Is "so long" your/our lifetime? I can't remember much before 1960, gets a little fragmented before that for some reason. I'll guess that bum-ditty made for a good dance rhythm that could still sound pretty good on early funky banjos. banjered

Blame Pete Seeger ?

It matches up with the basic fiddle shuffle. I hear it in Cousin Emmy's playing and Lilly Mae Ledford's work as well. Pre-Pete Seeger references.

Yeah, that and dozens of other styles, mostly now lumped under "Clawhammer", existed before Pete Seeger, but we can blame him for making it popular.

I suspect the Bum-ditty has endured because it an easy concept for a beginner learning from a book to understand and it makes them feel good when on page two, they can play their first song!

In Briggs Banjo Instructor (1856) the bum-di-ty occurs occasionally in many tunes, but not throughout the tune. Briggs' basic "movements" includes double thumbing (stings 1-5-1-5-1-5-1-5) and a drop-thumb pattern (strings 1-2-1-5) but bum-di-ty is not mentioned, and the fifth string is used both for melody and Rhythm or drone. This constant bum-di-ty-ing seems to be of newer date. Uncle Dave Macon used some bum-di-ty, but he was a versatile player and played a played of variations so you never think of his bum-di-tys.  Grandpa Jones and Lily Mae Ledford played typical bum-di-ty, and the Seeger "basic strum" is all based on bum-di-ty. So I guess the bum-di-ty was developed during the early 1900's and was adapted by a lot of banjo players.

I second Pete Seeger as the source of this description. He sold a lot of those red and blue "How to Play the 5-string Banjo" books during the 1960s and 1970s.

So do we need a word like "frailing" to differentiale bum-ditty from "clawhammer"? Or is bum-ditty a kind of clawhammer? I've never known. I bum-ditty almost exclusively, but people don't know what I'm talking about unless I call it clawhammer. I don't know that "clawhammer" was a thing in the fifties and early sixties. I'd love to learn about that however.

Bum-Dit-Ty and Clawhammer are relatively new names that I doubt many of the old timers ever heard of.

Just about all forms of down stroke playing are nowadays lumped under the name "Clawhammer".

Bum-Dit-Ty is also a fairly new description of one form of down picking.

What I play is sometimes called "Boom-A-Lac-A" or some such silly name. The difference between this and "Bum-Dit-TY" is the drone is sounded on each upstroke, and with Bum-Dit-Ty it is skipped on one.

I prefer to call my style "double thumbing", old folks called it "Rapping" or "Thumping", and probably half a dozen names other than "Clawhammer".

Isn't this discussion a little about the concepts frailing and clawhammer. Some people seems to see frailing as bum-di-ty while clawhammer is more drop thumb or di-ty-di-ty. Independant of what you call these styles they represent different ways to attack the banjo.

Here are two good videos demonstrating these two different techniques (taken from this thread from 2020): 

youtube.com/watch?v=egmrCj_gZUg
youtube.com/watch?v=2gTGf50Kmsk
 

There is another similar discussion about bum-di-ty here: https://www.banjohangout.org/archive/151051

quote:

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Originally posted by R.D. Lunceford

How did it come to be viewed/taught as the basic clawhammer stroke for so long?

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Seems similar to the Nashville Shuffle came to be viewed/taught as the basic fiddle bowing. 

The popular folk boom/revival probably had a lot to do with it. Conformed with the outsiders stereotype of what sort of sounded like, what might often saw on TV entertainers (from Grandpa Jones, to maybe some folks revival singer). Bum-ditty seems to fit with, was popular with basic urban folk song accompaniment of the time. (guitar players also liked that strum)

But also change in education. It aligns with modern academia as teachers got involved; need to have learning/teaching methodology following more formal education; lessons with quantified rules/instructions/exercises/metrics; and use of written, books using notation/TAB. Replacing more traditional ways, or more self-directed learning... which involves experience with listening.  Attractive to a type of modern students, esp without much any prior experience with listening to music. As mentioned, "makes them feel good when on page two, they can play their first song!" As lots of those students started that way... that's what they passed along.

Had a student who went home with Boom ditty and came back with 123,123,123,123.

Joe Bethancourt is always a member here. His work is with the University of Tennessee in archives. I knew him personally for years.

We developed our own verbs and nouns.
It's four beats and that's why it syncs up with 3-finger, 2 finger, thumb lead. index lead picking.

