Jack Baker - Posted - 12/23/2017:  07:47:52

Round Peak banjo is a term often misunderstood. Please go to this link to get an idea of what this style is really about and where it began: youtube.com/watch?v=hzmbUg_z4Tg Jack

Edited by - Lynne on 12/23/2017 15:54:16

mmuussiiccaall - Posted - 12/23/2017:  08:47:00

collections.library.appstate.e...-carolina

Jack Baker - Posted - 12/23/2017:  09:57:48

Ray Alden used to teach for me many years ago. He was an excellent Round Peak player....lots of drop thumb and left hand pull offs...Jack

Edited by - Jack Baker on 12/23/2017 09:59:06

janolov - Posted - 12/23/2017:  12:05:04

I think Round Peak is more than just drop thumb and alternate string pull offs, but drop thumb and pull offs are essential elements. This is how I experience Round Peak Style:

1. From the "beginning" Round Peak was usually played on fretless banjo, and the fretless slides are also an essential element.


2. The Round Peak style (for banjo) was developed mainly to accompany the  fiddle, and the banjo supports the fiddle by playing essential core melody notes and maintaining a steady rhythm. However there are also examples of songs accompanied in the Round Peak style, I love, for example, Tommy Jarrell's version of Little Maggie.


3. In Round Peak the main "roll" or main "pattern is more "di-ty-di-ty" or "bum-pa-di-ty" than the common clawhammer "bum-di-ty". This means that the measure usually is filled up with 1/8th notes (where alternate string pull offs, pull offs, hammer ons and drop thumb are important). It is also common to play "di-ty-di-ty" with "double thumbing" (= thumb plays a fifth string after each downstroke on the "ty") together with pull offs, slides and hammer ons.


4. When playing a melody the playing is focused on the "core notes" (often two or three essential notes per measure) and the space between the core notes are filled up with the techniques already mentioned. This can be compared with melodic banjo where the core notes are connected by different melodic ornaments. In Round Peak the ornaments and more rhythmic (maintaining the 1/8 notes rhythm) or harmonic.


5. Chords are seldom brushed and it is usually downstrokes on only one string. Instead of brushing a chord often only the root tone is played: for example, instead of playing a G chord only the G string is played and similar for other chords.


6. It is a rumor that one of the Round Peak giants, probably Tommy Jarrell, in an interview was asked what the most common banjo style was in the Round Peak area, and he answered "Probably Bluegrass".

Jack Baker - Posted - 12/23/2017:  12:09:25

Thanks Jan,

Good reporting on Round Peak banjo playing. I hope the link I posted helps a little..Jack   p.s. Not too many people own fretless banjos 

Edited by - Jack Baker on 12/23/2017 12:13:41

janolov - Posted - 12/23/2017:  12:17:21

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jack Baker

Thanks Jan,

Good reporting on Round Peak banjo. I hope the link I posted helps a little..Jack   p.s. Not too many people own fretless banjos 

---

The link you posted is frequently referred  in in the Clawhammer/Old-Time section. Tom Collins also have made a whole series of videos called Banjo Blitz  which to a large part is focused on the Round Peak techniques.

Jack Baker - Posted - 12/23/2017:  12:43:16

Thanks Jan,

I hope old time players will have the patience to hang in there with Tom as he is quite loquacious about this style and people will want lots of playing also. I'm hoping for the best from Tom as the link I posted from Tom was excellent and certainly went into the elements of Round Peak. I took many lessons with John Burke and Ray Alden way back and we covered Round Peak and talked about Dwight Diller a lot..Jack

Edited by - Jack Baker on 12/23/2017 12:56:44

Brooklynbanjoboy - Posted - 12/24/2017:  04:14:13

Hi Jack.

Interesting, your mentioning Dwight in this context.

Roundpeak came up as a subject numerous times when I was doing the digging work for what became Dwight Diller: West Virginia Mountain Musician (April 2016).

