with corn meal, salt and pepper added to taste (some people add a lot of pepper, the seasoning is very personalized); left to harden, it is then sliced and fried. They said Earl eats it, and other natives crave it. It’s found on a north/south line from Blacksburg north to the Virginia border. One native son who now lives in Oregon has a special metal suitcase which he fills with frozen livermush and flies it home with him on yearly visits. It is served at the Snack Shop in Boiling Springs, which is where Earl and Lester and the boys used to stop for meals when travelling though this neck of the woods. Joe remembers seeing the bus there when he was a student, it was no big deal at the time.
As I walked home with Tom and Carol after dinner I proposed that we go for breakfast in the morning to the Snack Shop and see about getting livermush.
They thought I was overenthusiastic I think but they agreed to go.
Artist:Tony Trischka Hometown:: Fair Lawn, New Jersey Album:Shall We Hope Release Date: January 29, 2021 Record Label: Shefa Records
Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?
Earl Scruggs. Pretty much a no-brainer for me. He changed my life when I was 14 years old. His playing is at the heart of everything I do. And on a larger scale, indirectly because of him, I have the wonderful family I have, have had a successful career and many friends around the world.
What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?
I can’t say there was a moment like that. I first earned money playing music when I was 14, and continued to do so regularly through college. Though I was a Fine Arts major in school, and had very abstractly thought of a career as a museum curator (who was I kidding?).
What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?
In 1988, our band Skyline was invited to tour communist Czechoslovakia. Since my background is Czech on my father’s side, it was a particularly moving experience. While there, we performed in front of 30,000 people at the Porta Festival in Plzeň. We played a nighttime set and every second or third person in the audience was holding a candle, which made for an unbelievable sight. We were called for a second encore, and the emcee asked us to leave our instruments backstage and just walk to the front of the stage. As we were standing there facing this incredible candle-dappled crowd the emcee said, “You’ve given your gift of music to us, now we want to give you a gift.” He proceeded to divide the audience into thirds and had each third, of 10,000 each, sing a separate note of a major chord for us. Especially considering this was when Czechoslovakia was still communist, it was a profound experience.
If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?
Push boundaries and explore new areas on the 5-string banjo, but honor the history of the instrument. Don’t get bored.
Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?
Can I bring back Aaron Copland? On an emotional level he has had as much influence on me as Earl Scruggs. As for a meal, we’d have to start with a nice cocktail, and I guess it would have to be a Manhattan. Dinner would be hearty beef brisket with all the sides, and finish off with some good ol’ apple and cherry pie. I think that would cover all of the appropriate culinary bases.
On October 3, 2020, during IBMA’s Virtual World of Bluegrass, I watched the Bluegrass Situation‘s presentation of Shout & Shine Online, the fifth annual showcasecelebrating equity and inclusion in bluegrass and roots music. This year it featured Black performers, including Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, the blues, folk, bluegrass, and jazz multi-instrumentalist and vocalist from South Los Angeles. Not only do I enjoy his music, I also relish his asides and introductions. He knows a lot about musical sources, histories and meanings.
Introducing his music, Paxton explained that “ragtime” was the word people in his home community used to describe what others might call “old-time” or “traditional” — music that rekindled a shared past. At neighborhood and family social gatherings, he said, people would ask for his music by saying, “Play some of that ragtime music!”
For many people ragtime evokes the aural image of a piano played in the style of early 20th century composer Scott Joplin, an African American whose “Maple Leaf Rag” starred in the soundtrack of the 1973 hit film The Sting. (Paxton performed an arrangement of “Maple Leaf Rag” on five-string banjo for his Shout & Shine Online set.) The basic structure of this solo piano music involves the left hand keeping the rhythm often with large leaps in the bass register — often referred to as “stride” — while the right hand plays syncopated melody on the upper register.
In this form, ragtime is thought of as an urban phenomenon, straddling the border between popular and classical, and as the musical precursor of jazz. Joplin, for instance, composed an opera in 1911, and Julliard piano professor Joshua Rifkin’s 1971 LP of Joplin’s works earned a Grammy nomination. Pioneer jazz pianists like Jelly Roll Morton included ragtime in their repertoires.
Ragtime had another manifestation in the southeast, where Black musicians adapted it to the guitar in a fingerpicking style. Here, the right hand did all the work: the thumb picking the rhythm on the bass strings while the index and middle fingers ragged the tune on the higher strings.
The guitar was more affordable and portable than the piano. Ragtime guitar was featured by early 20th century itinerant musicians like Arnold Shultz in western Kentucky and Blind Boy Fuller in North Carolina. But it was not just the music of popular entertainment, it was also, as Paxton explained, social community music, performed for friends and neighbors.
In 1957, ragtime fingerpicking was a “new thing” within the folk music world that I was becoming acquainted with as a college student. I switched from nylon- to steel-string guitar and started wearing picks on my right hand. One of the recordings popular with us at Oberlin College was a track Peggy Seeger fingerpicked and sang on her 1955 Folkways LP, Songs of Courting and Complaint: “Freight Train.” She’d learned the song and its guitar accompaniment from the Black woman who worked as her family’s maid, North Carolinian Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, its composer.
In 1958 Peggy’s brother Mike Seeger produced Cotten’s first album for Folkways. “Freight Train,” already her best-known song, was on it:
Another tune we were trying to fingerpick in our dorm rooms and dining hall jam sessions was “Railroad Bill.” That song had been recorded by Virginia multi-instrumentalist and virtuoso Hobart Smith back in the ’40s.