Up stroking = Boom rest Did He - brush all the strings

Down or frailing = Boom rest Did He

Clawhammer = Tap, Rest, Tap, Hit. Single melody notes

(Roosevelt) = Did He Rest Boom Index up and down rest, 5th. The documentary showed old men dressed up in black finery and ready to play Soldier's Joy At Hoover Dam for the President who had no clue but was told which song to request.
However, the little kids outside, came up to the car, where's security? They spoke with Frank and showed him on film how simple this is.
Try it. I looked for the link but couldn't find it.

OldPappy Then Boomba Rest Did He
Now the hammering and pulling make it more danceable.

In '64 some peers stopped by the Vanguard in Kansas City Missouri on a road trip from California. They were Nitty and Gritty.
He Played Grandfather's Clock and started with up picking, then down, then two finger, then three. Don't we all?
I play it that way to this day because I still can. AND there are words, oops, lyrics, oops, dots.

I like American slang for musicians, So show me, I don't care what it is called.

quote:

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Originally posted by OldPappy

Bum-Dit-Ty and Clawhammer are relatively new names that I doubt many of the old timers ever heard of.

 

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In the old days, folks didn't travel far.  My Dad's family was from Chariton County, Missouri, but even then it was far more localized.  The family was located north of Keytesville, and my aunt at 70+ years of age told me that she'd never been south of town until just a couple years before.

I guess as part of the old folk revival it was important to analyze and categorize, and the labels became overly important.  You could talk about Missouri fiddling, Little Dixie (central Missouri) fiddling, maybe even Chariton County fiddling if you wanted to home in on it, but even that isn't accurate.  In the stretch of country north of Keytesville, there was a whole group of families that migrated from Kentucky together in the 1830's, and so their music had its own character as opposed to maybe what was just a few miles down the road.  You're not talking about regional styles, but micro-regional and even family styles.  So, all of the labels often didn't reflect reality.  Of course, as regional styles have long been in eclipse, maybe the wide categories are becoming more relevant as so many folks nationwide tend to learn from the same sources- Seeger's Red Book, Mel Bay publications, etc.

I used to hear the term "drop-thumb from my Dad, and his cousin once asked me to get out my banjo and "thump" one.  Mostly, it was just "picking the banjo".

I think terms like clawhammer and frailing were originally local names.  You can listen to an interview with Wade Ward's niece on the Folkways LP "Uncle Wade" where she says something like; "Uncle Wade didn't pick the chords, he clawhammered all of the time.

I remember first hearing the term frailing during the folk revolution.  I always thought it was kind of a goofy name and associated it with '60's folkies.  John Burke's book was where I first heard the term clawhammer.  In my own mind, frailing was this kind of crashy style a la Grandpa Jones or Stringbean, and clawhammer was more melodic and intricate as per Burke's settings.

In general as noted above, "clawhammer" is pretty much the universal name for down-picking.  I guess "clawhammer" just soonds cool, ot tough, or something.

I use the words clawhammer and frailing interchangeably, and most of the tunes I play include measures of bum-diddy as well as bump-a-diddy. Even at the most basic, I rarely make it through a tune/song without at least a lick or two of drop thumb, so for those people who have different definitions for each word, my style would probably be described as a frailing/clawhammer hybrid.
I first heard the words clawhammer and frailing in Sing Out! magazine in the early sixties during the Great Folk Scare and they were used interchangeably to mean down picking.

"Bum ditty," never really thought about that. "One ennuh-two" would be more descriptive. The "June Carter scratch" would also fit.

I've always wondered about the term "clawhammer," actually sounds really weird to me...

Clawhammer? Frailing? When asked, I look them straight in the eyes and tell them I play both styles 

"Frailing" was the term when I was first introduced to the banjo. "Clawhammer" came when I switched from the "Seeger strum" to proper CH. Tom Collins refers to the "bum-pa-ditty" stroke when talking about Round Peak style.

I label "frailing" to be a basic strum accompaniment to "folk songs", and CH to mean more sophisticated playing. Some people dropped in at our jam several years ago and one questioned my drop thumbing. She thought that CH was simply continuous bum-ditty playing, and was intrigued to learn that there was more to it than a basic strum.

I think the micro-regional argument above is spot on. But as our nation continues to homogenize, it follows that attempts at standardization, categorization, and a standard nomenclature follow. It's helpful if we all want to communicate. It's a process that is still very much incomplete.