Wade Ward was of special interest to Dwight, who spent some time with Ward in 1970 and maybe 1971, at festivals and other gatherings. Dwight appreciated Ward’s banjo playing, and believed that Ward’s music reflected the traditions of the Galax, Virginia area.

“Wade played Wade,” Dwight observed, concluding that shoehorning Ward into the “Roundpeak style” did not capture his special flavor.

In 1971 Dwight wrote Ward a letter asking him to agree to a visit, and Ward wrote back inviting Dwight to his home, but Ward passed away before Dwight had a chance to visit him.( 12 December 2014 (704 PM) email from Dwight Diller to Lew Stern.)

Ira Mullins, Harvey Sampson, Melvin Wine – these are musicians Dwight mentioned as important to his development in his interview with Ken Perlman in 1996. Two decades after that 1996 Sing Out! Magazine interview, Dwight reflected that he knew Frank George, and considered him to be an independent minded musician who kept his music pure, stuck to local traditions, and was not “swayed” by contemporary tastes external to that tradition. (13 December 2014 (659 AM) email from Dwight Diller to Lew Stern.)





There’s a very thoughtful doctoral dissertation by James Ruchala on Roundpeak that is worth reading:

Ruchala, James Randolph, Making Round Peak Music: History, Revitalization and Community, a dissertation submitted to the Department of Music, for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Brown University, May 2011.


MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE.

Lew

FretlessFury - Posted - 12/24/2017:  07:25:39

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jack Baker

Round Peak banjo is a term often misunderstood. Please go to this link to get an idea of what this style is really about and where it began: youtube.com/watch?v=hzmbUg_z4Tg Jack

---

Jack, 

Thank you so much for mentioning my video. I'm glad you enjoyed it. The first Elements of Round Peak videos are really only scratching the surface of the totality of Round Peak banjo playing. I'm looking forward to fleshing out the series once Banjo Blitz (my current instructional series) is completed.

Janalov's post on this same thread is really excellent. There is certainly more to Round Peak banjo than alternate string pull-offs and Galax licks, and I think he does well to describe the style. 

If I were to condense my thoughts into a single sentence describing Round Peak in technical terms (as opposed to geographic and cultural) I'd say that it's a linear style of clawhammer that favors rolling eighth-note patterns that hew to the basic traditional melody of a tune, while providing melodic and rhythmic counterpoint to the fiddle part. 

I think what's often forgotten is how the Round Peak masters were able to generate variations as they played. When listening to Fred Cockerham I'm amazed at how downright experimental he was. He sounds both traditional and incredibly modern. In a world of tablature and YouTube videos that teach fixed versions of tunes, I think we often forget that the ability to create variations lies at the heart of old time music. Listening to and learning from the Round Peak masters is a cure to this malaise. You can't help but be swept along in the current of their improvisation. 

Thanks again for your comments on the Elements of Round Peak series! 

Cheers!

Tom Collins 

Jack Baker - Posted - 12/24/2017:  11:10:50

Thank you for your post Tom and good luck with your series on Round Peak...Jack

Edited by - Jack Baker on 12/24/2017 11:11:19

Jack Baker - Posted - 12/24/2017:  12:33:42

Tom,

I did forget to mention what a wonderful insight you are giving to this wonderful energetic banjo music that so many enjoy and don't really know why. I for one, will stay glued to your series on the Round Peak style of banjo and its many interpretations...Thanks again Tom and the very best for your Holidays...Jack

Edited by - Jack Baker on 12/24/2017 12:34:15

AndrewD - Posted - 12/25/2017:  03:55:26

Surprised nobody has mentioned Brad Leftwich's excellent books on this.

jack_beuthin - Posted - 12/25/2017:  08:33:21

Does anyone know when "Round Peak" became embedded in the Old Time vernacular? I was at several festivals in '74 & '75 in North Carolina and Virginia and don't recall hearing the term (of course, my memory is less that perfect of those way back years). I did hear a lot of talk of how Tommy, Kyle, or Fred played a tune. Also, who might have introduced the term?

