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Originally posted by SophiaD

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Originally posted by writerrad

By folk banjoists,  I mean people who have learning banjo as part of an actual community folk tradition in which the music made was part of the living life of the community, not a decision by people who enjoy and wish to revive or celebrate the music who did not learn it in their communities. 

There is a difference between people who make an intellectual decision to play old time music and people who are part of organic communities in which the music evolved.

 

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Thank you for such a thoughtful explanation.  There's a lot to think about there!  

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Thoughtful, yes. Truthful, perhaps not so much. It is a closed mind that thinks you can only be part of the American musical tradition if you check specific boxes (as defined by self-proclamed authorities on the subject). It's 2026, 1926 was 100 years ago. There have been traditional fiddle competitions throughout the country for over 75 years. It's frankly offensive to suggest that because someone is young, or 'not from around here', that they are not part of the tradition. It's also insulting to the players that are from those areas, to suggest that they put no thought into their playing or that they also didn't make a concious decision to continue the tradition.

The fact is, the vast majority of people from all areas do not play traditional music. This is a statistical fact. Anyone that does play traditional music, has made a conscious decision to participate and celebrate the tradition. 

There is a fixation among both players and scholars that the "tradition" only happened during a specific period, in a fixed place, and everything after that is simply a recreation or revival of that time and place. It's a false paradigm. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of time and culture. The tradition is alive and well, it is organic and growing to this day. Music made this year is just as much as a tradition as music made in 1930. A banjo player that plays the old songs in Utah is just as much part of the tradition as one from South Carolina. When the music was made back then, it was new. Someone playing The Cuckoo or Cold Frosty Morning in 2026 is just as much part of the tradition as someone that played it in 1926. It's not emulation, and it's not 'inauthentic' just because they're not from a specific demographic. 

Again, the overall point here is that 'tradition' is an ever changing and organic cultural phenomenon. It is not fixed, in any way. All traditions were, at one point, new styles. They change over time. Tradition does not mean "old". By it's very nature, despite many attempts to do so by educated individuals trying to sell books and lectures, tradition can not be canned and labeled and sold on a shelf. 

All that is to say, back to the subject. If you take the 1920 to the 1970, that is 50 years. 1970 to 2026, is 56 years. This means that open backs have been the 'default' banjo design for clawhammer for a longer period than resonator banjos were the standard. Time marches on. 

And that's not even getting into the issues with the term 'clawhammer' banjo, itself. Is 'clawhammer' banjo even a traditional term? It's pretty modern itself. One could easily argue that, all other traditions aside, the open-back banjo has strong ties to so-called "clawhammer" and "old-time" music.

One could make the argument that those who cling to the resonator as the traditional banjo are revivalists, because they're attempting to recreate the styles of the 1910s-1940s. And that the people playing open back banjos are the "true traditionalists", because they're playing the style of banjo that represents the current zeitgeist of vernacular American music.  If one person plays a resonator "because that's how they did it 75 years ago", and one person plays an open-back "because that's what everyone else is doing right now", which one is the revivalist and which one is the traditionalist? Food for thought.

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Originally posted by KCJones

The tradition is alive and well, it is organic and growing to this day. Music made this year is just as much as a tradition as music made in 1930. A banjo player that plays the old songs in Utah is just as much part of the tradition as one from South Carolina. When the music was made back then, it was new. Someone playing The Cuckoo or Cold Frosty Morning in 2026 is just as much part of the tradition as someone that played it in 1926.

 

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I was looking this morning at an announcement for a local musical event, and I noticed the new-to-me term "tradition bearer", I suppose denoting a performer who places themselves within a musical history.  There's something formal and ponderous about such a designation.  It seems to me that just about all music harkens back to some traditions and history.  Maybe the difference is some folks make a deliberate effort to stay within with a real or imagined traditional style, while others just want to do something fresh with what they're inherited.   So Dylan goes electric, back in the day.

KCJones "Again, the overall point here is that 'tradition' is an ever changing and organic cultural phenomenon. It is not fixed, in any way. All traditions were, at one point, new styles. They change over time. Tradition does not mean "old". By its very nature, despite many attempts to do so by educated individuals trying to sell books and lectures, tradition can not be canned and labeled and sold on a shelf."