“Discovered” at the White Top (Virginia) folk festival in 1936, Smith and his sister, singer Texas Gladden, subsequently performed at the White House and were recorded for the Library of Congress by Alan Lomax in 1942. In 1946, Lomax introduced Hobart to New York record company owner Moses Asch. One of Asch’s new Disc label 78s launched Smith’s version of “Railroad Bill” into aural tradition among ’50s fingerpickers. Lomax recorded Smith again in 1959:
Smith had studied and learned fiddle and banjo with African American musician neighbors at a time when the realities of segregation forced him and his friends to visit them surreptitiously. He was inspired to take up the guitar when he saw an itinerant Black bluesman, whom he identified as Blind Lemon Jefferson.
“Railroad Bill” was a well-known song in the southeast. Another song with a similar melody was “The Cannon Ball,” which Maybelle Carter of the famous Carter Family learned from Burnsville, North Carolina, native Lesley Riddle. In the late twenties and early thirties Riddle, an African American, accompanied A.P. Carter on song collecting trips and taught the family several songs they later recorded. Here’s a 1936 radio transcription of Maybelle singing and picking “The Cannon Ball”:
Mike Seeger recorded Riddle several times between 1965 and 1978; in 1993 Rounder issued a CD with 14 performances, including “The Cannon Ball”:
Riddle’s version, with its C to E chord change, is even closer to “Railroad Bill” than Maybelle’s. But in the mid-’50s, when I first became interested in this tune, no LP recordings of it were available.
That changed in 1956, when a new version of “Railroad Bill” was released on an album, Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians. The first piece on the “B” side, it was fingerpicked by Mrs. Etta Baker:
By the time I arrived at Oberlin College in 1957 it was an underground favorite; the hip older students spoke about trying to play like Mrs. Etta Baker. Copies of the album were passed around.
This album was on the new folk music label Tradition. Based in New York, Tradition hit the ground running in 1956 with at least 14 albums representing Greenwich Village trends in the mid-’50s folk revival: lots of ballads, plenty of Irish and English singers, popular radio performers, folklore collectors, flamenco artists, new concert sensations, and two albums of field recordings in the style of Folkways — one from Ireland, and this one from Appalachia. The recordings for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians were made by Tradition owner Diane Hamilton along with Liam Clancy and Paul Clayton in the summer of 1956.
Diane Hamilton was the pseudonym of Diane Guggenheim (1924–1991), an American mining heiress with a lifelong interest in traditional music, particularly Irish. At the time of the recording, Liam Clancy, soon to become part of the famous Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, had just arrived in New York, following an attachment with Hamilton. His brother Paddy was president of her new company.
New Englander Paul Clayton had studied folklore at the University of Virginia while pursuing a career as a folksinger. He recorded many albums from the mid-’50s until his troubled life ended in 1967 at the age of 36. Today he’s perhaps best known as a songwriter. His “Gotta Travel On” was a country hit in 1958, and his friend Bob Dylan borrowed from one of his songs to compose “Don’t Think Twice.” In 1956 Tradition had just released Paul’s album, Whaling and Sailing Songs from the Days of Moby Dick.
In his notes for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, Clayton described the album as “the result of a folk-song collecting trip during the Summer of 1956.” Hamilton and Clancy had recently arrived in New York from Ireland; Clancy was keen on collecting southern folk songs, and Clayton, who’d done a lot of that, was the obvious choice for expert guide.
The three met in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and headed west for a collecting trip to Appalachia. Their exact itinerary is unknown, but they went as far west as Beech Mountain, the highest point in the eastern U.S., well-known for its folk traditions. There they recorded folktale collector and performer Richard Chase doing three old-time dance tunes on the harmonica. In nearby Banner Elk, Mrs. Edd Presnell played three old-time tunes on her Appalachian dulcimer — an instrument then rarely heard on recordings that Clayton had studied and used in his performances.
The trio also visited Hobart Smith in his Saltville, Virginia, home, seventy miles north of Beech Mountain, recording four fiddle tunes and one banjo piece.
Their travel also took them to Blowing Rock, about a 25 mile drive from Beech Mountain, where they stopped in at the Moses H. Cone Mansion (also known as Flat Top Manor) a popular regional park on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Etta Baker, her father Boone Reid, and other family members were vacationing in the area, visiting the mansion. Reid, a musician himself, noticed Clayton was toting a guitar. He told Clayton of Baker’s musical talent and asked him to listen to Etta play her signature, “One Dime Blues.” According to Baker, “Paul was amazed. He got directions to our home and he was over the next day with his tape-recorder along with Liam Clancy and Diane Hamilton.”
They recorded five pieces. “Later,” says Clayton, “We met more of… a very talented family living in Morganton or Gamewell,” and they recorded two banjo pieces each by Boone Reid, then 79 years old, and Etta’s brother-in-law, her sister Cora Phillips’ husband Lacey.
Clayton’s notes indicate that they recorded “considerable instrumental material,” from which they chose “typical and best-performed” examples. This considerable material subsequently disappeared, leaving us today with only the album’s 20 tracks.
These include many familiar pieces from the local old-time repertoire. By following Harry Smith’s precedent in not identifying the color of performers’ skin, Clayton made the point that these musical traditions were regional, not racial. Perhaps since dulcimer player Mrs. Presnell’s first name was not given, all of the musicians were identified on the album notes as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” This lent an air of respect to the names of people often described elsewhere as “informants.”
Because of her fine guitar playing Mrs. Etta Baker was, for us, the most memorable performer on the album. A word of explanation — Mr. Hobart Smith was a fine fiddler, but in 1956 the fiddle hadn’t caught on in the folk revival. That wouldn’t start to happen until a few years later when the New Lost City Ramblers appeared.
With the exception of Smith, who led a string band for a while, the folks on this album made music as part of their social life, playing for their own enjoyment and that of family and friends. Sometimes they provided music for dancing — square dancing, and solo step dancing.
