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Originally posted by Lew H

 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.

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Herein lies another point-- the "gourd banjo" that Mike Seeger was playing is fiction.  It was created in the early 1980s (that is no typo) by Scott Didlake and Clarke Buehling.   Later, and in tandem, Pete Ross developed a similar version of the gourd banjo, and eventually studied with Scott Didlake.

There are no known original examples of gourd body 5 string banjos of this pattern.  There is one single example that has been determined to have been assembled by the seller who sold it to a museum, the neck originating on a  round wood rim.
 

These 5 string gourd banjos continue to be presented as a reflection of early banjos by musicians in the public eye, including a MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grant recipient.  The time period that these are "authentic" to is the 1980s.

One of the only features or aspects of vernacular music that seems to resist its denial as traditional is actually a characteristic: the ephemeral.

An experience produced and enjoyed for and in the moment.

Today we are as far removed from an ephemeral culture as we have ever been. Maybe that's why we place such value on what we attempt to define as 'traditional'?

It seems to me that "traditional" simply means that the same thing has been done for a long period of time.

When Earl Scruggs hit the stage of the Opry in the Forties, he would have been considered "non-traditional". Today, 75 years later, it's reasonable to describe Charlie Cushman as playing traditional Scruggs-style banjo.

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

Right. Cultural activities we take for granted, that are not felt to have any deeper significance, that are not contested, that are not tied to membership in a particular community, that require no specialized knowledge or conscious effort to maintain, are generally not identified as traditions. The "traditionality" of a given activity can shift over time or between different settings.

But even if we could reach a consensus on the meaning of tradition, we would still be hamstrung by the terms "folk" (which has been applied to everything from isolated rural communities to songwriters in 1960s Greenwich Village) and "old time" (which is an umbrella term for multiple traditions, some more "folk" than others).

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Originally posted by SophiaD

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Originally posted by banjoboyd

Many old-time banjo players and makers today are aiming for a sound that did not really exist in the past, or at least was not that common or desirable. There has occurred a timbral shift, alongside perhaps more obvious changes in technique and musical interpretation. It's a sound I would describe as "hollow-plunky,"

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I think I read something that indicated that some of the first recordings of clawhammer style banjoists have that plunky sound, and that there is a current trend to recapture that as an authentic feature of old time music.  I wonder if that's a factor.

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Might a comparison be today's RB banjo makers trying to emulate Earls' banjo to capture the sound Earl made?  

If you emulate the recorded sound of banjos in the 1920s and before, you really don't know if that's what the banjo sounded like because early recordings techniques missed so much of the sound--especially the subtleties.  I tend to set up my banjos for a sound I prefer--not necessarily based on what might have been 100 years before.

Converse and other19th century banjoists of his type make a fundamental contribution.   The use of the term "stroke style" to me seems to cover musicians who follow the exact delineations that Converse and others in his train followed.   I find it more precise to confine the use of "the stroke style" to adherents of down picking like those Converse spoke to and with the destinations and limitations that his and his peers influence radiated to.

Up picking and down picking,  seem practically useful.   The stroke style seems to denote one kind of down picking or down stroking.  I would find it hard to say Rufus Kasey played in the stroke style.  I have to admit as you may have seen me mention elsewhere.  Kasey, a Black Virginia banjoist told Kip Lornell around 1980 that he had used banjo thimbles to some point in the 1950s when he loaned his to a friend who moved away and was surprised he could no longer buy them in stores.  If I am among ABF members or classical banjoists or people familiar with that segment of banjo history and the banjo world. I do find it useful.   However, if I am writing about the banjo in general it seems limiting.

There is no line of blood about it.  I remember the discussions Shlomo, Greg, Bob, and I had working with the portion of Roots and Branches I quote earlier here and the up and down picking seemed the compromise .