Excellent summaries by Jan and Tom! They underscore something I have long felt, which is that Round Peak banjo playing is more of a genre, with several personal styles within in it (akin to a language with dialects). No one player defines Round Peak, but a group of players do set the broad parameters that create the sound that we identify as Round Peak.

And thank you Tom for emphasizing the living tradition aspect of Round Peak.

janolov - Posted - 12/25/2017:  23:45:32

quote:

---

Originally posted by jack_beuthin

Does anyone know when "Round Peak" became embedded in the Old Time vernacular? I was at several festivals in '74 & '75 in North Carolina and Virginia and don't recall hearing the term (of course, my memory is less that perfect of those way back years). I did hear a lot of talk of how Tommy, Kyle, or Fred played a tune. Also, who might have introduced the term?



 

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In David Brody's Banjopicker's Fakebook from 1985 there some tabs by Bob Carlin that were labeled as "Galax Style" (for example Sally Ann) which seems to be what we call Round Peak Style today.

jack_beuthin - Posted - 12/26/2017:  10:04:04

quote:

---

There’s a very thoughtful doctoral dissertation by James Ruchala on Roundpeak that is worth reading:



Ruchala, James Randolph, Making Round Peak Music: History, Revitalization and Community, a dissertation submitted to the Department of Music, for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Brown University, May 2011.





MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE.



Lew

The Ruchala dissertation can be accessed and downloaded at the link below.  Thanks Lew for bringing this into the discussion. Looks like a very worthy read.

repository.library.brown.edu/s...dr:11260/

jack_beuthin - Posted - 12/26/2017:  11:22:31

quote:

---

Originally posted by jack_beuthin

Does anyone know when "Round Peak" became embedded in the Old Time vernacular? I was at several festivals in '74 & '75 in North Carolina and Virginia and don't recall hearing the term (of course, my memory is less that perfect of those way back years). I did hear a lot of talk of how Tommy, Kyle, or Fred played a tune. Also, who might have introduced the term?

Well, to answer my own question, we may be able to attribute the "Round Peak" label to Ray Alden.  J.R. Ruchala states in his 2011 dissertation (p.168), "More than anyone else, he [Ray Alden] was responsible for making the name "Round Peak" stick to the style of old-time music played in Surry County."  In the Works Cited section of Ruchala's dissertation, the earliest work I can find using the name "Round Peak" is Ray Alden's 1972 article in Sing Out! magazine entitled "Music from Round Peak." The article was republished in 1975/1976 in Old Time Music (also in the Works Cited section).  This might explain why I don't recall hearing the term "Round Peak" at festivals in '74-'75--it possible hadn't quite spread far and wide yet.

Done scratched that itch.  

Edited by - jack_beuthin on 12/26/2017 11:23:04

Bill Rogers - Posted - 12/26/2017:  13:13:36

I think the style began to catch on from the County Records Clawhammer Banjo three-record set, followed by recodigs of Cockerham, Jarrell, et al.

hweinberg - Posted - 12/27/2017:  10:39:05

For me the Camp Creek Boys 1967 recording with Kyle Creed opened my ears to the band sound from what we later called Round Peak. It was powerful, probably inspired a bit by the volume and drive of what was by then the more popular Bluegrass music. It certainly influenced us in the band I was playing with in college. On the subject of style, the players we now collectively think of as Round Peak stylists all used the techniques that Tom outlined in pursuit of the "linear" rhythmic accompaniment to a fiddler. But they all had wonderfully distinctive individual styles. Eg, You'd never mistake Kyle for Fred or Fred for Tommy. The books by Brad Leftwich and Bob Carlin/Dan Levenson do a nice job highlighting some of the different ways of playing Round Peak style.