FWIW, I think frailing is a beautiful, elegant term while clawhammer is the silliest, clunkiest term anybody could have dreamed up. Though it's interesting to me that the word clawhammer itself is pronounced with a bump-ditty rhythm, while proponents of the name insist the style differentiates itself as being anything but, or far far more than, bump-ditty.  Linguistics reveals the roots.  When my daughter took violin lessons, the tutor showed her "strawberry rhythm".  Long, short, short.  Straw Berry, just like Claw Hammer.  Bump Ditty.  Sound them out.   All the same.


I up-pick, so I don't worry about it much. I guess if I had no other worries I could instead lose sleep over whether I'm an up-picker, a basic strummer, a Seeger styler, or a two finger index leader. But I don't bother.

I think frailing and clawhammer were both regional terms.  I can see "frailing" as "frail" kind of sounds like "flail", and I can see some folks' approach to the banjo as flailing the heck out of it, although,"frail" means weak or delicate- the exact opposite.

I'd guess most folks have heard the reasoning that the right hand is held in a sort of claw configuration, thus "clawhammer".  Also, some of the old-time minstrels were said to have worn an article of clothing known as a clawhammer coat, so who knows.  As above, it seems like "clawhammer" was a name for the style in Wade Ward's locale... and as some of us have said, neither term had any currency where we were from.  As Eric succinctly points out though, standard nomenclature is helpful if we want to communicate, and Pete Seeger,  through the wide circulation of his red book shaped a large part of the lexicon;  e.g., bum-ditty, frailing, hammer-on, pull-off, etc., etc., none of which I had heard until I came into contact with those who were influenced by it.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know what down-picking was called in Round Peak?

In his yellow book (from which I learned basic five-string playing) Pete Seeger (mistakenly of course) called Scruggs style “clawhammer,”(!) and then proceeded to show incorrectly how to play it. Took me six months to unlearn. In the red edition, Mike Seeger wrote the Scruggs section, correcting the botched yellow book.
@R.D. Lunceford

quote:

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Originally posted by R.D. Lunceford

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know what down-picking was called in Round Peak?

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In Brad Leftwich book  "Round Peak Style - Clawhammer Banjo" (page 5) he wrote:

• "...he (Charlie Lowe) almost certainly responsible for the popularity in Round Peak of what local banjo picker "called double-noting'."
• "Fred Cockerham distinguished between Charlie's double-noting style and the 'framming" style that coexisted in the area.

He also explained that double-noting is connected to drop-thumb, and framming was also called older style by Tommy Jarrell. I interpeet it as framming is what we call bum-di-ty?

So even in Round Peak they were discussing different styles, and what they should be  called.

"Each region maintained its own individuality, because communication and transportation were difficult at best.Farmers on one side of the hill might be totally unaware of what the music was like on the other side of the hill.
"By 1920 several things happened which were to change all this: Prohibition, mail order houses like Sears and Montgomery Ward, the newly born recording industry, and radio,"
Ken Bloom

"The major source for the style we call clawhammer in the early stages of the 'urban' folk revival was a banjoist from the town of Allen in Floyd 'county, Kentucky, named Rufus Crisp. Pete Seeger in fact credits Crisp with teaching him to 'frail', but apparently it was Stu Jamieson who was Crisp's major disciple and the main revivalist exponent of the downpicking style. ...
"Interestingly, Jamieson ... claims that neither frailing nor clawhammer were then the common names for our downpicking style, it is apparently an urban-based misunderstanding of 'flailing', which is itself an analogy to the motion employed to thresh grain. ...
"THe period in the revival when clawhammer began to eclipse all other old time styles was roughly the mid-1960s. One factor involved here is that by this time the balance of power among styles in the South was changing, under pressure from a general fascination with the then relatively new 'Scruggs picking' style. Alan Jabbour makes the point that at the fiddlers' contests he went to during that period in Virginia and North Carolina, you would see lots of Scruggs pickers and a fair amount of down pickers. What you no longer saw so much was the old time fingerpickers, because most of then had either made the transition to bluegrass, or - presumably - been intimidated into silence by the high levels of sound, volume and speed the new style permitted.
"And it was to these very contests in the mid-60s, of which Galax and Union Grove were only the most famous, that scores of young urban, college-educated pickers began to flock in search of musical inspiration. What they saw at that time, was mostly clawhammer associated with old-time music, and three finger picking associated with bluegrass music.
"By the late 60s, this new generation of revival banjo pickers had focused on the styles of a few banjoists from the Round Peak region, which - not entirely coincidentally - was right in the heart of the area where all these fiddlers' conventions were taking place. ..."
Ken Perlman

quote:  Very simple.  It all comes from the banjo instruction from Pete Seeger which from the mimeoed version in the 1940s until some time in the 1980s was about all there was. 