Here’s a good example of ragtime guitar used for solo step dancing: Earl Scruggs playing “Georgia Buck” live in 1961.
Another version was released in 1964 on the The Fabulous Sound of Flatt & Scruggs (Col CL 2255/CS 9055). The album notes say: “Georgia Buck, played by Scruggs on the guitar, represents the rhythmic beat of the old-time buck dancers.”
According to NCPedia, “buck dancing is a folk dance that originated among African Americans during the era of slavery. It was largely associated with the North Carolina Piedmont and, later, with the blues. The original buck dance, or ‘buck and wing,’ referred to a specific step performed by solo dancers, usually men; today the term encompasses a broad variety of improvisational dance steps.”
The Traditional Tune Archive describes “Georgia Buck” as “a black Southern banjo song,” so it’s interesting that Earl played it on the guitar in a style resembling that of Baker, Smith, Riddle and Carter. Where did he learn it that way? We don’t know, but Lester makes a point of describing his music as “hot” during the video and other musicians can be heard saying the same thing off-camera, seemingly endorsing the idea that this is good ragtime.
There are many stories of young white southern musicians learning from older black musicians in their hometown. One example: In 1972-73, Kenny Baker, then playing fiddle with Bill Monroe, did two albums with Buck Graves of guitar fingerpicking he’d learned from his brother, who’d taken lessons from “Earnest Johnson, a blind, black guitarist who sold peanuts in Jenkins, Kentucky during the thirties.” Rebel reissued them in 1989 as The Puritan Sessions (CD 1108).
Listening to Etta Baker on Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians was as close to taking lessons in that style of guitar as most of us undergrad folkies got. After the release of the album, she was not heard again on records for many years. Like Libba Cotten, Baker was a working woman with little time for making music. By the time she retired in 1973 from the Skyland Textile mill in Morganton, North Carolina, she’d endured family tragedies — the deaths of her husband and a son. After retirement she began accepting requests to perform and her music career developed. More about that next time…
When it comes to bluegrass and classic country music, North Carolina offers a talent pool that rivals any other state. It’s also red hot on the modern country scene, with stars like Eric Church, Luke Combs, and Scotty McCreery hailing from the Tarheel State. Some would say these contemporary musicians are following in the footsteps of these 10 North Carolina-born artists who made a mark in country music history.
Earl Scruggs b. 1924 in Flint Hill, N.C.
Without the banjo innovations of Earl Scruggs in Bill Monroe’s band, would we even have bluegrass? “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” are obvious Flatt & Scruggs classics, though his catalog runs deep — and his creativity blossomed further in the ’70s with the Earl Scruggs Revue. The city of Shelby has renovated its courthouse into the interactive Earl Scruggs Center.
Don Gibson b. 1928 in Shelby, N.C.
This soft-spoken artist is arguably country music’s first triple threat — a commanding presence as a vocalist, songwriter and guitarist. Born poor, he persisted through every bad break until finally exploding in 1958 with “Oh Lonesome Me” and an Opry membership. He remained active on the charts for two more decades. Shelby has honored him, as well, with a live music venue, the Don Gibson Theater.
Fred Foster b. 1931 in Rutherford County, N.C.
Behind the scenes, it’s hard to fathom just how well-connected Fred Foster was. He founded Monument Records in 1958 and produced all of Roy Orbison’s early hits on that label, gave Dolly Parton a publishing and label deal when she first moved to town, and landed a co-writing credit on Kris Kristofferson’s iconic “Me and Bobby McGee.” He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2016.
Stonewall Jackson b. 1932 in Emerson, N.C.
After an impressive audition but no track record, Stonewall Jackson was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry cast in 1956. For the next 10 years, he charged the country chart with “Life to Go” (written by George Jones), “Waterloo” (a five-week No. 1 in 1959), and “B.J. the DJ” (No. 1 in 1964). He sued Opry for age discrimination in 2006, then after a settlement, resumed appearances on the long-running show.
George Hamilton IV b. 1937 in Winston-Salem, N.C.
From North Carolina to the world, George Hamilton IV may be the top international ambassador of his generation. His stardom began as a teenager with an unexpected million-selling pop hit, 1956’s “A Rose and a Baby Ruth.” He signed to RCA and the Opry in 1960, setting the foundation for a decade of radio success with “Abilene” (a four-week No. 1 classic), “Break My Mind,” “Early Morning Rain,” and more.
Del Reeves b. 1932 in Sparta, N.C.
A 1965 novelty smash, “Girl on the Billboard” finally established Del Reeves as a likable country star (after four other record deals didn’t pan out). He’d go on to issue Top 10 singles through 1971, often singing for truckers on tracks like “The Belles of Southern Bell” and “Looking at the World Through a Windshield.” Known for his big personality, he joined the Grand Ole Opry cast in 1966.
Donna Fargo b. 1945 in Mount Airy, N.C.
A leading artist of the 1970s, Donna Fargo won a Grammy, an ACM Award and a CMA Award for her 1972 breakout hit, “Happiest Girl in the Whole USA.” The feel-good release reached No. 1, as did her next three singles — and she wrote them all. Fargo taught high school English courses before exploring songwriting. By 1979, she’d notched 16 Top 10 country hits and landed her own syndicated variety show.
Ronnie Milsap b. 1943 in Robbinsville, N.C.
Easily one of the most identifiable voices in country music, Ronnie Milsap dazzled listeners with charisma, musical talent, and an impeccable ear for hearing a hit. Inspired by R&B and country music alike, the entertainer shared his soul with fans for decades, with an astonishing 49 Top 10 country singles on RCA. One of the best, “Smoky Mountain Rain,” topped the chart in December 1980.
