Preface: This is not to mock the "Occupy" movement which I support. I'm simply borrowing the term as a rhetorical flourish.
As member of the 79% percent that have no interest in the Round Peak sound, styling, or most of it's well known practitioners, I feel compelled to speak out. Albeit in print, sans the human mic.
I imagine that I'm typical of many of my banjo generation that one of the first Lps that I purchased back in the '70's was the original Clawhammer banjo album on the County label. Two impressions that I still carry with me are how much I loved the sound of Wade Ward and equally disliked the sound of Kyle Creed. The subsequent Lp releases introduced other banjo elders that I developed an affinity for: Matokie Slaughter, Gaither Carlton, Oscar Wright and Syd Meyers.
My first and only banjo teacher was a professional in a Bluegrass band regarded as the best in the region at the time, The Road Apples(great name, Jon). Even though a Bluegrass player primarily, my teacher was a fine downpicker and admired Old Time players like Tom Paley, Mike Seeger and Art Rosenbaum and encouraged me to investigate their playing styles. I emphasize STYLES.
About this time the Fuzzy Mtn String band records were appearing led by banjo players Blanton Owen and Eric Olson. As students at UNC, Owen and Olson were very much influenced by elders like Kyle Creed and Fred Cockerham with whom they had first hand contact with and whose styles they imitated with precision. The Fuzzies seemed to have a huge impact on what I would call the Generic String Band Revival Sound and the prevalence of the North Carolina "clawhammer" sound on banjo. The impact seemed really great upon Northern, Urban revivalists looking for an "anti-Bluegrass identity''. I loved the Fuzzy's fiddle tune repertoire, but was luke warm at best to the banjo playing.
Next came the purchase of Art Rosenbaum's Old Time Mountain banjo book. Two revelations: I coundn't read TAB very well, and there were profiles of all these great banjo elders who, after investigating their vintage recordings, I found they sounded nothing like like Creed, Owen and Olsen. I loved their sounds and styles.
And yet, it seemed that nearly everywhere I went, the Round Peak style was becoming the dominant form, indeed the definition of "Old Time" banjo. Newer players were seemingly being caught up in this trend, and Surrey County was becoming the center of the universe. I would ask about Boggs, Hobart, Roscoe, Uncle Dave, Wade Ward, Oscar Jenkins, Franklin George and others who's sound had captivated me. Responses ranged from dismissal to grudging acknowledgement of their existence, but few took up their styles.
Then came the Fashion Show, and Madison Avenue could not have done a better job. The 12-inch potted, frailing scooped, Mylar headed anti-bluegrass banjo became the Banjo Du Jour for the fashionable Round Peaker. Still there were glimmers of hope. The most interesting banjo in my collection(now stolen) was an unlabeled 11 inch spun rim banjo with a hubcap resonator and one of those real ugly early plastic 5 Star heads. It's sound was completely at the other end of the sound spectrum of say, an Enoch Tradesman. My partner, Linda Jo (you may know her on this board as Bassora) took it with her one year to Mtn View, Ark. where she was taking a traditional singing class with Alice Gerard. She wanted to show the banjo to Mike Seeger who was teaching Old Time banjo. To her delight, Mike asked if he could use it to teach his classes. "The students need to know that great old time music was frequently made on these types of banjos", he stated.
I can pretty much say with certainty that Oscar Jenkins was the first finger style Old Time player I heard followed closely by Roscoe Holcomb and Tom Paley. The fact that Oscar played what was by then, a forbidden resonator banjo and Roscoe and Paley used picks, was also at odds what I was seeing in the Urban Revival scene. It reeked, or at least hinted at...gasp...bluegrass. My God, next people will be taking "breaks". Even though there were "breaks" on some of those old 78s, it was verbotten in the Brave New Round Peak World.
And my favorite anecdotal story concerns an old old music pal with a masters in Folk Music history. This person is a self-professed purists in the area of appreciation of "authentic" Old Time music; banjo fiddle and vocal. And make no mistake this person has a great voice and is a highly skilled fiddler and picker. And yet for the life of me plays a banjo with a modern plastic head and nylon strings. I've asked this stickler for tradition to produce for me a single Field or Studio recording of a banjo that has such a dreadful sound to no avail. I do not mind that said banjo player likes that sound, which is a personal preference that I respect. I merely disagree that it is very Old Timey in interpretation.
I'm not opposed to Round Peak banjo playing. I have no such right. Indeed I like the playing, a lot in fact, of musicians like Kevin Fore and Riley Baugus. And who doesn't love Fred Cockerham? And I should add that I deeply admire Kyle Creed, the man, (and his fiddling!!).