I think you are in part right. However I think what writerrad is saying is that there are people who grow up in a community that has a musical tradition, passed on within families and among kin and neighbors. This "passing on, or learning, is done in face-to face situations. Or there have been these situations for centuries. He is not disparaging such singers or musicians. I think he is pointing to a very different way in which tradition is transmitted. Folklorists use the term "oral transmission," but that doesn't readily apply to instrumental music. Learning by ear might be more accurate. But even so, folklorists note that some singers from such communities keep "ballet books"--books with song lyrics written down. Surely some folk learning involves passing on the printed word in these close relationships, despite how folklorists have framed it.

This doesn't mean that everyone in the community is a singer or musician, but that individuals and families are immersed in the tradition. Other's might appreciate the music or they might ignore it or even dislike it. It's still a tradition for the community as a whole. Nor does this mean that a community member that sings its traditional songs can't also sing songs learned from commercial recordings.

It also means that there is no innovation or creativity. The eastern mountains have people who play or sing songs from their traditions, but also make up new ones. These new pieces might become part of the community's tradition. One marxist folklorist (whose name escapes me at this moment) spoke of "creative bearers of the folk tradition."

That mode of transmission differs markedly from learning from books, tablature, recordings, and videos. It is based partly at a corporate level. It's still the same songs and tunes, but the community is not there. I think it is the people involved in this new mode of transmission who think of "tradition" as something that happened early last century or over 50 years ago. They want to play a tune with just the same notes and fingering that Tommy Jerrell used on May 16 at 2 PM, 1952. This would be a static, perhaps a dead, tradition were it not for the fact that recordings of newly minted tunes are allowed in by the publishes and purchasers of digital, CD, or tab versions of a tune.

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Originally posted by KCJones

And that's not even getting into the issues with the term 'clawhammer' banjo, itself. Is 'clawhammer' banjo even a traditional term? It's pretty modern itself. One could easily argue that, all other traditions aside, the open-back banjo has strong ties to so-called "clawhammer" and "old-time" music.

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This is why we should always refer to clawhammer as 'stroke style' and proudly proclaim how we really play our banjos...   

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Originally posted by pinenut

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Originally posted by KCJones

And that's not even getting into the issues with the term 'clawhammer' banjo, itself. Is 'clawhammer' banjo even a traditional term? It's pretty modern itself. One could easily argue that, all other traditions aside, the open-back banjo has strong ties to so-called "clawhammer" and "old-time" music.

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This is why we should always refer to clawhammer as 'stroke style' and proudly proclaim how we really play our banjos...   

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"Banjo style" is also acceptable. 

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Originally posted by Joel Hooks

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Originally posted by pinenut

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Originally posted by KCJones

And that's not even getting into the issues with the term 'clawhammer' banjo, itself. Is 'clawhammer' banjo even a traditional term? It's pretty modern itself. One could easily argue that, all other traditions aside, the open-back banjo has strong ties to so-called "clawhammer" and "old-time" music.

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This is why we should always refer to clawhammer as 'stroke style' and proudly proclaim how we really play our banjos...   

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"Banjo style" is also acceptable.  Sweet.  That makes banjo a noun and a verb like, "smurfing the smurf".  

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Clawhammer as a term really has only come into use by many people since the 1950s.  I have not found any reference to it before WWII by anyone in discussing the banjo.  It certainly does not appear in any 19th century discussion of the banjo or banjoists.

When I first got interested in old time music by in the 60s as a guitarist. I saw people say they were playing "clawhammer" who were 2 finger pickers.  I do think today the term is chiefly understood as down picking, often with the drop thumb, and other innovations.  It is all right insofar as folks now understand it to be the old time down picking but down picking or frailing seem more descriptive.  I wont get into the fact that the term  frailing is not really found anywhere before the 1950s or 60s even, either.

As a person who study of English composition and writing itself is my primary academic certification,  when I started to write papers and edit others papers and book chapters etc about 20 years ago,  I found the term to not one that was useful because of that lack of precision.  The identification in clawhammer comes from the idea that professional minstrel banjo entertainers wore coats with the tails in the back much like the claw on a claw hammer. 