RG - Posted - 12/27/2017:  11:37:45

If you're Frank or Oscar Jenkins, Round Peak Style would be 2 finger thumb lead with a finger drag thrown in every now and then...

mbuk06 - Posted - 12/27/2017:  23:55:26

Howard and RG kind've sum it up in that there's no way any discerning ear could mistake for example Kyle Creed for Fred Cockerham's or Oscar Jenkin's playing. And those guys were near contemporaries.



Isn't it more informative to understand place, the way proximity influences and results in individual playing within that context rather than refer to anything as a 'style'? As soon as we label we are halfway to homogenising what has distinctness, individuality and beauty. And the beauty is found in how place can create connected variation.

Edited by - mbuk06 on 12/28/2017 00:00:35

jack_beuthin - Posted - 12/28/2017:  18:07:27

quote:

---

Originally posted by mbuk06

Isn't it more informative to understand place, the way proximity influences and results in individual playing within that context rather than refer to anything as a 'style'? 

Agree with this Mike, and would add that place in this case would also imply a certain repertoire of tunes.  I seem to remember Old Woodchuck once saying that he associated "Round Peak" more with a tune repertoire, less with a playing style.

I incorporate almost all of the Round Peak licks into my playing, but my repertoire is fairly eclectic.  I have had people tell me that my style is melodic (although I hear all the Round Peak licks), but no one has ever said that I have a Round Peak sound.  Point is that place and repertoire are essential components of the "Music from Round Peak" (Ray Alden's phrase). 

jack_beuthin - Posted - 12/29/2017:  08:36:03

If anyone is interested, I started a new thread related to this discussion in which I have tabbed out different versions of Breaking Up Christmas in order to illustrate Round Peak clawhammer.

Go here: banjohangout.org/topic/338181

Brooklynbanjoboy - Posted - 12/29/2017:  08:49:05

Might also be worth looking at this:

clawhammerbanjo.net/the-round-peak-recipe/

clawhammerbanjo.net/the-round-peak-recipe/

Brooklynbanjoboy - Posted - 12/29/2017:  09:06:06

This morning I went through a couple of years of notes on a range of issues, notes developed while writing a book on Dwight Diller, and interviews/notes compiled during a year of work on a book about Tommy Thompson.

A good deal of those jottings spoke to Roundpeak and a good percentage of those discussions revolved around the heroic efforts of my interview subjects to try and clarify my confused understanding of Roundpeak as a style.

* * *

Grayson County, VA - especially a small area called Whitetop that is about an hour and a half from Surry County (where Round Peak is located) - was home to alot of the younger revivalists who modeled their playing after Kyle Creed and Tommy Jarrell.

Some of the locals carried on their sound, and some from surrounding areas carried on the music of the people in their own communities, basically underscoring the extent to which local and regional music ends up being a goulash of sound rather than any one coherent tradition.

One interview subject pointed to “tons of homegrown musicians” in the surrounding areas, all who had their own unique personal styles. He emphasized that the fiddling and banjo playing from Grayson County and the Galax areas is very much different than the fiddling Tommy Jarrell did or the banjo playing that Kyle Creed did.

Most of the people who grew up within an hour of that epicenter of old time music generally don’t use the term Round Peak. They seem to play some of the same tunes, but not in what is generally accepted as that style.

Many musicians who grew up in that tradition said that there were many different styles even within the "Round Peak" area. They made the case that the “revivalists” latched onto to Tommy Jarrell, Kyle Creed, and Fred Cockerham. That is, there were people born and raised in that area that did indeed carry on those styles but for any number of reasons never entered the orbit of revivalists, did not come out to play the way Jarrell did – maybe lacked that gregariousness that welcomed the steady march of visitors.

Several people made the case that using the "Round Peak" label for alot of the southwest VA and northwest NC music distorts things or glosses over the extent to which the music of these areas is more of an ensemble music than what the Hammons played and what was typical of a lot of the other solo based old-time from West Virginia, for example.

One interview subject stressed that the old time music from his region is more geared towards dancing, which was and is a very popular thing still today, and that bands and competition were also a distinguishing feature because there were and are many fiddler's conventions that essentially encouraged band formation, and made for good contests.

