Category: Instrumentation

Flying into Raleigh-Durham Airport for the “Black Banjo: Then and Now” conference, I looked through the window, soaking up my first glimpses of North Carolina and dreaming of banjos. Then I noticed how much culdesacs look like banjos from the air:

And then I thought … “I’ve got to stop thinking about banjos before I go mad!”

“Culdesac” is also a term sometimes used to describe a website that has links only to other pages within the same site, and has no links to anywhere else on the web. So if you’re just pointing and clicking at such a site, there’s NO WAY OUT.

And so, maybe banjos really are sort of like culdesacs. Hmmm, yes … food for thought …

At the “Black Banjo: Then and Now” conference, historian Ted Landsmark said he often gives talks to groups of nice, middle-class, African American church ladies, who reverently listen to him talk about black history. He brings along the usual objects of veneration — quilts and talking sticks and all that.

Then he brings out the banjo.

He said you’ve never seen a group turn on anybody so quickly. He tried to impress upon the Black Banjo conference attendees just how disgusted these audiences are that Landsmark, as a black man, would even be seen touching a banjo. It never helps much to explain that, of all the material culture produced by African slaves in the New World, the most persistent and successful is the banjo.

Well, given this taboo, it’s nice that Taj Mahal is taping a segment for the PBS series History Detectives in which he researches the possible authenticity of a banjo once owned, supposedly, by an African slave. Taj was chosen for the segment because he is a knowledgeable banjo historian and player — and is, of course, a famous black bluesman. The show was taped in Cincinatti and will air some time this summer.

I just returned from the conference, “Black Banjo: Then and Now,” held in Boone, North Carolina. This blog will plunder my memories of it for months, no doubt, but for now let me tell you a story …

I sometimes hand my banjo to somebody who’s never held one before and invite them to “make some noise.” They always do very strange things with their fingers. They might rest their thumb on the “drum” head, above the strings, and pick up with their index and middle fingers, like an electric bass player. Maybe they’ll rest all four fingers on the head below the strings and pluck down on the strings with their thumb. Maybe they’ll sit like a classical guitarist and use their thumb and all four fingers to pick the strings.

It’s interesting to watch what they do, and it’s immediately obvious that they have no knowledge of any of the banjo-playing traditions.

But — in one incident after another, stretching back many decades — Oldtime banjo players hand their banjos to West African players of a Senegambian instrument called the akonting, and they immediately play clawhammer like they’ve been playing the banjo all their lives. Alternately, a banjoist will pick up the akonting and play like a master griot, much to the amazement of his West African hosts.

The banjo is an African instrument and clawhammer is an African playing technique. The instrument and the technique simply survived slavery and are alive and very well today in America, albeit generally in the hands of white Oldtime musicians. Knowing this fact, and fully imagining it, has been a profound shock and inspiration to me.

Banjo spikes are little L-shaped pieces of wire that old-time banjoists, especially, drive into their banjo fretboards, underneath the fifth string (sometimes called the short, drone, or thumb string). They use these spikes like permanent capos for the 5th string — just tuck it under the spike to raise its pitch, usually in combination with a regular capo on the other four strings.

So, here’s the thing: They’re called “spikes” because they’re literally railroad spikes — used by model railroaders to hold down their HO-scale model train tracks. Banjoists have to buy them at hobby-train supply shops.

If you like your metaphors straight up, and no chaser, this is your poison: That banjo string is the lonesome old Long Steel Rail. Sometimes old-time banjoists die with a teeny-tiny little hammer in their hand, trying to beat that itsy-bitsy steam drill …

For vivid, multi-page instructions on installing railroad spikes in your banjo, see Richie Dotson’s BanjoResource.com.

A guy vacationing in Naples has stumbled across one of the most desparately sought pieces of ancient scholarship, long thought lost forever when the great Library of Alexandria Egypt was destroyed around 400 AD.

Apparently, it had been right in front of millions of tourists for decades.

A statue of Atlas carrying the Universe on his shoulders turns out to have used the lost celestial globe of Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer who first discovered the precession of Earth’s axis, observed a nova, precisely calculated the length of the year, and invented the stellar brightness scale used today.

And he also made this newly-rediscovered, amazingly accurate star map, complete with celestial equator, ecliptic, and Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

The round drum of a banjo is called the “pot” — you say your open-back banjo has an 11-inch pot, and so forth.

Obviously, I’m not the first to notice the cooking association. One of the best-known stringbands before WWII was The Skillet Lickers. It’s like guitar “licks,” except played on a banjo, which if you hold it by the neck, looks like a skillet.

The signature song of the great banjo songster Uncle Dave Macon was “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy”. I like that the design of a 5-string banjo is “written into” this song’s tune. The SKILL syllable is high and loud and you can easily play it by snapping the high 5th string. The word TIME in the rest of the line (“Keep my skillet good and greasy all the time, time, time”) slides up several notes each time it’s said, so it goes: “Keep my SKILLet good and greasy all the slide, slide, slide”. The melody seems to spring naturally from the design of old-time fretless banjos.

There’s also an old banjo tune called “Sugar in the Gourd,” which may refer to the fact that banjos used to be made from gourds, and there’s a great sweetness to the sound of a gourd banjo.

Of course, all of this might be sexual innuendo, as well.