I use down stroking and up stroking, or down picking or up picking.  Finger picking is also an adequate term for what it describes.  Calling something "the stroke style" to me  suggests the definite forms of down picking and down stroking used popular in the 19th century,'' such as in banjo primers and such from the 19th century that were often divided between the "guitar style" and the "stroke style."  I also think stroking can indirectly imply a mistaken idea of down picking or down stroking, that the player making a stroke across several strings or all the strings, when at times the player is aiming at individual strings.

To me science in the matter, especially for writers seeking academic precision began to be provided in ROBERT B. WINANS and ELIAS J. KAUFMAN's  "Minstrel and Classic Banjo: American and English Connections  American Music, Vol. 12, No. 1. (Spring, 1994), pp. 1-30."   I know the two authors sought to provide scientific and definite precision for a number of different aspects of banjo playing for future academic writers in this decisive article because each has told me that. 

 It is available online on a number of sites today and it is still illuminating to me after 20 years of reading and rereading it.    Here, the authors refer to the delineation of "the stroke style"  and the "guitar style" describing the different forms of banjo playing that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s among banjo entertainers.  No one seriously interested in the banjo and its history should be without this essay.

My friend Greg Adams and the great banjo research hero the late Shlomo Pestcoe sought to codify these things especially for researchers  in "Banjo Roots Research": Changing Perspectives on the Banjo's African American Origins and West Africa Heritage"  Chapter 1 in Duke University Press's 2018 publication Banjo Roots and Branches,  which was edited by Robert Winans, and published as part of the University of Illinois Press's music in American Life series in 2018.   I know this initial chapter was not the simple idea of the its two authors and the editor, but the product of a lot of collective discussion of the inner core of banjo roots researchers because they share this chapter with several of us. 

There the final decision in introducing this was to advance the term "down picking (also called down-stroking)" (pg 10) adding on the next page that later in the 19th century the term "Negro Style" and  "Stroke Style " were used by some to describe this.  Adams and Petscoe add: "Traditions of banjo down-picking are also found throughout the rural South, where they have been commonly referred to by various names,  such as frailing, clawhammer, rapping or thumping."  On the same page they advance the term "up picking" to describe both 2 and 3 (and actually some 4 or even some like Gus Cannon 5)  finger picking.

The stroke style seems descriptive and useful when discussing 19th century and early 20th century banjo playing especially as delineated by the minstrel entertainers and parlor banjoists, but it seem awkward if you are referring to 20th and 21st century old time Black and white banjo players that I study. It can suggest a misunderstanding of what most down picking banjoists do.  If I am down picking I am not mostly brushing across the strings in a stroking manner, but aiming at particular strings when I am not brushing and in some styles players rarely brush, but get much of the work done by strikes on individual strings, pull offs, and sounding the fifth string,  

Down picking and Up picking seem to be more objective.  Fingerpicking and Frailing are useful terms that people also understand.

Hey Tony, where are you getting this "brushing" thing with stroke style?

The ultimate method for stroke style (or "banjo style") is found in Frank B. Converse's Analytical Banjo Method. Here he provides a series of movements and combinations that covers pretty much any pattern possible. All extremely precise and deliberate. He does teach a "nail glide" which is not "brushing" but an arpeggio with distinct note separation.

This is the first time I have ever read a connection to "clawhammer" and tailcoats. This does not make any logical sense. EVERYONE wore tails for evening dress. This was not anything specific to minstrelsy.

Also, while the jokes were ad nauseam repeats, the music featured in minstrelsy kept current with times. By the late 1880s it was fully out (for the most part).

Here is what Pete Seeger has to say on the matter.

I am still unclear about the definitions of:

1) Traditional

2) Old Time Music

As used in the context of this discussion.

I do not believe the OP question is answerable without agreed upon definitions of the two above terms.

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Originally posted by Joel Hooks

I am still unclear about the definitions of:

1) Traditional

2) Old Time Music

As used in the context of this discussion.

I do not believe the OP question is answerable without agreed upon definitions of the two above terms.

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I doubt if we'll be able to find a definition that everyone will agree on for either of these terms.
- My idea of traditional music includes everything from acapella whaling ballads to Inuit throat singing to Appalachian banjo tunes to Cajun fiddle tunes to. . .
- When I hear the term Old Time Music, I think of Charlie Poole, Samantha Bumgarner, Jean Ritchie, The Carter Family, The New Lost City Ramblers, Tommy Jarrell, Eck Robertson, Fiddlin' John Carson. . .