I see that Tony writerrad doesn't accept the folklorist definition of what he is talking about, so I'll change paths. We all need to think about what kinds of cultural traditions are there. Culture has two parts that are useful to distinguish, ideas and material things. Gourd banjos, open back banjos and resonator banjos ( we could add tenor and plectrum banjos, banjo uses, etc) are parts of the country's current material culture. There are subcultures* today that each claim one or two of these banjos. Within these subcultures, there are ideas about how one appropriately plays on each of these banjos, when and where it is appropriate to play, and what music is appropriate. Sociologists call these ideas NORMS. Norms can come in clusters, so if one attends Cliff Top, there are areas (I am told) where only "traditional" tunes and only open back or gourd banjos are appropriate. Foggy Mountain Breakdown is not appropriate, nor neo-trad. There are kinds of norms. Some are long lived, going back generations (These might be associated with important values . Some, like clothing styles change every few years. Then there are fads that are very short lived. Any group of people might hold some of each these types of norms.

The material banjo has changed over the centuries, and the ideas about it have changed As Tony points out, slaves saw it as a ritual instrument, a part of the sacred. I know of nobody who thinks that today in the USA. It is a secular instrument. There were different subcultures in between the sacred and secular: minstrelsy, the classic or guitar style for the middle classes that Stewart promoted, the college banjo orchestras, etc. 

Another example.  In today's oldtime/openback subculture it is a fashion to have raw brass fittings--J-hooks, tuning pegs, tail pieces, etc. on openbacks.  I don't know just how or when this got started, but it wasn't that way a few years ago. In the bluegrass subcullture  nickel or gold plated fittings are still preferred.

 Differential preferences for tone  and how these might have got started have been described already. But I get the impression that there are some openback/oldtime pickers who are well trained in clawhammer are developing a new softer style of picking that is more emotive than the usual rapid fire claw. Is this a fad, a developing fashion?  Will it take root and become "traditional?"

Would it help the discussion here if we distinguish between long standing norms, fashions and fads? -- shared ideas and material goods? Can we distinguish between the subcultures that are within the banjo world?

* A subculture is a set of norms and values shared by a network of people who have been exposed to and learned that set along. They may not personally accept each detail of the norms and values, but they know, or at least believe, that other members do accept them.

Joel Hooks By the way, I didn't say that Mike Seeger f,ound a gourd banjo from the 1700s. It was a fretted instrument with planetary tuning pegs. Quite a wonderful banjo too!  It was a real banjo, contrary to what you say.  I saw it in person. I heard it. I saw Seeger clawing a bluegrass song on it.

Terminology exists to explain things.  If terminology gets confused, or is used in one context one way, and other contexts otherwise,  it does not help to bend to the confusion, but to seek clarification.   When scholars discuss the banjo and tradition,  they speak of folk traditions.  The idea of folk tradition is a rightly contested view, but for scholars it is not confused with people who call themselves folksingers and such that emerged out of  Romanticis and Peoples' Front debentures of music.  The idea of folk tradition itself is specific and well defined even if people who are not part of any folk tradition or folk culture call themselves folk singer

  It is true there are a variety of other kinds of traditions, but we mean folk tradition.  My friend Lew's delineation of what is folk tradition and music which he deals as an academic on the one hand, and as an adept musician on the other, although most of his music (we have belonged to a weekly zoom picking session together for several years)is not folk music from a folk tradition.

It does not help anyone to eliminate the idea of folk tradition or merge it with other things that call it that because it is not.  The problem is misuse of the term makes it harder to accurately discuss reality and to learn what those who have studied folk culture and folk music and how it evolves, and how it is different from other music gets thrown into the toilet.

There is also an awful lot simple refusal to recognize music that is NOT folk music and not coming from a folk tradition is NOT folk music and does not come from a folk tradition.  That is why we find it to be useful.

Bluegrass is not folk music.  It is a show business music that was created by professional musicians at the top of their genre of musical performance, on the Grand Ole Opry shows and radio broadcasts from 1945 to 47.  By and large it largely proceeded not in the playing of folk songs or airs, but in the playing of copyrighted already written, or published for the first time popular songs, or copyrighted arrangements.  Much of the discourse about "tradition" and Bluegrass only began in the late 1950s when some in the Bluegrass milieu felt Bluegrass could attract fans of the Folk Music boom.  If you examine the repertoire of Flatt and Scruggs or Bill Monroe in the 1940s, the repertoire contains relatively few songs that are folk songsm  and is largely composed of copy righted and alreadty published songs.   B

Bluegrass entertainers increased the number and amount of songs with links to tradition in the late 1950s and and early 1960s when they sought to attract people who came out of the "Folk Music" boom of that era.   Musicians like Doc Watson and the Stanley Brothers and many others sought old time and  traditional recordings from people like Ralph Rinzler, Mike Seeger, and John Cohen and added songs from such sources to their repertoire. 