Charlie Daniels b. 1936 in Wilmington, N.C.
Four decades later, Charlie Daniels Band is synonymous with “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Arguably the most famous fiddling song in the country music canon, the single won a Grammy and led to a guest spot in the era-defining film, Urban Cowboy. A member of the Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame, Daniels remained a highly visible entertainer, especially eager to support causes for veterans and children.
Randy Travis b. 1959 in Marshville, N.C.
In the mid ’80s, Randy Travis was transformed from a dish-washing hopeful to a country music sensation. Plucked from the kitchen of the Nashville Palace onto the TNN airwaves, Travis was then reportedly rejected by every label in Nashville until finally signing to Warner Bros. And then “1982” changed everything. His resonant voice, though largely silenced now, will live on forever and ever, amen.
Photo of Charlie Daniels courtesy of Charlie Daniels Band, Inc.; Photo of Earl Scruggs by Al Clayton, provided by Sony Music; Photo of Randy Travis provided by 117 Entertainment Group.
Discover more about the North Carolina music scene and #NCMusicMonth through Come Hear North Carolina’s website and on Instagram at @comehearnc.
I came to North Carolina three decades ago, as music critic for the Raleigh News & Observer, knowing very little about the state’s music. Yes, I was plugged into the college-radio end of the spectrum, from Let’s Active to The Connells, and I’d at least heard of Doc and Earl (Watson and Scruggs, respectively). But there was a lot more to it, obviously, and the joy of my career was figuring out that North Carolina’s many disparate strains — old-time and bluegrass, blues and country, rock and pop, soul and r&b, jazz and hip-hop, and of course beach music — were all part of one big story.
As we’ve tried to convey with the book’s subtitle, it involves a wide range of music, from the roots music of bluegrass forefather Charlie Poole and bluegrass-banjo inventor Earl Scruggs to Ben Folds Five’s “punk rock for sissies,” super-producer/deejay 9th Wonder’s hip-hop to the Avett Brothers’ post-punk folk-rock. And what ties all of it together? Glad you asked! The narrative thread running through Step It Up and Go is working-class populism, a deeply rooted North Carolina tradition that runs into the present day. The simple detail of how to earn a living is a pretty prominent feature of each chapter, starting with the four acts in the subtitle.
Fuller (whose 1940 Piedmont blues classic provides my book’s title) and Watson were both blind men who turned to music as a way to provide for their families when few other avenues were available. Eunice Waymon’s plans to be a classical pianist were derailed and she had to start singing pop songs in nightclubs for a living, taking the name Nina Simone because she knew her Methodist preacher mother would not approve. And Superchunk is a punk band known for the 1989 wage-slave anthem “Slack Motherfucker” — and also for running Merge Records, one of the most improbably successful record companies of modern times.
Across genres, the state’s musicians have a proud, idealistic pragmatism that manifests as a certain mindset in which North Carolina is “The Dayjob State.” It’s an outlook that a lot of our state’s greatest artists retain even after music stops being a hobby and they go pro. Two of the state’s best-known Piedmont blues players, Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten (of “Freight Train” fame) and master guitarist Etta Baker, had amazing careers as musicians even though they didn’t seriously pursue it until they were both in their 60s. Pastor Shirley Caesar was even older, pushing 80, when she had a viral hit with her old chestnut “Hold My Mule.”
In the modern era, Carolina Chocolate Drops alumnus Rhiannon Giddens has run her career as a lifelong learning experience, involving academic research as well as performing, bringing long-forgotten or even unknown history and ancestors to light in the 21st century. With her creative work spanning from Our Native Daughters to an original opera score, Giddens honors her musical roots while retaining a spirit of collaboration, as many North Carolina musicians have done before her.
Or consider the aforementioned Doc Watson, who died in 2012 as one of the 20th century’s greatest musicians. A flatpicking legend who played guitar better than almost anyone else ever had, he nevertheless carried himself with a self-deprecating nonchalance; he just never seemed as impressed with himself as the rest of the world was. Barry Poss, whose Durham-based bluegrass label Sugar Hill Records released 13 of Watson’s albums over the years, used to express his frustration over Watson’s retiring nature and habit of deferring to other players even though there was never a time when he wasn’t the best musician in the room.
But that didn’t hurt Watson’s legacy in the slightest, and maybe it was just his way of dealing with the world. Jack Lawrence, one of Watson’s longtime accompanists, once told me that if he had been sighted, Watson probably would have been a carpenter or mechanic while picking for fun on weekends. Turns out that Doc was a homebody who would rather have spent more time at home in Deep Gap.
“Ask Doc how he wants to be remembered, and guitar-playing really doesn’t enter into it,” Lawrence said. “He’d rather be remembered just as the good ol’ boy down the road.”
Like the rest of North Carolina’s cast of musical characters, he’s remembered for that and a whole lot more.
Doc Watson needleprint, fashioned out of upholstery fabric samples by artist/musician Caitlin Cary in 2017. (Photo by Scott Sharpe.)
On the national music scene, North Carolina sets itself apart by blending the heritage of traditional roots music with the innovation of modern indie and Americana sounds. The bluegrass canon of North Carolina encompasses pioneers like Charlie Poole and Earl Scruggs, as well as groundbreaking musicians like Elizabeth Cotten, Alice Gerrard, and Doc Watson. Today’s spectrum of talent spans from modern favorites such as Darin & Brooke Aldridge, Balsam Range, and Steep Canyon Rangers, and the progressive perspective of the Avett Brothers, Rhiannon Giddens, Mandolin Orange, Hiss Golden Messenger, Mipso, and many more.