Tradition has an exact meaning for those of us who do serious work in the study of music and history.  It is exaggerated by those who do not.  Traditional music means music that evolves out of the social fabric of traditional communities and their day to day lives,  not out of the commercial activities of entertainers, or commercial pressure  and extension of the music, and not by  the popularization of the music by media, or for that matter not by people who claim their music is superior to other music because it is tradition.

As such traditional music has been pretty much on the decline in its original form in North America across the 20th century.  I got to know Joe Thompson the fiddler and talked to him about himself learning music in North Carolina starting as a kid of 4 or 5 in a family where his father and his uncle led a family band that provided a significant part of the family income and more of their social life up to the time Joe went away to WWII.  Joe had ideas about  what was right, famously telling you "get it right" of you were doing something he had not been taught by his father and uncle or the way it had been.   He had been taught by his father and his uncle and his brother who played banjo too.

His brother who played banjo was first handed a banjo at a young age.  The frailing strokes were demonstrated to him. and then he was enjoined to learn them, not by chording the banjo in any way or tuning it all the way up, something he was not allowed to do until the pure rhythm of the strokes met the satisfaction of father and uncle which took time.   Only then was he permitted to tune up the banjo.

People who learn music by various media  rather wrongly confuse folk traditions with commercial entertainers who claim to be so, or even people  who after the social and cultural situations that evolved real folk traditions have changed so that the influences of commercial. formal. art and all kinds of other music are dominant, and dessimination of  music is by radio. records, shows, etc, etc. is not traditional music, but the outgrowth of music as either a business or as cultural ideal.   Nothing wrong with that, but just the way these things are.

The history of the banjo is not one of tradition but of bursting tradition.  The early gourd banjo that were created by by followers of specific religious/spiritual cults in the Caribbean and North America were powered by the specific spiritual beliefs these people had.  They caused them to design the first banjos in ways that represented their beliefs about cosmology, not how to create an effective musical instrument.  We know from a banjo of this type we have found that dates from the 1860s and 1870s, they continued to do so after not only more effective gourd banjos had been designed, after the frame headed or hoop headed, not gourd banjo had been adopted by both folk and commercial entertaining banjoists.   That is the difference between tradition and non tradition.

Tradition is a real thing, but it has a narrow life in the real history of the banjo where constant innovation often comming outside of folk or traditional approach has been in the driver's seat for much of the banjo's history.  Someone who plays a a banjo that is not an early gourd banjo of the truly traditional type, is playing a banjo that is the product of commercial innovation of the banjo by banjo entertainers and luthiers applying techniques borrowed from commercial manufacture of drums, guitars, and other instruments, not tradition.   The physical banjos we all play and that have advanced the music are modeled after instruments designed by commercial instrument builders  to designs that not folk traditions, but commercial entertainers,  commercial sale to parlor and popular music players.

People I know who have spoken at length with Earl do not think of him speaking much about tradition but of wanting to match in his playing innovations in music he heard around him including names like Blind Boy Fuller and Charlie Christian and of the degree to which he grew up in a banjo community where the guitar style of banjo which Joel would call "classic" was being played and taught all around him.  

A few questions. Help me understand. It all sounds like a lot of dogma and formality to me, but I'm not very smart. Is there a specific way that is "playing it right", as Joe Thompson says? It sounds like his father and uncle are the authorities on traditional music, but they also made their income by playing as commercial entertainers? How are they traditional if their income came from entertaining? Or is there a nuance I'm not understanding. Again, I am not a smart person and easily confused, so please explain so I can understand this. 

It almost sounds like there's a blood right to tradition, as you define it. It's only traditional if you learn from your family, and even then you must be in a specific family for it to be traditional. And if you're not part of the select few families, then it's not tradition. Is there an official list of traditional music families? How far removed are you allowed to be from the paternal line of succession before you're no longer traditional? 

I'm curious also, what is a "traditional community"? Are there specific criteria for this? Are there aspects of a community that preclude it from being traditional? Is there a geographic requirement, and if so is there a list of specific zip codes where traditional music is from? Or is it more of a regional thing. If so, is it possible to play traditional music from areas outside of these communities, or do most places simply not have any traditions at all and are just emulating commercial entertainers. 