What vexes me is the that for many, the Round Peak sound has come to define the Old Time sound in part due to the fact that many use it's anti-Bluegrass sound to prop up an unnecessary Old Time identity/inferiority complex. Many of the proliferating "Clawhammer Banjo Camps" are also to blame as they crank out Round Peak Clawclones.This runs counter to another interesting Mike Seeger quote stating that the best of the vintage Old Time Music seemed to actually "predict" Bluegrass(my emphasis).
Finally, a thank you to all of the Old Time musicians on this board and elsewhere that have reinforced my belief over the years that it was Ok to swim upstream against the current of the Urban Old Time Revival, even as we were told, as I was NUMEROUS times, that I play "wrong".
On to Low Gap! Into the streets of Toast. We are the 79%.
13 comments on “Occupy Round Peak”
Dock Jekel Says:
Sunday, November 20, 2011 @6:07:20 PM
Thanks for the entertaining read. The best part about the spirit of "Old Time Music", is that its never pretended to be anything other than getting together, and making your own music, and having a good time. Music on your porch, music on my porch- its all good, regardless of how it sounds!
Tom Meisenheimer Says:
Monday, November 21, 2011 @8:44:02 AM
Gosh I feel deprived! I never even heard of Round Peak or any other Peak. Being , therefore a square peak in a round hole.
I always played what I thought was what I heard. It wasn't 'til about 15 years ago that I realized there was something called "drop thumbing". I managed to get that DT sound with my left hand, at least when I could get any sound other than straight melody. To my way of looking at it "Melody Rules" and what else you do is making that rendition "yours". That is the trouble with never haveing had a lesson beyond Bill Ross saying "bump titty" in passing one day. I got it!
All that I know is what I have heard; almost always from recordings, field or performed. I have that LP with Creed and Cockerham and etc. plus Pete Steele and Hobart Smith and a few others but I stopped listening to recorded banjo as a source for my own repetoire many, many, years ago. Its only recently, since finding BHO that I have gone back to hearing and learning. I would occasionally buy a CD, but usually for it's entertainment quality not as a learning tool. Of course I DID learn some tunes too. I can't avoid hearing music, it just seeps into my head through my ear holes. Gets stuck there too. Unfortunately not just OT music. If I've heard it I know it. Causes problems sometimes.
But while I never heard of Round Peak (until I came in contact with you, out here on the edge of the Ozark Plateau) I sure have been exposed to the nonsense that there is only ONE way to play a banjo! That notion is patently nutso. Please look back at the banjo's history. Starting with the original "African" way of playing what ever configuration of vibrating string amplified (or not) by what ever "sound box-gourd-bucket-etc. it-they were stretched over. There were as many ways of playing "it" as there were cultures, tribes, bands, individuals doing the playing. That hadn't changed for three hundred or more years! I live in the Ozarks, there are differences here from what is considered Appalachian. There are differences here from Blue Eye, Poplar Bluff, Sykeston, Old Mines, Moberly, and on. Most have been "lost" due to the homoginization (sp?) caused by recorded and broadcast music but there are differences none-the-less. "I'm Old but I'm Awfully Tough" the album produced by a local New Haven, Missouri group of folkies illustrates these regional differences.
There is a tendency for people, especially those who enjoy the idea that their knowledge of something makes them special, to establish territories, to place themselves at the center of events and movements, arbiters of style, form, function.
The NFL syndrome (New F-----g Locals).
The NFLs come in and their first activity is to establish themselves as authorities and to pull up the ladder so others can't ride in the boat. They make "it" their own so they can order their world according to their definition of what works. That, as I understand it, is the 'Round Peak Sydrome' or RPS.
So I have named it, so it will be!
To paraphrase Ken Haferman "Its your banjo, kid, play it any way you want"!
Tom Meisenheimer
Don Huber Says:
Monday, November 21, 2011 @1:51:48 PM
Thanks, Dock. I wish that your porch was a bit closer in proximity to Tom's and mine.
Viper Says:
Monday, November 28, 2011 @10:39:48 AM
What vexes me is that too often "Round Peak style" these days just means "Kyle Creed style." Great post.
Don Huber Says:
Monday, November 28, 2011 @7:45:27 PM
I totally agree, Brad. My favorite banjo player from the Round Peak area is the late Enoch Rutherford. His sound is not one bit the "Kyle Creed style" sound. BTW, I love the tone that you get out of that Recording King banjo. Both styles of playing.
Paul R Says:
Sunday, January 1, 2012 @9:18:01 PM
Good points. I'm sure many people were influenced by whatever they could get their hands on. Up in these parts, going back thirty-something years ago, you picked up what you could find - which was precious little. So, Fuzzy Mountain and Highwoods were about it. I never heard of Round Peak (although there were some better, performing musicians who doubtless knew - if you weren't in the circle of the elect, you didn't learn these things).