 However, get any record the Stanleys or Monroe made around 1950 or even 52,  compare it with a recording they would have made in 1962 or 63, and note the prevalence of professionally composed songs and published songs, in the pre folk scare recordings and the greater number of popular songs, including non folk popular songs from England and the United States from the late 19th century and early 20th century. 

still I say the open back's voice fitting the old-time ( a stringband genre} is why it is seen more--as in "sounds better" the bottom line

With picks on a masterclone and  playing  ongoing arpeggios-- the music does  not--- fit easily --clawhammer on a resonator  is still a more differing  timbre than the other instruments

a good part of genre's and their rhetorical traditions are marketing hype uttered with great music--we fall for some good nostalgia also --nothing sinful about selling things --but we just ain't that deep into a worldwide movement --more like jam to jam-- or a good festival 

my opinion I ask no agreement

One year at the banjo gathering we had a focus on the Creeds.  It was funny insofar as at the same meet, there was a focus on the Boucher banjo and Bob Winans and Greg Adams presented a multi lecture presentation on Boucher and the banjo in Baltimore.  We met in a big room tht contained about 30 or 40 Bouchers and an equal number of Creeds.   

What i  got out of the discussion of the Creeds from people who had interacted with Creed is that Creed was an innovator rather than a traditionalist.  What I got out of the discussion of Creed by those who knew him and studied it was that he was trying to incorporate many of the measures in making a loud bright banjo with strength that had come into the banjo world in the Gibson and other resonator banjos that were created in the early 20th century, originally based on designs to meet the needs of tenor and plectrum banjos in part for band playing,

The Creeds were not a traditional throwback to anything in the banjo's past, but a late 20th century designers aim update what banjos did to sensibilities created by post WWII music and by other banjo designs.

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Originally posted by Lew H

I see that Tony writerrad doesn't accept the folklorist definition of what he is talking about, so I'll change paths. We all need to think about what kinds of cultural traditions are there. Culture has two parts that are useful to distinguish, ideas and material things. Gourd banjos, open back banjos and resonator banjos ( we could add tenor and plectrum banjos, banjo uses, etc) are parts of the country's current material culture. There are subcultures* today that each claim one or two of these banjos. Within these subcultures, there are ideas about how one appropriately plays on each of these banjos, when and where it is appropriate to play, and what music is appropriate. Sociologists call these ideas NORMS. Norms can come in clusters, so if one attends Cliff Top, there are areas (I am told) where only "traditional" tunes and only open back or gourd banjos are appropriate. Foggy Mountain Breakdown is not appropriate, nor neo-trad. There are kinds of norms. Some are long lived, going back generations (These might be associated with important values . Some, like clothing styles change every few years. Then there are fads that are very short lived. Any group of people might hold some of each these types of norms.

The material banjo has changed over the centuries, and the ideas about it have changed As Tony points out, slaves saw it as a ritual instrument, a part of the sacred. I know of nobody who thinks that today in the USA. It is a secular instrument. There were different subcultures in between the sacred and secular: minstrelsy, the classic or guitar style for the middle classes that Stewart promoted, the college banjo orchestras, etc. 

Another example.  In today's oldtime/openback subculture it is a fashion to have raw brass fittings--J-hooks, tuning pegs, tail pieces, etc. on openbacks.  I don't know just how or when this got started, but it wasn't that way a few years ago. In the bluegrass subcullture  nickel or gold plated fittings are still preferred.

 Differential preferences for tone  and how these might have got started have been described already. But I get the impression that there are some openback/oldtime pickers who are well trained in clawhammer are developing a new softer style of picking that is more emotive than the usual rapid fire claw. Is this a fad, a developing fashion?  Will it take root and become "traditional?"

Would it help the discussion here if we distinguish between long standing norms, fashions and fads? -- shared ideas and material goods? Can we distinguish between the subcultures that are within the banjo world?

* A subculture is a set of norms and values shared by a network of people who have been exposed to and learned that set along. They may not personally accept each detail of the norms and values, but they know, or at least believe, that other members do accept them.