I'm still not clear on the time frame. Is there a specific age something must be to be traditional, is it a specific fixed time in the past? Or is it an age? 

Was Ralph Stanley a traditional musician? What about Pete Seeger? Earl Scruggs? I think we probably all agree that they weren't traditional, they were commercial entertainers. 

Question for the authorities: If a young person learns banjo from their father in 2015, and their father learned from their grandfather in the 1985, and the grandfather learned from their great-grandfather in 1955, and the great-grandfather learned from recorded artists in the 20s, and all of those people have played around campfires and on porches and at community barn dances and harvest gatherings and maypole celebrations through the years... is that young person today a traditional player?  Or are they not traditional because the original great-grandfather learned from a commercial recording? I'm not smart or educated, please help me understand. 

I would argue that if commercial/noncommercial are the defining factors in “traditional” then including the popular form of the banjo as we know it cannot possibly be “traditional” period.

Then there is the timeline, which also presents problems. The timeline for the banjo as we know it really starts at around 1840. But historical record pushes that forward by a decade or more to the mid 1850s and really post ACW.

This only gives us three generations from development to the generation born around 1900 (which was the generation of the 20s recordings).

So, one generation to invent the music, one to learn it, then one to commercialize it. The strange part is that the first two generations were able to totally avoid detection and evade anyone writing the music down. They also had zero influence on banjo design.

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Originally posted by Joel Hooks

So, one generation to invent the music, one to learn it, then one to commercialize it. The strange part is that the first two generations were able to totally avoid detection and evade anyone writing the music down. They also had zero influence on banjo design.

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Differentiation by generation is a methodology we are currently using in relation to the assimilation and adaption of the banjo within19th century British contexts. But this is really only because that serves as a relevant and useful differentiation in THOSE specific contexts in relation to patterns that our research happen to identify.

It would be a misunderstanding to assume this as a 'formula' or framework approach that is necessarily helpful in any study. Certainly any interpretation of that methodology that assumes any particular generation embue one  'function' in linear isolation is quite wrong.

Neither do communities, even those in flux and subject to immense social and physical change, 'invent' music. Innovation interacts with and within pre-existing cultural norms while simultaneously being ONE factor among many influencing the way those norms change over time.

The factors that drive change may alter, but the dynamic of interactive factors of change remain more or less continual only the pace of change really showing any marked difference. No vernacular context is static or 'fixed'. That's the human dimension that history seeks to understand.

I could illustrate this with examples specific to our research context but this would subvert the U.S. focus of this interesting thread. One common - virtually universal - factor is that no historical or cultural activity can be fully understood without regard to ALL the external factors of varying scale that exert influence on that activity.

There’s always change. However if I hazard a guess at the degree of change within British communities across 60 years 1725-1785 it would not be as profound, extensive or as fast as that in 19th century Britain. Individuals born in 1825, 1865 and 1885 grew to adulthood in distinctly different social and cultural environments which radically affected behaviours and opportunities.

This period of radical societal reorganisation and transformation extends to the immediate post-WW1 years c.1919-1924 but we just happen to be looking in detail at a date range within that tumultous period of change.

Different geographical locations may undergo periods of significant social change that don't conform to the same date range

This is fun! If you don't mind, I have some strong opinions about things like "tradition" and the related concept of "authenticity." I've thought more about the authenticity part, because that's been explicitly in other work I've done. The tradition opinions are still growing and conversations like this make certain things more clear. I'm really enjoying it. What's surprising (but shouldn't be) is how consistent these kinds of questions come up in so many musical practices and communities...

First, I find it really helpful to pull apart "tradition" and "traditional." As it's generally used, something is "traditional" if it fits someone's expectation of being a part of a tradition. That seems obvious, but centering the expectation and not the tradition is important. Why?

Because I find it vastly more useful to think of "tradition" as a term that is plural: there is no singular capital-T Tradition. There are lots of traditions that overlap and build importance for people and for communities over time. They get circulated just like any other ideas, through things like family connection, oral transmission, community gatherings, mass media, radio, fads and trends, etc.

