The Banjo- Ringing Back From the Upland South and the Appalachian Mountains (Part 6)

By the mid- twentieth century, the five-string banjo had become the symbol of Appalachia and the south. At the turn of the twentieth century, local styles of old-time Appalachian string music rang out from nearly every holler and crossroads community. In the 1910's and into the 20's, with the widespread availability of 78 records, all America could hear the old mountain fiddle tunes as well as the more recent lyric guitar songs popular in the Upland South. In these two decades, record companies and radio stations showed little interest in the old-world ballads or old-time banjo playing also common in the region. In the late 1920's, after southern musicians had enjoyed access to inexpensive mail-order guitars for almost a generation, groups like the Carter Family emerged. They led groups of singers that specialized in traditional music of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Soon after, country music emerged, and the guitar took center stage.

It wasn’t until the early 1940s and 50‘s, when the intense rhythms of bluegrass captured America's ear, that this hard-driving music reasserted the banjo with brashness and a fast-paced pushing of the beat. Helping this along was the phenomenal success of the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly American radio program featuring live country and western music. The nation's oldest continuous radio show, it was first broadcast in 1925 on Nashville's WSM as an amateur showcase. This Tennessee city eventually became the performance and recording center for country music. The banjo became tied to this music through the years. And now, even at the dawning of the twenty-first century, the five-string banjo continues to symbolize the people of the south and the Appalachian region. Let’s look at the history and progression of these events:

During the eighteenth century, when the banjo first appeared in North America, Ulster Scot, Scottish, and Irish immigrants began moving in large numbers and traveling west on the Old Pike or south down the Great Wagon Road. These were Colonial American thoroughfares from Pennsylvania to North Carolina and from there to Georgia. It was the heavily traveled main route for settlement of the Southern United States, particularly the 'back country'. Also, moving to North Carolina or western Virginia from east Virginia was a migration route for many of these families, so descendants of these families were pioneers in Kentucky, Tennessee and other frontier states. The population of the mountain frontier included slaves, freed slaves, indentured servants and servants free of indenture. Many were musicians who carried their recently standardized fiddles with them.
Many African American freed slaves followed the waterways and traces years after the initial push by European settlers into this area. There were a number of slave families who should be counted among the early settlers, although few have found their way into the historical record. For instance, slaves made up 10 per cent of Kentucky's early settler population. Slaves were fewer in the mountains, but were not as separated from their owners as was possible on the large plantations in east Virginia. As it was, freed slaves were welcomed by many displaced Native American communities and European families as well on a frontier where neighbor had to depend on neighbor. Beyond that, many mixed race individuals married into white families. So there would have been no class inhibition for exchanging cultural traditions, including banjo playing, among the members of these frontier families.


The cultural exchange that eventually led to the banjo becoming a symbol for Appalachia began on the coastal plain and moved along the waterways into the Piedmont. African musicians introduced African culture to the settlers as settlement progressed across the mountain traces. Musical exchange between Africans and whites, especially the Irish and the Scots, intensified as settlement continued, inspiring whites to learn to play the banjo. The names of only a few black banjo mentors are known, but their stories illuminate how African and white contact and exchange occurred in and through the mountains from the time of settlement into the nineteenth century. The gourd banjo was just one of several contributions African Americans made to mountain folk life. Others are the songbow, gourd fiddles and early fiddle music, dance, patting for dance and possibly puzzles. As a whole, it was a uniquely American amalgamation of African and European folkways and music.


Dr. Combs has the following to say in 'Folk Songs of the Southern United States' regarding banjo songs: “The Highlanders have adopted a considerable number of songs belonging to or originating among the Negroes. Some of these songs have long been current in the Highlands, from the days prior to the Civil War, and include banjo songs, besides some spirituals and songs of the British type... Since the Civil War a number of Negro occupational songs have crept in, notably such well-known ones as 'John Hardy,' 'John Henry,' the 'Yew-Pine Mountain,' 'Frankie,' 'Lynchburg Town,' 'The Kicking Mule,' 'Turkey in the Straw,' and others.' Later, he makes a more specific statement regarding this subject: 'The Highlander has adopted many banjo airs from the Negroes, although the Negro population of the Highlands has never been extensive. Such airs came into the Highlands prior to the Civil War, while the Negro railroad songs came in afterwards, largely during the past twenty-five years [1900-1925]. The tunes of 'Lynchburg Town,' 'Shortnin' Bread,' 'Raccoon,' Shady Grove,' 'Hook and Line,' 'Houn' Dog,' 'Ida Red,' 'Little Gray Mule,' 'Big Stone Gap,' and numerous others, are from the Negroes.'
It’s important to note that Dr. Combs is specific in stating that banjo songs came in long before the Civil War.


