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banjopogo - Posted - 04/17/2015: 00:28:01
I wish I could remember where it was, but SOMETIME in the last couple of months, I saw photographs of a musician with a handlebar mustache and the old fashioned style of dress, and also the quality of photography led me to believe it was from around 1890 to 1900. The man had had his photograph taken with banjos, I remember at least three in one photograph, all of them "mountain style".
"depression era poverty".... before about 1880, the majority of Americans, something like 80% were subsistence farmers. Cycles of boom and bust were normal in US History, and either due to bad weather and crop failures, or bumper crops resulting in the prices for them dropping to close to worthlessness as far as cash value, subsistence farmers endured a LOT of lean times, and while they usually had enough to eat, were often cash poor, and could ill afford to spend what little cash they hand on something that was mostly for entertainment. Nails, tools, building materials and ammunition for hunting guns (to put food on the table after bad harvests) were all higher priority than instruments. So a banjo design that could use a bit of scrap stovepipe and recycled screws would have had appeal LONG before the Great Depression.
Words from an old Grange song:
"The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man,
Lives on credit till the fall.
And his pants are wearing thin,
His condition it's a sin,
We forget that it's the farmer feeds us all.
One key problem with mountain banjos is that the design is so simple, and the hardware so minimal, that there really isn't much to date them with.... unless you start using dendrochronology like they do for dating fine violins. (Dendrochronology matchs the tree ring patterns to tree rings in wood of a known age).
I've seen people reject banjos as being old because of the shiny screws, but if the original screws had gone rusty, they could easily be replaced.
No doubt Pete Seeger and the Foxfire books promoted a renaissance of mountain banjo construction, but to ascribe the origin of the design to them seems awfully extreme.
Another problem is this: the study of history thrives on documents. But folk instruments are were constructed by people who before a certain point were either illiterate, functionally illiterate, or were so busy just surviving that they were unlikely to keep diaries or write about their music if they actually were able to do so.
So there is an absence of documentation. The problem is that an absence of documentation does not prove that something DID NOT exist before a certain time, it only means its existence cannot be CONFIRMED before that time.
Minstrel banjo on the other hand was something that appealed to the middle classes who had the money to spend on banjo tutors and such, and being part of a commercial enterprise, there are various artifacts from those enterprises.
Also.... look at parallel things with other folk instruments.
Fiddles are pretty easy to make with minimal tools, and cigar box fiddles were common. Mountain dulcimers can be hand made too.
If someone could made a homemade fiddle or a dulcimer, if they had some scrap stovepipe and some screws, they could made a mountain banjo.
In fact, I see the mountain banjo as being the equivalent of say a cigar box fiddle. Both are basically substitutes for commercially avaiable instruments when the money to buy such instruments is not available.
A likely time for that would have been shortly after the Civil War. Memories of banjo music in the camps would have supplied the desire and it took time for local economies to recover from the destruction of the war, and the absence of able-bodied males. If the basic idea was introduced then, it would have spread like wildfire, at least in certain regions. The dulcimer isn't that widespread of an instrument in the mountains, and it's quite possible that the mountain banjo design was limited to certain regions.
Here is a banjo made by Homer Ledford of Kentucky in the 1940's.
wcudigitalcollection.contentdm...605/rec/6
Foxfire didn't start until 1966.
According to one maker and seller of mountain banjos, he uses:
"Stanley Hicks' family pattern from Watauga County, North Carolina, as featured in Foxfire 3"
I found this excerpt from a Foxfire book:
books.google.com/books?id=IERy...p;f=false
It focuses mostly on Ernest Franklin, but mentions Frank Profitt. Both are mentioned as saying they learned to make banjos from their fathers, which is going to put the origins of the design back before World War One at the very least.
Here is a photo in Jim Daniels photo section of a banjo in the Colonial Williamsburg museum of a mountain banjo dated around 1900:
Here is a photo of another banjo that shows another angle on the mountain style banjo which is to the left:
What's obvious to me is that while the basic idea is the same as the instruments in the Foxfire books, it shows quite a few details that are different.
In my searches about mountain banjos the last few minutes, one place keeps coming up:
Watauga County, North Carolina.
It's not unusual for folk instruments to actually come from a smaller region than people think. Mountain dulcimers were not that widespread originally, from what I've read. The nyckelharpa (keyed fiddle) is only common in a certain area of Sweden. Some places develop distinctive local craft traditions.
It seems Watauga County had something special going on with regard to mountain banjos.
Here is a photo labeled Buna Hicks.... with a fellow playing a mountain banjo:
Adding "Watauga County" to the search produced some results, including this from the Watauga Arts Council.
Another banjo by a maker who learned from his father:
watauga-arts.org/2006_instrume...fford.jpg
How many references to mountain banjo makers who learned from their fathers is necessary before we believe that we are in fact looking at a traditional folk art here, and not a product of Pete Seeger's imagination, photos like these notwithstanding:
Edited by - banjopogo on 04/17/2015 00:50:45
csacwp - Posted - 04/17/2015: 09:52:02
quote:
Originally posted by banjopogoI wish I could remember where it was, but SOMETIME in the last couple of months, I saw photographs of a musician with a handlebar mustache and the old fashioned style of dress, and also the quality of photography led me to believe it was from around 1890 to 1900. The man had had his photograph taken with banjos, I remember at least three in one photograph, all of them "mountain style".