One example of how the state is merging past with present is the recent opening of North Carolina’s only vinyl pressing plant — Citizen Vinyl in Asheville.
According to press materials, the building’s third floor played host to Asheville’s historic WWNC (“Wonderful Western North Carolina”) which was once considered the most popular radio station in the United States. In 1927, the station hosted live performances by Jimmie Rodgers and made his first recordings shortly before he went to Bristol, Tennessee. In 1939, the station featured the first ever live performance by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys during its Mountain Music Time segment. Citizen Vinyl expects to keep the live music tradition alive in this former newspaper building, too.
Here at BGS, we’ve been committed to North Carolina music from our launch, notably with our Merlefest Late Night Jams, which are always worth staying up for. And how much do we love the IBMA World of Bluegrass week in Raleigh? Looking back on our archive, we gathered these songs from the artists we’ve covered over the years — and looking ahead, you’ll see all-new interviews with the Avett Brothers and Mipso, examine the classic country stars with roots in North Carolina, and spotlight some rising talent with video performances at the state’s most scenic destinations.
In the meantime, you can discover more about the North Carolina music scene through their website and on Instagram at @comehearnc
Editor’s note: This content brought to you in part by our partners at Crossroads Label Group.
On Wednesday, October 28, music fans had the chance to see and hear some of the most historic instruments in bluegrass played once again during an all-star fundraiser, BIG NIGHT (At the Museum). The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum presented performances captured in the museum’s galleries and performance venues while the museum was closed, with select artists paired with instruments from the institution’s collection. The event debuted on the museum’s YouTube channel.
One such performance includes Alison Brown playing Earl Scruggs’s 1930 Gibson RB-Granada banjo, Ricky Skaggs playing Bill Monroe’s 1923 Gibson F-5 mandolin, and Marty Stuart playing Lester Flatt’s 1950 Martin D-28 guitar. Skaggs was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
“I think it’s important to do anything we can to support the museum not as just members of the Hall of Fame, but as lovers of country music history,” Skaggs tells BGS. “I think it’s kind of our job to do that and it’s a privilege to know that my grandkids will be able to go there to see that history that we celebrated — and some of it I even got to be a part of. I’m thankful to be a part of it. It’s a wonderful thing.”
BIG NIGHT (At the Museum) generated support for the museum’s exhibitions, collections preservation, and educational programming. A closure of nearly six months due to COVID-19 caused significant loss of revenue for the museum, which was forced to cancel in-person educational events. During the BIG NIGHT program, viewers were encouraged to donate to the museum.
BGS spoke with Hall of Fame member Ricky Skaggs and museum CEO Kyle Young about the event.
BGS: Kyle, how have things been at the museum since the shutdown?
Young: We’re hanging in. We were closed for about six months. We opened back up September 10 under very limited capacity. As I look at the year, I think we will end up looking at lost revenue approaching thirty five million dollars, so it’s a matter of trying to navigate through and I’m hoping that we can stay open, even though it’s very limited.
Ricky, it’d be hard to imagine such an event without you there considering that you have such a deep connection to this music. What does it mean for you to get to play Mr. Monroe’s mandolin?
Skaggs: I can’t believe I’m getting to play it one more time. Every time I play it I’m sure it’s the last time, but then they’ll drag it out again and I’m always like, “Oh, God, thank you.” The first time I played it, I was 6 years old. So I didn’t really know that much about how priceless it was even then. And he wouldn’t just take it off and give it to you to play. He wasn’t that way, you know? Sometimes we’d shared a dressing room together. And he’d have the lid open in the case, but it would be pushed down in the case. I would always ask his permission if I could play it and he’d let me.
But, I didn’t play it that much when he was alive. I’ve played it so much more since he passed. There was a time before it went into the museum that the Opry House had it in a vault. There was a guy there that would let me play it, and two or three times a year, I’d go out and make sure that the bridge was OK and maybe I’d put new strings on it and stuff like that. But I played it quite a bit back then. When it went into the museum, I thought, “This is it.” You walk by and see it in the case and think, “Well, that ain’t ever coming out.” But I’ve been able to play it a few times and I’m always thankful.
It’s an amazing sounding instrument. And I made sure to mention, when I was inducted into the Hall of Fame, that Mr. Monroe did not create this music by himself. That instrument was his partner. That was his number one instrument from the time that he got it. He and that instrument created the sound of bluegrass. I mean, he was so creative after he got that instrument. If you think about the instrumentals that he wrote before when he had that F-9 with that short scale you can tell he was very limited. But when he got that 14 fret neck — goodness gracious! It gave him the room and the tone and the whole Loar experience to work with. It was meant to be. It was a heavenly meeting of two instruments: Monroe being one instrument and the mandolin being the other.
That’s a beautiful sentiment and a good point about how inspiring that instrument was for him. That connection between instrument and musician existed with all of these instruments, so it’s going to be special to watch all of these performances. Were you all excited to get to perform a bit?
Skaggs: We were. None of us three — me, Marty or Alison — have had COVID, and we’ve certainly been pent up and cooped up. I recently did a video for Camping World with Steven Curtis Chapman, and after one of the faster instrumentals we played, I remember thinking, “Man, I have got COVID fingers,” you know? Kentucky Thunder hasn’t played a show since March 11 and that’s just crazy. So, it was a lot of fun to play with Marty and Alison. I think it’s going to be a really, really great show, and I hope it raises a lot of money for the Hall of Fame, because even though they’ve had to shut down, the building must be paid for every month like nothing happened. But, something has happened and that’s another example of how hard this virus has been on America in general, and which has been really, really unfortunate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1j5JYpSfTc
I know that those instruments almost never leave their display cases so what were the circumstances that allowed the instruments to get played for this event?