To oversimplify: folklorists had a sense of what they thought tradition was and they set out to find it. Then the things they found were held up as traditional (in the singular noun "this is it!" sense). But as this conversation has demonstrated, the music and the folks who made it were rarely operating in some vacuum. Maybe some were. But many were not. All of these things had long histories of change. All this grows out of interaction with commercial practice, at least so far as we can go back. It turns artificial, but an idea of holding up a (singular) tradition or many (singular) traditions can be so helpful for things like community identity, nation building, and so on. During a time of recent colonialism and a WWII to Cold War political context, creating an "us" can matter.

I'd argue that things like contemporary clawhammer playing on an open back are absolutely part of a tradition, but it's not a stagnant one that goes back. As we've seen here, it goes through so many stages and the interesting part to me is how we end up where we are, where the association is so dominant that it's taken as normative, it's singular. This all also suggests that the flip of the original question is where the fun lies: it's not why clawhammer uses open backs, it's why these two things are so tightly wound, when the historical record suggests much more promiscuity in playing style and instrument. Why not just use what you got to do what you want? Marketing? Where do the assumptions come from? (We have a lot of good answers to this here!)

When reading on religion and politics in Morocco during graduate school, I came across a quote that stuck with me: "Tradition defended is never entirely traditional." I think it was political scientist Henry Munson. Once you take some common practice (a tradition) and call it traditional, you change the way folks interact with it and the meaning that it holds. The practice itself will change as a result, often rather quickly.

I'm currently trying to break the habit of defaulting to words like "tradition" or "traditional" because I think they cause more problems than they solve. I wonder what this thread would have looked like if the word "traditionally" had not been in the question. A lot of the same discussion would have happened, but it might have played out differently, as a simpler question with a simpler answer.

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Originally posted by cjwit

 practice (a tradition) and call it traditional, you change the way folks interact with it and the meaning that it holds. The practice itself will change as a result, often rather quickly.

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An example that springs to mind is cinema. For our parents and grandparents cinema-going was a part of their way of life. An arguably culturally central experience for those generations c.1910-1950. Yet we never hear that behaviour referred to as 'traditional'. It was popular, or a social convention in it's time.

The banjo as we know it has always been wrapped in nostalgia. Minstrelsy=nostalgia. The classic era was filled with nostalgia, including newly composed works based on nostalgia.

During the rise of the "fiddle contest", nostalgia was king. Articles ran in music trade magazines encouraging ridiculous "rules" and so forth.

At the time it was all in good fun.

Then the recordings and Ralph Peer produced radio shows solidified a growing fad for "the good old days".

But with the rise of the "folklorist" the fun was lost and the joke was not received.

I left something out in that above timeline. An important point.

The generation born after the American Civil War included the first generation of Black Americans born (at least on paper) free. This was scary for a large portion of the population. So nostalgia for the "good old days" was strong.

Bluegrass sold nostalgia, Shakey's Pizza sold nostalgia.

It was all fictional depictions of times that never were.

Tony: "Tradition has an exact meaning for those of us who do serious work in the study of music and history. It is exaggerated by those who do not. Traditional music means music that evolves out of the social fabric of traditional communities and their day to day lives, not out of the commercial activities of entertainers, or commercial pressure and extension of the music"

With respect, this may be an exact meaning, but it's also one that seems arbtrarily exclusive. Is Western classical music "traditional"? Are we really going to argue that someone in 2026 playing Bach or Beethoven is not participating in a tradition?

My view is that something is a tradition when it functions as a tradition. It simply means a socially agreed-upon and relatively stable way of doing something. How old that "something" is, where it comes from, how it is transmitted, and so on are secondary. 

"Ralph Peer produced radio shows solidified a growing fad for "the good old days".  I have several biographies of Peer, the best being Barry Mazor's.  I am not aware of Peer having produced any radio programs.   That would be interesting.  When did he do this?

Maybe we are mixing up related but somewhat different concepts here. The word "tradition" has several definitions and lacks clear boundaries. Not that people have shown much reaction yet, but I tried to clarify a mistaken impression of of what writerrad Tony was saying by using folklorist language. For them, the FOLK tradition is defined by how songs, tunes, and ideas about proper instrument types, are TRANSMITTED within groups and across generations. We are all aware that you can play "Doing my time" on a Gibson Mastertone banjo, a Deering Clawgrass open back banjo, or a gourd banjo. Any of that is possible. A quarter century ago at Suwannee Banjo Camp, I got to see Mike Seeger play "Doing my time," a bluegrass song, on a gourd banjo clawhammer (or down stroke) style but emulating bluegrass banjo sounds. It was a jarring, but wonderful and humorous experience for me, full of cognitive dissonance. All because there is a tradition of some sort of playing that song is appropriate only on resonator banjos.