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Originally posted by KCJones

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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'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. 

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" 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. "

No one here is speacking of "American musical tradition." Folk music and folk tradition are specific things that are defined in definite ways over now a couple centuries of discussion about what they are a specified as such things.

Folk tradition is one thing. The product of continued innovation and invention of often borrowing from the craft of making other instrument, largely driven by what the commercial market and professional market for the instruments is another things.

Most banjos made today are not open back banjo but have some kind of external resonator. This is a material fact.

crosspollination---and it's big downhill run on the world wide web --fueled by ---, available access to any whim--tradition itself is in for speedbumps --when the billboards tout new ways to ruin the world ,with banjos --
good taste is part of the establishment of a tradition among peers--they did not agree to the tempered scale all at once--but finally shook their heads yes together---that is going to be more a case of how many likes it gets --for a while--

< a 5 bender.   Aw, Charlie Poole played open back proto-bluegrass until he  broke it over a Sheriff's head and got permanent powder burn on his cheek and a chipped tooth from the bullet going by, then he sold enough moonshine to get his Gibson.  I think the picture is a promo, whatever from 1492.

I strongly suggest a Gold Tone AC-1 because they researched the original Bakelite by Harmony and then changed the composite formula to get a lighter, stronger, and more durable banjo to offer, smart enough to go 4-string, short neck and 25 fret.  I had a person stop by with one and got to play it.  I like to be able to Lean on it and it did just fine.  It won't vintage, but it still deserves a place on the plane. 

I know this gets asked a lot, but I’m just curious what the reasoning is.  Correction, AC-5

It's the sound of it that brings the fox in the fog, it's more loving and personal 

I should add that i give no special value to something because it is a folk tradition.  Earl Scruggs confessed even after years of trying, he never could play down picking, frailing, down stroking, the stroke style adequately.  He is still to me one of the greatest positive influences in my life.  He grew up in an area that was a hotbed of the guitar style of Banjo with neighbors he told he heard from his early childhood who made records that more or less quote the Frank B. Converse, that my hero Joel  Hooks tells us to honor.  And people I know who spent time with Earl at his house said he could play that music note for note until he was in his last days.  

It is no coincidence Joel points us to Converse on that, because the ABF tradition does not shy away from recognizing the massive positive influence on the banjo that non-folk banjo has had since the late 1830s,  and of world-famous banjo entertainers Black and white.

History is not advocacy, but trying to understand reality.

You cannot explain the way the banjo has risen and fallen and different developments in the banjo if you think that after it passed out of Black exclusive hands in the 1830s,  that the banjo has simply a folk tradition, or to try to say any kind of banjo playing you or anyone should like is the product of a pure folk tradition. 

 For one thing, designs of the banjo that performing music makers like Sweeney,  artisan shop luthiers like Boucher, down to the Dobsons, and on to SS Stewart and my CT homeboy Fred Bacon (really David Day did the work  and both Day and Fred were born in Massachusetts) and many others down to those who made the Gibson's, created the banjo as it is played, and that folk or traditional players have uniformly followed the modifications in the instrument that were produced by urban commercial banjo designers designing banjos for professional entertainers and popular parlor musicians.

Even if you want to study just African American banjo playing, the history of the banjo is not the unfolding of a tradition in which "folk" playing has led the great variety of changes, but the responses and contributions to tremendous change and development of the instrument and adoption of all the latest design and advances produced by commercial and artisan construction of the banjo.   

Odell when asked already owning a Gibson RB had Deering give him an RB.  Gus Cannon played a Wasburn "Professional" a professional level 5 string,  and then for a decade or more a Van Eps Recording banjo with an internal Resonator, and finally acquired a Gretsch pseudo Bacon Broadkaster with an enormous resonator.  

This returns us to the original subject of this board:  There is absolutely no truth to the idea that either historically or in actual practice, frailing or down picking, or down stroking, or stroke style banjoists play open backs, and not resonators.   This is an idea based on fashions and misinformation among old time music revivalists, that was not share among banjo players traditional and otherwise before some point in the 1960s or perhaps 1970s.  When internal resonators were available, banjoists used them and When the external resonator started to be popularized by Paramount and other makers including Gibson in the early 20th century, old time banjoists who were frailers ued them.