Young: We knew that there were a lot of things we couldn’t do while we were closed, but we tried to focus on what we might be able to do under these circumstances and what opportunities there might be. I don’t know if you remember this or not, but very early on in the shutdown, the Shedd Aquarium let a couple of penguins out and let them walk around the aquarium and posted videos of them looking at the other exhibits. That got us to thinking about what we could do. We are a very active museum with lots of programming, but we realized with an empty museum, we can carefully take these instruments out of their cases.
So, the penguins were the germ of it, to tell you the truth. We wanted to do something that looked like us and felt like us. The backbone of the museum, as you know, is the collection — and the collection is unbelievable. The curatorial staff enjoyed carefully choosing which instrument they wanted to take out and allow to be played. From that point, we decided which artists made sense.
That’s so special because I know it’s such a rare thing. The only time I can remember something like it was when Ricky played Bill Monroe’s mandolin at the Medallion Ceremony back in 2018.
Young: That was very, very unusual. And after a lot of discussion, we thought that’d be a great thing to do with Ricky that afternoon. And likewise, this is something we never do. It is only because we were closed and able to really control the circumstances by which we were moving these instruments and carefully handling them and letting the artists play them. They’re behind glass for a reason. That’s the best way to protect them. And they are in an environment that is intensely controlled from temperature to humidity to light exposure and so on. But we did feel like under these circumstances, and only these circumstances, could we see our way clear to take them out for a little while and let them be played.
Photos courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum
Andy Hall is one of the fiercest slide guitarists we have around not just today, but probably ever. If there’s any doubt, you needn’t look further than his newest release, 12 Bluegrass Classics for Resophonic Guitar. The Denver-based singer and Dobro player of the Infamous Stringdusters has always pushed the envelope, but had never taken the time to put his own stamp on the formative tunes that all musicians of the genre play with one another. From teaching thousands of students online via ArtistWorks, to his work with Earl Scruggs, Dolly Parton, or Jack Black, it’s obvious that Hall is a master of the instrument, and the art itself.
BGS visited with Hall to talk all things pandemic, resophonic guitars, and what this record means in a time like our own.
BGS: What was your initial inspiration for this recording?
Andy Hall: It was an interesting time in the spring when I was recording it, you know, but it’s all about taking opportunities that present themselves and making the most of the situation and what you can do. When everything stops, you have no idea what’s happening, you’re pretty quickly trying to figure out how to continue to be expressive. Our band the Stringdusters has toured so much for so long. …I don’t want to say I took it for granted, but when it all went away it was surprising — there was this withdrawal from doing the things that I love to do.
These are songs I’ve played for years and years, and I’ve always wanted to put my stamp on them, my take, you know? I totally overlooked them as anything I would record, because I always played them in jams. For most people, they don’t know these songs. So, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to get a recorded version of all these jam songs. It was really just a matter of me sitting, playing, and enjoying these tunes enough to get a good representation of them.
At the same time that you’ve put your own stamp on these tunes, you said that they were formative. I noticed the speed-up in “House of the Rising sun,” just like Mike Auldridge of the Seldom Scene would do. Are there any influences you’re drawing from, more than others, on this record?
Everyone has their own version of what their “classic” tune would be for a certain instrument. So “House of the Rising Sun,” definitely based on the Mike Auldridge version. To me, if you do that song on Dobro, that’s just how it goes. “Dixie Hoedown” was on Jerry Douglas’ first solo record, and something like “Fireball Mail” couldn’t be a more quintessential dobro song. I was always too impatient to sit and get every nuance of somebody’s playing, so I kinda gloss over it for the general idea and fill in the blanks myself. So due to my impatience I have my own style with a lot of them.
So that’s what a lot of these are like, but you can trace most of them back to an original version — like “Cherokee Shuffle,” Sally Van Meter, a great dobro player from Colorado, did that on a record called the Great Dobro Sessions. One that’s totally my own is the first one on the record, “Leather Britches.” I’d never really heard a version of that, but I wanted to try and get that repetitive, cyclical, rolling sound of the fiddle. So a lot of them are jam tunes that I never heard a Dobro version of, and wanted to develop my own thing with.
“Foggy Mountain Rock” really comes through that way.
I actually was fortunate enough to get to play with Earl Scruggs some, and that tune is a perfect example of how I didn’t take the time to learn it officially like Josh Graves. When I auditioned for Scruggs’ band, I went to his house and jammed with both Earl and a fiddle player named Glen Duncan. My mind was just blown, you know, we’re just sitting in Earl’s living room playing “Foggy Mountain Rock.” When we finished playing it, it was clear I hadn’t done it the way he was used to hearing it. And he complimented it! “Oh, I love how you put that four chord in there. I love when people do their own thing.” That really justified my whole approach. If Earl Scruggs says it’s cool, then I’m good.
Do you teach many of these in your class over at ArtistWorks?
There are a couple in my school. “Panhandle Rag” is in there, “Cherokee Shuffle.” I’m about to transcribe not just the melodies, but the solos for a few of these so that the students can have a crack at them. It seems primed for that kind of thing. This is a specialty project geared at Dobro nerds. With the Stringdusters or other projects I do it’s a bit more broad, usually song-based. This record definitely ties into ArtistWorks; it’s just getting deep into the slide guitar thing… because that’s what I love!
“I am a Pilgrim” is so woody, while “Cherokee Shuffle” has that cutting metallic ring of the Dobro… Can you talk about some of the guitars you used on this record?