Seeger, I think, meant to create that very response. He was pushing boundaries of what we think of tradition. He showed that there are traditions of whatever type and however recently established, within the bluegrass world and the oldtime world. I don't know that there was anything traditionally FOlK about these. We have taking these ideas to heart from seeing what Earl Scruggs and Pete Seeger played, from advertisements of banjos, and from other performers we encounter.

People ask how long must an idea or practice be around to become "traditional." For folklorists that's the wrong question. The right question is "How long must it be transmitted in face-to-face situations within communities. They speak of commercial songs passing "into the oral tradition" and accept them as "folk songs." This happened in the Ozarks and other areas for some pop songs of the 1800s and some recordings of the early 1900s. I don't know that folklorists (or I) have an exact idea as to how much "oral transmission" is needed for a song to become a part of "tradition folklore."

I'll add a monkey wrench into the discussion here. There has been talk of external influences, and maybe modern v. traditional communities as issues. Symphonic music, we might all agree, is not folk music. People pay money to institutions to learn instruments, read music written by people they never met face-to-face, etc. But however modern and incorporated a classical orchestra might be, there is a part of that culture that is transmitted in the folk mode. Think about inside humor, jokes about orchestra performances, about the classic composers, etc. Folklorists don't like to think about this, but it is a kind of folklore in their definition.

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Originally posted by banjoboyd

Tony: "Tradition has an exact meaning for those of us who do serious work in the study of music and history. It is exaggerated by those who do not. Traditional music means music that evolves out of the social fabric of traditional communities and their day to day lives, not out of the commercial activities of entertainers, or commercial pressure and extension of the music"

With respect, this may be an exact meaning, but it's also one that seems arbtrarily exclusive. Is Western classical music "traditional"? Are we really going to argue that someone in 2026 playing Bach or Beethoven is not participating in a tradition?

My view is that something is a tradition when it functions as a tradition. It simply means a socially agreed-upon and relatively stable way of doing something. How old that "something" is, where it comes from, how it is transmitted, and so on are secondary. 

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Did you read Chris's post? He makes a  key point about perception i.e. how referring to something as 'traditional' has an effect on how people relate to that activity. 

Consensus - 'social agreement' - even if tacit, is pretty much how culture is defined. But not everything that carries cultural identity is 'traditional'.

Is the term useful? We can only really examine that by holding examples up to scrutiny. We could say that before the commercialisation of mass entertainment it was traditional for ordinary people to actively entertain themselves and their local community. But is that a helpful or accurate statement? The practical reality holds water; but did those engaged in local performance consider themselves as part of a tradition? That's much more open to question.

Does Clifftop in WV every August fit the criteria of 'traditional' activity? A time-travelling fiddle player from the 1880's, once they have their Walmart pop-up tent up and wander around the site may well recognise some of the repertoire they hear. But the scale, setting and geographic separation of those attending would be quite alien. Where and what constitute 'traditional'? I don't know.

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Originally posted by writerrad

"Ralph Peer produced radio shows solidified a growing fad for "the good old days".  I have several biographies of Peer, the best being Barry Mazor's.  I am not aware of Peer having produced any radio programs.   That would be interesting.  When did he do this?

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His focus was on gathering publishing rights, but there is no doubt that his influcne on recording contributed greatly to shows like The Grand Ole Opry.

I think there are several uses of tradition.  Banjo Hangout has traditions.  Internet discussion boards where we argue about the NY Giants have traditions.  Innovation itself has its own traditions.

However, the issue here the existence of  "folk tradition" as opposed to the idea of artistic and commercial innovation, or traditions of musicianship passed along show business or bluegrass banjoists..  There are all sorts of variations on this idea of folk tradition from useful scientific to down right racist and silly. 