Bill Hicks, a North Carolina fiddler who, with Tommy Thompson and Jim Watson and Mike Craver, constituted the Red Clay Ramblers, visited Jarrell, played with him, learned from him, and thought a good deal about Roundpeak. He made this clear to me:

“While there is a very accepted view [. . .] regarding Round Peak style, I think close listening to [. . .] that style of playing will yield clear and obvious differences. Tommy Jarrell, who in a sense is the master player of that area, would improvise subtly in his tunes, and over the years played the tunes differently. His favorite fiddler was Kenny Baker. I do agree that the driving style of the Round Peak banjo/guitar and often bass instruments dominated the sound, particularly when experienced in contests or performances. The most powerful practitioner of the Round Peak sound was surely Benton Flippen and his band. In Benton's playing the tunes were sort of smoothed out somewhat. They also played very fast.” (24 January 2015 (933 AM) email from Bill Hicks to Lew Stern.)

Hicks seemed to agree that the Round Peak "sound" is a band sound, and that people who think about these things tend to look at West Virginia players as more individual. Hicks wondered whether that might reflect something about the moment when various people wanting to learn the music came in contact with the various musicians. It was important to Hicks to stress that Round Peak is a very small area relative to West Virginia. So, NC rural music from the Piedmont and Appalachians would probably be as varied as West Virginia music.

Jimmy Costa grew up in a family where not much old time music was played, but in a community that was full of the old sounds. His recollection is that he first became attentive to old time music when he was ten or eleven years old, in a neighborhood at the foot of Bluestone Dam, where the Greenbriar and New Rivers converge. He recalls the fiddling of Marvin Lacy, and remembers first learning clawhammer from Wilson Ballard who was born in 1876. The harmonica was the first instrument he learned to play. He took up the banjo around age 15.

Costa’s take on the notion that Round Peak music represented one sound, one specific technique: “If you think there’s a specific Round Peak style, you’re mistaken.” While he acknowledged that technically, stylistically, it is possible to distill a music into its constituent parts, and characterize it by these elements, the truth of the matter is “because [Round Peak] is such an interpretive type of music, everybody had put their own mark on it.”

* * *

Now, these are notes, random records of pieces of conversations – not a coherent argument regarding what I think Roundpeak represents.

The notes are not necessarily reflective of what the interview subjects might offer as their views on Roundpeak – we were, after all, discussing other regional traditional music styles; Roundpeak came up, tangentially, as a way of contrasting West Virginia old time mountain music with other regional evolutions.

That is, these discussions fed into other lines of inquiry, and the Roundpeak thing was often subsidiary to those other discussions, digressions from my main quarry.

On the basis of all I absorbed about Roundpeak, I’d still say I still have a lot to learn, and I haven’t reached any conclusions – except that this remains a pretty interesting, and also confusing, piece of old time music history, especially when one weaves in the variable represented by “revivalism” and all that represented for the area.

Play hard,

Lew

jack_beuthin - Posted - 12/29/2017:  09:31:29

Lew, this all makes me think of a passage from the book, Fire in the Mind, by George Johnson.

"Ultimately, all of us are faced with the same dilemma: the pictures we draw, the systems we build, can never fully embrace the richness and the unruliness of creation. Yet it is endemic to our species that we keep trying, huddled on our tiny planet, shining our flashlights into the darkness."

allieb - Posted - 12/29/2017:  09:33:03

All this and more will be discussed (and played!) at the Banjo-Fiddle Frolic in Bryson City, NC. Instructors David Bass, John Herrmann, Beverly Smith, Meredith McIntosh, John Engle, and Frank Lee. March 30-April 1 2018. frankleeandallieburbrink.com/b...le-frolic

Brooklynbanjoboy - Posted - 12/29/2017:  09:43:47

Jack, First thing I did after reading your note was head to Amazon.Com to look up Fire in the Mind. Second thing I did was press the "Add To Cart" button. Thanks.