"depression era poverty".... before about 1880, the majority of Americans, something like 80% were subsistence farmers. Cycles of boom and bust were normal in US History, and either due to bad weather and crop failures, or bumper crops resulting in the prices for them dropping to close to worthlessness as far as cash value, subsistence farmers endured a LOT of lean times, and while they usually had enough to eat, were often cash poor, and could ill afford to spend what little cash they hand on something that was mostly for entertainment. Nails, tools, building materials and ammunition for hunting guns (to put food on the table after bad harvests) were all higher priority than instruments. So a banjo design that could use a bit of scrap stovepipe and recycled screws would have had appeal LONG before the Great Depression.
Words from an old Grange song:
"The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man,
Lives on credit till the fall.
And his pants are wearing thin,
His condition it's a sin,
We forget that it's the farmer feeds us all.
One key problem with mountain banjos is that the design is so simple, and the hardware so minimal, that there really isn't much to date them with.... unless you start using dendrochronology like they do for dating fine violins. (Dendrochronology matchs the tree ring patterns to tree rings in wood of a known age).
I've seen people reject banjos as being old because of the shiny screws, but if the original screws had gone rusty, they could easily be replaced.
No doubt Pete Seeger and the Foxfire books promoted a renaissance of mountain banjo construction, but to ascribe the origin of the design to them seems awfully extreme.
Another problem is this: the study of history thrives on documents. But folk instruments are were constructed by people who before a certain point were either illiterate, functionally illiterate, or were so busy just surviving that they were unlikely to keep diaries or write about their music if they actually were able to do so.
So there is an absence of documentation. The problem is that an absence of documentation does not prove that something DID NOT exist before a certain time, it only means its existence cannot be CONFIRMED before that time.
Minstrel banjo on the other hand was something that appealed to the middle classes who had the money to spend on banjo tutors and such, and being part of a commercial enterprise, there are various artifacts from those enterprises.
Also.... look at parallel things with other folk instruments.
Fiddles are pretty easy to make with minimal tools, and cigar box fiddles were common. Mountain dulcimers can be hand made too.
If someone could made a homemade fiddle or a dulcimer, if they had some scrap stovepipe and some screws, they could made a mountain banjo.
In fact, I see the mountain banjo as being the equivalent of say a cigar box fiddle. Both are basically substitutes for commercially avaiable instruments when the money to buy such instruments is not available.
A likely time for that would have been shortly after the Civil War. Memories of banjo music in the camps would have supplied the desire and it took time for local economies to recover from the destruction of the war, and the absence of able-bodied males. If the basic idea was introduced then, it would have spread like wildfire, at least in certain regions. The dulcimer isn't that widespread of an instrument in the mountains, and it's quite possible that the mountain banjo design was limited to certain regions.
Here is a banjo made by Homer Ledford of Kentucky in the 1940's.
wcudigitalcollection.contentdm...605/rec/6
Foxfire didn't start until 1966.
According to one maker and seller of mountain banjos, he uses:
"Stanley Hicks' family pattern from Watauga County, North Carolina, as featured in Foxfire 3"
I found this excerpt from a Foxfire book:
books.google.com/books?id=IERy...p;f=false
It focuses mostly on Ernest Franklin, but mentions Frank Profitt. Both are mentioned as saying they learned to make banjos from their fathers, which is going to put the origins of the design back before World War One at the very least.
Here is a photo in Jim Daniels photo section of a banjo in the Colonial Williamsburg museum of a mountain banjo dated around 1900:
Here is a photo of another banjo that shows another angle on the mountain style banjo which is to the left:
What's obvious to me is that while the basic idea is the same as the instruments in the Foxfire books, it shows quite a few details that are different.
In my searches about mountain banjos the last few minutes, one place keeps coming up:
Watauga County, North Carolina.
It's not unusual for folk instruments to actually come from a smaller region than people think. Mountain dulcimers were not that widespread originally, from what I've read. The nyckelharpa (keyed fiddle) is only common in a certain area of Sweden. Some places develop distinctive local craft traditions.
It seems Watauga County had something special going on with regard to mountain banjos.
Here is a photo labeled Buna Hicks.... with a fellow playing a mountain banjo:
Adding "Watauga County" to the search produced some results, including this from the Watauga Arts Council.
Another banjo by a maker who learned from his father:
watauga-arts.org/2006_instrume...fford.jpg
How many references to mountain banjo makers who learned from their fathers is necessary before we believe that we are in fact looking at a traditional folk art here, and not a product of Pete Seeger's imagination, photos like these notwithstanding:
This is all hearsay and speculation, and frankly it sounds like you really want the mountain banjo to be as old as you suggest so you are fabricating a folksy history to support that. I often hear from folk players that the surviving documentation and historical evidence from the 19th century doesn't pertain to their instrument and style because poor people don't leave evidence behind. In fact, there is evidence that these people left behind- it just doesn't support that your instrument and playing style were prevalent at the time, and therefore you ignore it.
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