“I am a Pilgrim,” “Amazing Grace,” and maybe “Foggy Mountain Rock” were all played on a 1929 Squareneck Tricone National guitar. To me it just has a super unique blues sound. So I used it on the tunes that were slower, just to get some variety. I wrestled with how much variety to put on the record in that way, because I have a bunch of different slide instruments. I’ve got a Chaturangi, which is an Indian slide guitar with all of these resonant strings, of course lap steels and things of that nature, but I decided I wanted to keep it kind of Americana sounding. The National fit into that. All the rest I did on my favorite Beard guitar.
Speaking of formative years, I’m curious if there are any younger Dobro players that stick out to you, or even influence you?
For sure. As a Dobro player, when I was in my twenties, at a certain point I kinda felt like I had heard everything, because there weren’t all that many. I’d heard all of the Jerry Douglas and Rob Ickes, Mike Auldridge and Josh Graves. There’s a lot to dig into, but compared to any other instrument, there was a much smaller pool of stuff to draw on. It’s been cool as new players come up to hear new styles. I think the first guy that was new when I first moved to Nashville was Randy Kohrs. He had a technique that nobody else had.
Out of that came a couple of younger players that I really love like Josh Swift, who played in Doyle Lawson’s band for years. His technical ability is just insane — nobody else can do what he does. There’s a young guy named Gaven Largent who I remember teaching when he was probably 12. There’s a guy named Tommy Maher, who plays in a band called Fireside Collective. Andy Dunnigan from the Lil Smokies, he uses the Dobro very lyrically, and he’s the lead singer too. I love seeing that — a lead singer Dobro player!
I’d say one of my biggest influences in recent years is Roosevelt Collier, a lap steel player. I met him in 2013, on JamCruise, and of course became fast friends with the slide guitar connection. We stayed in touch and actually did a record together a few years back. Roosevelt’s very gospel, sacred steel, very singing, very emotive style, is something I’ve really tried to absorb. It just gets you in the chest.
What do you foresee, or hope, will be the impact of this record?
There’s something about the coronavirus, or the lockdown, that made every part of life simpler. A lot of things got stripped away and we just got down to basics, be it hanging out with our families and making food, or with the music we’re not doing big tours or big production — we’re sitting in our basements by ourselves playing. It’s certainly one of the silver linings of the whole pandemic thing, the simplicity and the sweetness, and that’s what I was feeling with this. It’s just a reflection of me sitting and playing, and hopefully people will relate to that. People have had to strip everything down to being simple, and that’s what this record is. It’s a reflection of that return to the basics that the pandemic has put on us. It’s really forced us to get back to the root of why we do what we do!
On the morning of March 24, 2020 I learned Eric Weissberg had passed away when a friend posted a long and detailed obit. I found several other substantial ones online — Rolling Stone, Variety, New York Times. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Weissberg’s family had a press release ready; he’d been in decline, suffering from dementia. A few days later Jim Rooney posted a very moving memoir focused on his long-time friend Weissberg in mid- and late years; it shed more light on this influential musician.
Recently Bob Carlin finished a bio on Weissberg. When we spoke at IBMA’s business conference last fall he told me publishers weren’t interested in a book about a studio musician. Too bad, it’s a good story. In 1972 Weissberg won a Grammy for the banjo hit that propelled the growth of bluegrass festivals, “Dueling Banjos,” the theme from the movie Deliverance.
I first heard Weissberg’s banjo playing in the fall of 1957. I was an 18-year old Oberlin College freshman who’d gotten into folk music as a high school student in Berkeley, California. This was my first time “back east.” I now had classmates from New York City. One of them, Mike Lipsky, had a new Folkways album, American Banjo Scruggs Style. The final band on the second side was by a friend of his from New York, Eric.
Weissberg was 17 when he recorded for Folkways, backed by Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler. He picked a medley of “Jesse James” and Woody Guthrie’s “Hard Ain’t It Hard,” using Scruggs pegs on the latter. When Lipsky played it to me and my roommate Mayne Smith (fellow Californian and a fledgling banjo picker) he had to explain what Scruggs pegs were.
Lipsky knew about this music because he was one of a group of New York teenage folk music fans, mainly from elite high schools — Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, Music and Art — who socialized together. They’d networked not only in school, but also at leftist summer camps where folk music, spearheaded by Pete Seeger, was an essential part of the experience. They called themselves “The Squadron” and they gathered regularly in Greenwich Village on Sunday afternoons to hear two members of their crowd, Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman, picking at the Washington Square folk music jams. Weissberg, a student of Pete Seeger, had been playing the banjo since the age of ten.
Lipsky told us Weissberg and Marshall’s fancy picking confounded Roger Sprung, an older banjoist generally thought to be the best Scruggs picker in New York. And he described their banjos — not long-neck, open-back Vegas like Pete Seeger played, but Gibsons! With resonators, too. And on the fingerboard, down toward the body of the banjo, a little block of mother-of-pearl with “Mastertone” written on it.
This weirdness was all new to me. I’d never heard of “Scruggs picking,” and it was only when I borrowed the LP and read its notes, written by Ralph Rinzler, that I learned this music was called “bluegrass.”
The following March, at spring vacation, my roommate and I went to New York. I stayed with Mike Lipsky, on this, my first visit to The City. Mayne stayed with another classmate. Among our many adventures — we were rambunctious teen tourists — we went one night to a party for The Squadron in a posh upper East Side residence.
This was a homecoming party. Attending were young women and men most of whom were like us, on spring vacation from their first year as college and university students at a variety of institutions. Lipsky and Karen, another Oberlin classmate who was part of the group, introduced us to their friends. We’d brought our instruments, leaving them in the anteroom and going up a small flight of stairs to the main floor of this elaborate place. Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman, both of whom were freshmen at the University of Wisconsin, did the same.