While late nineteenth-century northern urbanites played their dandified pearl-inlayed banjos, an unbroken tradition of finger styles, plus clawhammer and frailing styles continued on in the rural areas of the Upland South and the hills of the Appalachia range. The transfer of banjo playing from black to white musicians was direct and that isolation kept the playing styles relatively free of interpretation. In rural communities, fiddle and banjo were the mainstay of rural dance.
The traditional music and dance of the Southern Appalachians evolved from a coming together - some might say a collision - of British Isles and African cultures. Flatfooting, clawhammer banjo playing, fiddling, square dancing, sacred harp singing, story telling, honky-tonk songs, balladry, and clogging were the elements of this old-time music and dance. The gourd banjo, along with the fiddle, was the instrumentation to these dances and traditions. The players used common methods to entertain, which of course varied from region to region.
For instance, dancing in east Kentucky was associated with the banjo - most dances in the Knott County area featured a lone banjo player with observers patting to help keep time.
The favored tune for square dancing in the Knott County area was Hook and Line. Lee Sexton, from Letcher County, Kentucky, states in the liner notes to his CD, 'Whoa Mule':
"We'd go to square dances and bean stringings, corn shuckings, just things like that … We'd hoedown then, the old hoedown dance, just flatfoot you know. And it started from that to square dancing…They didn't have no guitar or fiddle. I'd sit right there and play the banjo all night 'til the blood would run from my fingers. Hook and Line was the tune I played all the time." Hook and Line is just one example, but it is believed to be one of the oldest banjo tunes that came with early settlers into east Kentucky.
Manufactured banjos supplanted gourd banjos in urban areas by the 1860s. But gourd banjos were still being used in the Kentucky mountains, for example, as late as 1950. Leonard Roberts published a 1950's interview with an east Kentucky family in Up Cutshin & Down Greasy: Jim Couch related, 'My grandfather made one banjo that lasted for years. The box of it was made outten an old gourd.” Jim's father, Tom Couch, a banjo player born in 1860, said one of his forbears started the tradition of picking and singing by making himself a banjo from an old gourd.

In the cities and in popular music going into the 20th century, the banjo was going through an image change. It was growing out of the effects of the minstrel show, into the post civil war era of classical banjo fads, all the way to the jazz driven rythyms of ragtime. It also went from a 5 string instrument to a 4 string one. It had a part to play in all these popular forms of entertainment, but then was either eclipsed by other more suitable instruments in a particular genre, or the genre itself died out. But in the Appalachian mountains and farming communities of the South, the banjo was an integral part of undying traditions. It was depended on for the musical accompaniment to dances and songs that told of these peoples’ joys and troubles. And it survived because it was so inexorably tied to these traditions. So when recorded music started to become more readily available with advances in recording and the widespread distribution of records, it was only a matter of time until these incredible songs became known to a wider audience.
Rural string bands recorded in the 1920s and 1930s played a mix of traditional fiddle tunes, ballads, country blues, and ragtime-influenced compositions. This new mixture proved popular and created a new genre of “hillbilly” offerings. By the 1930s, record labels such as Brunswick sought out rural talent recording string bands with exceptional talent.

Among the successful recording artists of the 1930s was a young man named Bill Monroe who recorded as a duet with his brother Charlie. In the 1940s, Bill Monroe remade the rural string band format into the driving sound later called bluegrass in honor of his native Kentucky. Monroe was a master mandolin player and surrounded himself with the best talent of his day. One of these people was a young and shy North Carolinian, Earl Scruggs. Scruggs’ style is based on rapid picking of the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of the right hand and employs metal picks for the fingers and a plastic thumb pick. Scruggs had predecessors in the three-finger style and may have inherited some concepts from artists such as “Snuffy” Jenkins, but Scruggs’ sublime mastery of the style set him apart and completed the bluegrass formula. Variations on Scruggs’ pioneering work soon followed. The next two decades saw a new generation of bluegrass players, some of them born and bred in the suburbs and the city.

Minstrel stereotyping, harsh memories of slavery, urbanization, industrialization, and especially the increasingly restrictive Jim Crow laws led black singers to refashion their lyric songs with an assertive social commentary that laid the foundation for the emergence of the blues. Into the 20th century, black banjo players became obscure as they had begun to put down their banjos. By the 1920s it was more common to hear African American songs set to the then-inexpensive and readily available mail-order guitar. This guitar driven blues expression was the next major musical movement in the United States, and it made it’s way from the mainly black communities of the deep south and emigrated with them on their search for better lives in the northern cities. This blues emigration caught the country’s ear and made possible all the quintessential American music like ragtime, jazz, country, rock and roll, among other more current forms.

The folk boom of the 1950s and 1960s brought old time players and the black folk music tradition back to the attention of young players. Urban players adopted an almost parallel course to rural instrument style. This time, recordings and performances such as the Newport Folk Festival featured diverse banjo styles including bluegrass, clawhammer, and the styles of Pete Seeger and George Grove of the Kingston Trio. Through the 70’s and 80’s, the banjo can be heard on countless country albums. And from bluegrass’s beginnings in the 40’s, it has never let up, being driven by the ringing 5 string banjo. And although the banjo is not the guitar of the day, crossing all genres as it did in the past, it still retains it’s American essence with the ties it has to the past and the new music being created on it today.