 In many ways it is constricting, especially since people are taught to play this stroke first and made to practice playing with it until they can competently play,  Then typically players have tremendous difficulty, some life time difficulty, learning to use the other strokes such as the double thumb and the drop thumb and to integrate them into their picking.

I like Dan Levenson's materials which finally got me over the hump.   Here I mean materials that I found of his around 2000,  2001, 2003.  I do not know what he has today, but I am sure he expresses the same kind of practical wisdom, and concern for the music he had then today, or better/

He teaches a simple thumb and finger picking to do the tunes, and then teaches all three down picking strokes slowly.

I do agree that learning the basic strokes is the key for down picking.  Besides finding Dans Materials about 21 22 years ago, having a banjo mentor tell me to just practice all three strokes for a half hour to an hour every night (I was single then, LOL) without trying to play a tune until he thought I had them got me over the hump.  Otherwise, I would be just another guitar player who once tried to play the banjo and gave it up.

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Originally posted by R.D. Lunceford

How did it come to be viewed/taught as the basic clawhammer stroke for so long?

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I think the term bump diddy was first popularized by Pete Seeger and his instruction materials, but you can find the same approach in regard to teaching down picking banjo strokes going far back to the 1850s minstrel tutors. The concept is good, but like any concept when it is substituted for broader knowledge it can limit your playing.

Here is a commercial for those videos Zep had up on his web site showing each of the major down picking strokes through a clear headed banjo. Really really good. I have played claw hammer banjo since 1999, but I still find myself on the lookout for basic instruction videos on how to play the basic strokes and find myself reviewing them regularly.

My opinion is that constant bump diddying is quite rare in accomplished down picking players, especially among traditional banjoists. 

The pick, brush, thumb is over taught as all there is in down picking or the key to it.  Double thumbing, drop thumbing, and other variations of clawhammer stroking are not taught early enough or as equals with bump diddying.  I mean in contemporary (contemporary to me means since say 1990) banjo instruction.  It is a case of a useful concept being done to death.  

It does not seem to be the problem if I listen to traditional banjo players or when I have observed the course of study of 19th century banjo tutors teaching the minstrel style or stroke style.  

Over bumb diddying is a function of current old time revivalism, not of actual old time banjo playing.

Macon played the banjo in a variety of style, including 3 finger, and two finger, as well as clawhammer.  People I have met who talked to him about this, notably Stu Jameson who got to talk to Dave in 1946 about his playing told me that Dave Macon told him that his increasing affliction with arthritis that began in the late 1930s meant that Macon played more and more clawhammer and less and less finger style.  He said Macon's right hand was frozen into what Stu called  "a perfect clawhammer claw" by arthritis when Stu got to talk to visit Macon in Nashville in 1946.

quote:

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Originally posted by janolov

In Briggs Banjo Instructor (1856) the bum-di-ty occurs occasionally in many tunes, but not throughout the tune. Briggs' basic "movements" includes double thumbing (stings 1-5-1-5-1-5-1-5) and a drop-thumb pattern (strings 1-2-1-5) but bum-di-ty is not mentioned, and the fifth string is used both for melody and Rhythm or drone. This constant bum-di-ty-ing seems to be of newer date. Uncle Dave Macon used some bum-di-ty, but he was a versatile player and played a played of variations so you never think of his bum-di-tys.  Grandpa Jones and Lily Mae Ledford played typical bum-di-ty, and the Seeger "basic strum" is all based on bum-di-ty. So I guess the bum-di-ty was developed during the early 1900's and was adapted by a lot of banjo players.

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R.D. posted----" In my own mind, frailing was this kind of crashy style a la Grandpa Jones or Stringbean, and clawhammer was more melodic and intricate as per Burke's settings."

That is how I've always thought of it. As for the word "frailing", I once heard a guy describe a fight and said "that big guy was just frailing the hell" out of the other guy, so I suppose that "frail" might in some places be a slang word for "to hit?" Or just a mishearing of the word flail.