Midway through the evening we were encouraged to get our instruments out and sing. Mayne had his banjo — an old Stewart with a resonator — and I, my guitar — a 1943 Martin 000-21. We went back downstairs. This was the nearest thing to a front porch or back room we could find. We did several pieces, and then Weissberg and Brickman came down and got out their banjos. Mayne had taken one or two lessons with Billy Faier, the virtuoso banjoist who’d arrived in the Bay Area from New York the previous August. Faier had introduced him to three-finger picking. Mayne chatted about Scruggs with Eric and Marshall.
Then they played a banjo duet, a Scruggs tune, “Earl’s Breakdown,” in harmony, with each picking with the right hand on his own banjo while reaching around to fret the strings on the neck of the other’s banjo. This was the first time we’d ever seen anyone play the banjo Scruggs style, much less a fancy stage stunt like that! It was a very impressive tour-de-force. You can get a good sense of what the harmony sounded like from the version on their 1963 Elektra album, New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass (reissued in 1972 as Dueling Banjosfrom Deliverance) although they weren’t playing the fancy solo breaks in 1958.
Afterwards Weissberg told us that the best way to learn this music was to study Scruggs’ playing on one of his instrumental records like “Earl’s Breakdown” or “Flint Hill Special.” Mastering all those licks note-for-note would take you a long way towards being able to play like Earl.
Weissberg noticed that I was playing the guitar with just two picks on my fingers — thumb and index. He recommended that I add a pick on my middle finger, like he and Marshall used for the banjo. I followed that advice immediately, and the following year, when I began working seriously on banjo, I also took his advice about studying Scruggs closely.
Putting our instruments away, we went upstairs and joined the party. I conversed for a while with Eric. I told him I’d heard Billy Faier in Berkeley last summer, had been very impressed with his music, and was looking forward to his forthcoming Riverside album, The Art of the Five-String Banjo. Eric agreed, Faier is a great banjo player, and said he had collaborated with Billy and another banjo player, Dick Weissman, on an album due out this coming summer called Banjos, Banjos and More Banjos!
That summer of 1958, Banjos, Banjos and More Banjos! arrived at Art Music on Telegraph in Berkeley where I hung out listening to new folk records. The album was on Judson, a bargain line label owned by Riverside’s Bill Grauer.
Grauer’s Riverside productions catered to the hip college kids of the fifties — a generation that grew up on hi-fi LPs. Riverside reissued historic prewar jazz and blues; released contemporary jazz and folk; and recorded sports car events. This major independent label ended abruptly in 1964 when Grauer, just 42, died. Their catalog is now with Concord Records, which has reissued some jazz recordings on CDs.
Riverside albums were well-produced, with glossy full-color cover art. Back covers — liners — had a standard format: bold head at the top with album title and artist names. Below it, three dense columns giving the playlist along with information about the music and musicians. Lots to read while listening!
Faier’s The Art of the Five-String Banjo liner held a full column endorsement by Pete Seeger, slightly longer notes by producer Goldstein, and Faier’s bio. In contrast the liner of Banjos, Banjos and More Banjos had its playlist followed by three columns of folklorist John Greenway’s flowery history of the instrument, and brief bios for the three banjoists. I bought the album(later reissued on Grauer’s Washington label with new cover and title: Five-String Jamboree: A Treasury of Banjo Music) because Eric Weissberg was playing Scruggs-style banjo on it.
At the bottom of the center column on the liners for both albums was the standard data of the time:
A HIGH FIDELITY Recording (Audio Compensation; RIAA Curve). Produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein. Cover by Paul Weller (photography) and Paul Bacon (design). Engineer: Mel Kaiser (Cue Recordings). New York: May, 1957.
Now I look back at the album, listen to it for the first time in years. When I last heard of Faier, about ten years ago, he was busking in Albuquerque. He died in Alpine, Texas in 2016. We’d seen each other and talked at the Tennessee Banjo Institute in November 1990, recalling the summer of 1958 when I guested on his KPFA show and worked as his backup guitarist at an SF coffee house. Dick Weissman, now 85, had distinguished careers: first as a performer, then as teacher and author. He published his memoir, The Music Never Stops: A Journey Into the Music of the Unknown, The Forgotten, The Rich & Famous, the same year Faier died.
These guys must have been in the Cue Recordings studio more than once in May, 1957. Their recordings were made with a single-track tape recorder; no overdubs. Faier made his solo album at Cue with Frank Hamilton playing guitar, and there’s one track on Banjos with that pairing — probably an outtake from The Art. Most of the other guitar on this album is by Dick Rosmini, then considered the hot, young, go-to guitar accompanist.
Weissberg is heard playing Scruggs-style banjo on five tracks, and singing tenor harmony in duets on three of those. One was an old spiritual, “You Can Dig My Grave,” with Faier. With Weissman, Eric harmonized on the old folksong “Chilly Winds.” My favorite was another spiritual, “Glory Glory.” This vocal duet with Rosmini featured great backup guitar and seven banjo breaks by Eric, each a new variation. I played that track a lot for my friends that summer!
He also did a reprise of his 1956 Folkways track, focusing on “Hard Ain’t It Hard” complete with Scruggs pegs, and a cool version of “900 Miles” in G minor tuning.
Weissberg’s music spoke to me as a young folk fan just getting into bluegrass. He’d mastered the instrument in this new style, and learned the vocal style that went with it. Here he was applying it to music that I knew — Woody Guthrie songs, a tune the Weavers had sung on their famous Carnegie Hall concert album, and familiar Black spirituals.
The door to bluegrass was newly opened. Eric Weissberg stood just inside, beckoning in. Come on, it’s not that hard, it’ll be fun.
Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg Photo of Banjos, Banjos, and More Banjos: Neil V. Rosenberg
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