It's refreshing to see so many BHO members reinforce the notion that there is no one, narrow definition or example of Old Time music and playing style. It's great to be able to find resources for other ways of picking (such as two-finger thumb lead). It's good to see that, in OT, there really are so many open-minded musicians. And it's good to see that there have been all along.
Don Huber Says:
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 @8:00:56 PM
Thanks for your input, Paul.
I'm somewhat amazed by players who do not explore the different banjo playing styles and the sounds they produce. It seems like such a natural progression:
First you downpick, then you try a little up picking. Before you know it, you're playing a two-finger index lead style. Then whoops, was that a thumb led lick? Then that 3rd finger slips in unnoticed. Then you try picks...maybe. And your downpicking becomes more sophisticated as you use drop thumb moves to replicate fingerstyle licks and rolls.
Well, that was my entire banjo playing history in one paragraph, and it seems as though your experience is similar.
Thanks for posting!
Don
hobogal Says:
Thursday, May 9, 2013 @2:11:49 PM
Interesting post. I do find it strange that Old-Time has become synonomous with one branch of playing and that the Forums here seem to encourage a further uniformity (the opposing camps of: Scruggs Versus Clawhammer.) I have become interested in OT music but I do have some anxiety about breaking unwritten rules, simply because I play fingerstyle. I am going to a local music festival tomorrow which has separate Bluegrass and Oldtime Tents - I wonder what will happen if I venture over to The Other Side with my resonator banjo and fingerpicks. I will report back!
Tom Berghan Says:
Friday, July 19, 2013 @11:44:31 AM
Hi Don,
Well written essay! I agree on many points. However, I cannot personally get too worked up about sentiments of persecution from Old Time players because I personally have not experienced any of that. And yet I should be one of America's Most Wanted rogues because even a brief scan through my recordings on the BHO indicates that I not only pluck the strings in all manners - up, down, picks, bare fingered, even flat pick - and I play bluegrass on four string banjos and blend OT with BG with 30's ragtime, and exhibit other musical trangressions - so, if all this segregation and prejudice were even somewhat apparent I of all people should be burned at the stake. But it hasn't been my experience. I am always received well here in all camps on the hangout, and at local BG jams as well as OT jams.
However - I absolutely agree with you that revisionist history is being written (in VOLUMES). VERY few OT bands today sound anything like any of the old 78s. I am often heard to say "Old Time Music doesn't sound anything like old time music!" And I have experienced raised eye brows at the notion of snare drums or accordions being used in bluegrass and yet the FOUNDERS of BG did all of that!
So, although I have not been hauled off in chains to the town square for public-punishment, I do agree that history in general is "revisionist" and it takes a bit of work, in any field" to learn the truth. And even then it is difficult for any historian to not judge the past by their own set of mores! Well back to my heretical arrangements! Best Wishes to all!
Tom
Don Huber Says:
Sunday, September 8, 2013 @4:23:38 PM
Thanks for the feedback, Tom. The slogan for many of the guru/teachers at the OT banjo camps these days should be " play as I do; not as they did".
Best wishes back...Don
Dock Jekel Says:
Monday, September 9, 2013 @6:49:48 PM
Well said to tomberghan. Better than I could say. Thanks for sayin'. Thanks to whyteman for swimmin' upstream.
chip arnold Says:
Saturday, March 29, 2014 @4:40:23 PM
Just found this. I've played illegally for forty years. I've been busted by the police and I've been honored by others. I just play the banjo. A resonated, tone rung banjo.
JanetB Says:
Monday, January 19, 2015 @10:33:53 AM
I can't attempt to match the intellectual, discerning observations and conclusions of you deep thinkers and historians here, Don. I'll just share my recent experience. When I first listened to Brad Leftwich's recordings from his Round Peak Style instructional book I wasn't impressed and set it aside. The slides sounded off-pitch and repetitive. The "Galax lick" escaped me. The melody was too deeply imbedded for me to hear it clearly. But since then I've learned to use that book as a resource. I've adopted, without really trying to, some of these Round Peaker sounds into my own style. I've been able to listen more easily to their historic recordings as learning sources for rhythms, especially through syncopation. Their ubiquitous "Galax lick" has become a useful way to express certain three-note phrases in my own arrangements of fiddle tunes. As I became more familiar with the tunes themselves, I could hear the melody better. (The same thing happened to me when I began learning Scruggs style in the 70's--I just didn't have enough background to appreciate what he was doing.) The bottom line appears to be, as you're expressing it--that it's okay, if not essential, to develop our own style as we absorb what we hear. I still don't like that Round Peak Style CD, but I'm glad I put out the effort to investigate it further.
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