Dave Macon used resonator banjos from the time they were available when he was a teen aged banjo performer until just before WWII when they became too heavy for him to deal with due to severe Arthritis  he could no longer hold resonator Gibsons and had Gibson made him special Gibson banjos without a resonator with a dowel stick. '

I attach photos to illustrate this last of Gus Cannon playing his Van Eps Recording banjo with an  internal resonator and Gus Cannon in the Stax studio in 1963 with his resonator Grestch Bacon Broadcaster, myself playing Doc Boggs' Gibson RB, and myself playing one of the open back Gibson made for Dave Macon. 

Should anyone be confused and feel they can become a "traditional" banjoist by discarding their Resonator Banjo, particularly if it is a Gibson Master tone or a close clone thereof,  I am quite willing to take it off their hands as I only own 7 banjos and both are bottom of the line banjos one from the current Recording King and a Chinese Wasburn, banjos I have because they resemble the budget RBs the Black traditional banjoists I study play.  

Mike was quite fond of that banjo which someone in Los Angeles had made for him.  He was among a party of folks that Scott Odell  and other took one of my favorite banjoists, the great Rufus Kasey in his home of SW Va back in the 80s or early 1990s.  Mike brought that monster gourd banjo with him and asked Rufus if he wished to play it., Kasey who played an inexpensive Japanese invasion RB declined.  On the other hand he was excited to play Scott's Creed.

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Originally posted by writerrad

Most banjos made today are not open back banjo but have some kind of external resonator. This is a material fact.

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Interesting claim. I wonder if there's any data or evidence to back it up? Aside from getting numbers from manufacturers I don't see how anyone would be able to know this.

I spend some time talking to people who buy and sell banjos over the last two decades. I have been part of the Banjo Gathering which used to be the Banjo Collectors Gathering for 20 years. There such things are discussed not by any typist who goes ont he board but by people who own music stores and make banjos. Stan Werbin of Elderly Instruments was sitting in the room I am typing in talking to me about such things with me Monday.

Bluegrass is the biggest generator of banjo sales, not old time or folk. People who just play old time music don't understand how much bigger the world of Bluegrass is and how deep it is. You can also add in most forms of banjo playing outside of old time and bluegrass like trad jazz etc use banjos with resonators.

Just look at BHO.      Even if we old time music enthusiasts tend to type more words per banjo than anyone else [More than anyone should in my case],the dominant discussion here is about Bluegrass playing, as it should be.

Thanks

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Originally posted by Lew H

Joel Hooks By the way, I didn't say that Mike Seeger f,ound a gourd banjo from the 1700s. It was a fretted instrument with planetary tuning pegs. Quite a wonderful banjo too!  It was a real banjo, contrary to what you say.  I saw it in person. I heard it. I saw Seeger clawing a bluegrass song on it.

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Understood, my reply was for general audience as I feel this truth is left out. 

These 5 string "gourd banjos" are currently being presented (including by some Emmy winning musicians) as representing "authentic early banjos".

These claims by are misleading and many people buy/make these thinking what they are getting represents something earlier than the 1980s.

This is a problem with "old time"-- not cataloging or documenting credit, rather using a catchall vague "traditional".  When the history of these 5 string gourd banjos are discussed, Scott Didlake and Clarke Buehling should be given credit for the existence of them. 

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Originally posted by banjoboyd

But even if we could reach a consensus on the meaning of tradition, we would still be hamstrung by the terms "folk" (which has been applied to everything from isolated rural communities to songwriters in 1960s Greenwich Village) and "old time" (which is an umbrella term for multiple traditions, some more "folk" than others).

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The aspect that tends to be laid bare by research is the highly selective nature of what is defined or constructed as 'traditional'. The casualty of that process is the rich diversity that existed which owed nothing to the modern insistence on genre conventions. The narratives associated with that diversity are suppressed to reinforce a partial or idealised image largely constructed by modern sensibility. 'Old Time' as a genre and the modern elevation of 'clawhammer' to the status of 'tradition' is an interesting example of this process of selectivity, constructed narrative and omission.

The meaning of “traditional” changed significantly and permanently with the advent of 1) records and 2) radio.