Having been involved in playing old time music since the 1960s,  I can say old time music revivalism has a set of traditions and attitudes that seem to grow and change that have little to do with what people who were folk traditional banjoists played.  People that I knew at the heart of the revival in the 60s and 70s were always thinking of whether this, that or the other thing was "traditional" in a way that musicians like Joe Thompson or Rufus Kasey never would.

In the world of the banjo people speak of "traditional banjo" as  if some forms of banjo playing  are the product chiefly of folk tradition when clearly they are not.  There is gross misunderstanding of the dramatic changes in how many people ever played the banjo before commercial, show business, and even art-oriented banjo playing became dominant forces in banjo playing and decisively shaped everything else banjo.

However, there was a constant thread of people since I have encountered old time music revivalism who saw themselves as sticking to what they believed was the folk traditional way of playing the banjo to preserve some original pure thing.  There were musicians I knew some of whom became quite well known nationally, who would NOT play a song or tune that was commercially written or created. or did not originate among what they considered traditional folk artists.   Most I think of in that wise are now passed away or have educated themselves, insofar our current knowledge is that so many of the songs and tunes they felt were purely traditional were actually written by commercial oriented entertainers or song merchants in major cities for money and one or two actually derived from European classical compositions!

Anyway,  generally in discussing the  old time music there has been an exaggeration of what comes out of pure "folk tradition"  and a minimization of what has been contributed by innovations that come from commercially oriented musicians, fine arts musicians, or popular musicians.  I am used to the idea that if someone says "tradition",  they mean 'folk tradition.'

Banjo playing itself has hardly much folk tradition to it.  Banjos did not exist before the 1600s and then relatively few of them existed among Black people in the Caribbean and by about 1720 or 30 in North America.    The decisive moment for their spread both among Black people and especially beyond Black people came across the late 1830s and 1840s, when largely commercial entertainers and designers of instruments for them went beyond the gourd banjo to create designs of the banjo that were not traditionally limited by the spiritual beliefs of the early gourd banjo makers, to create the frame or hoop headed banjo which could both be made more easily by non-luthiers, and more easily manufactured, and would and could be constantly developed and redeveloped by anyone with a good idea or for that matter bad idea.

Talking about how "traditional" banjo playing is creates a kind of fiction about the antiquity of the banjo.  It also is gross denial that the banjo's large scale spread and development came not as an object of folk culture or folklife, but as a commercially generated commodity.  There is no sign of any resistance by folk or "traditional" players to any of the innovations commercially oriented or artisan banjo makers introduced starting in the ate 1830s.  Just the opposite, with actual players associated with the older tradition-oriented approaches being the mos receptive to innovations coming from commercial, professional, or artisan banjo designers created for the needs of non-traditional players and entertainers.   

Earlier in this thread I spoke of a presentation I did on the banjos played by the Black banjoists in the Digital Library of Appalachia for the Banjo Gathering.  I found that without exception, these banjoists' original banjos were RBs Gibsons or Deerings if they could afford them, Japanese invasion low budget rbs if they could not,   I found that if they were pictured playing a Fairbanks, or Vega open back as many were,  it was uniformly a banjo owned by a white college based often college teaching, old time music revivalists, who thought it more appropriate for them to play a Boston banjo.   I know this because I have played banjos you will see people like Dink Roberts or Odell Thompson playing if you see them with open backs.  thinking rather fondly of an 1890s Fairbanks Special Electric that Cece Conway still owns that Odell Thompson is often pictured with. 

 On the other hand, when the Black traditional banjoists had choice in the matter as when Deering offered to provide Odell Thompson with a banjo, he got a new Deering RB model and also a owned a Gibson RB.  These are not traditional instruments.

There is a constant conflict between how banjo playing is an activity of the modern every changing ever progressing world in which exchange and development is constant, and a romanticist idea that old time music or banjo playing is an express trip back to a past bounded by ancient folk tradition.  Banjo playing is a development of the modern dynamic world of constant change and development, not primarily a relic of ancient tradition. 

Paradoxically,  the closer one gets to people whose origin in the banjo is in actual folk tradition--a vanished group now--the greater acceptance there is to modern innovation.  It is a shame no one ever recorded Odell Thompson playing  acoustic guitar which was his main instrument in the family  band  or playing electric guitar which he played in both R & B and even Rock and Roll bands in the late 40s and 50s.