Cece Conway

Partial Transcript: No transcript available

Partial Transcript: Well, when I was in college I began going to fiddler’s conventions. I had moved to Duke from North Carolina—I mean, from—I had moved to Duke from Texas and I began going to fiddler’s conventions and had some friends who played old-time music and got more and more interested into it and then married a banjo player. And then my sort of professional interest and academic interest and personal interest came together in an easy way to work on them all at once. Some—about 1973 we met a black banjo player and I had never met one before—John Snipes. And it was fascinating and puzzling. It was—he played a lot of the same tunes we knew but he played them a little differently and he loved to go lickety split and play real long tunes.

And then I got to meet two more black banjo players and the fiddler Joe Thompson and North Carolina had a student-initiated grant, which I received and that was just enough money to make a film about Dink Roberts and to record a lot of their music of the three players. And that sort of—that fieldwork became the basis of what eventually became my dissertation than later my book. And so that was just very fortuitous. And our little film in 1975 did when best in the show for the first North Carolina Film Festival. So then in 2005—well, so back up just a little bit.

So I wrote my book and a lot of it is still very much the same as it was when I wrote my book. But about the year 2000, new research began to come to us from West Africa from Senegambia and particularly southern Gambia. And a long spike neck lutes the first one we saw was the accounting began to look more like our early gourd banjos in this country. The gourd banjo arrived with blacks in this country no later—in this colony, in the colonies no later than 1740 in Maryland. And the descriptions of the early gourd banjo and the first picture in 1792 of a banjo also just that these long spike neck banjos, now there are about five traditions that have been discovered or found or noticed by people who didn’t grow up with them—seem to have been the physical influence of our earliest gourd banjos and to have provided us with dropped clawhammer banjo playing. So that was very exciting.

And in 2005 Mark Freed, who is the cultural coordinator here at the Jones House and you met. Was—had joined an online group called something like black banjo then and now. And they wanted to meet each other instead of being just scattered online. And they thought they would have a fish fry and so he invited these folks here to Boone in 2005 and we held the first black banjo gathering and that was very exciting. And so ever since then, I’ve been kind of nurturing that project along in different times and different ways.

Partial Transcript: Well, it’s a very complicated subject and to really understand it you have to try to place it in historical, chronological context. And first off, Anglo-Saxon is a term that’s no help at all. A lot of the first settlers in the colonies were English and they settled along the coast. The Cherokee had been here for hundreds of years before that up here in the mountains. And this mountain, southern mountain territory near North Carolina—in the west of North Carolina was their domain. One of the first families to settle on Beech Mountain, which is very near us—and it was the first frontier settlement in the mountains and Madison County was the second, where lots of great ballad singers also live and where Cecil Sharp visited. Although, he did not make it to Beech Mountain.

So the first settler on Beech Mountain arrived about the time of the Revolutionary War. His great-grandfather had come in as an indentured servant and worked on a tobacco plantation at the Mount of the Rappahannock River in 1637 or so and come in through Jamestown. He eventually worked off his term of servitude and had a family and bought some land in the Virginia Valley. And eventually, his family became the ballad-singing and Jack Tale-telling Hicks family of Beech Mountain, Ray Hicks being one of the best-known Jack Tale tellers. So the first Hicks to end up on Beech Mountain didn’t get there until about the time of the Revolution. He had moved down into coastal North Carolina and he didn’t want to fight the English or the Patriots.

And so he started moving west and went across the Blue Ridge and eventually got a land grant for 300 acres on Beech Mountain. Then another family, the Wards, arrived just after the Revolution, and that Ward had been a soldier and had seen the land as he passed through during the Revolutionary War and came back to settle there. And he traded a rifle, a sheep’s skin, and something else—maybe a hound dog for the 300 acres that had first been taken. And the Hicks moved further on back into the mountain. And the Wards stayed on the Watauga River.

So here we are in the 1770s and it’s during the 1700s that the Scots-Irish start moving from Ireland. They had been there a hundred years. They had racked the rents on them. They began to move in whole—often in congregations. And come in and also a lot of Germans were moving at this time. A lot of the Germans came in through Philadelphia and went straight west. A lot of the Scots-Irish came down the Virginia Valley and eventually ended up in our mountains and were very influential. So whether any of them were Anglo-Saxons is unclear. But many of them were Scots-Irish and a lot of the Germans also settled in the mountains as well.

And of course, the Cherokee were all there and had their own music, which tended to be much more ritually based and connected to like flutes or reed instruments and percussion. And again, ritually based and communal. We know less about that interaction than we need to know. Now, when African Americans begin moving west soon after they arrived in Maryland—and we have sort of scattered stories about them. There was a black family that moved into this area, the Thompson’s, around the time of the Civil War. Also, one of the Hicks descendants coming home from the Civil War stopped off in Wilkesboro and got a pattern for an inset rim banjo, which we now call a mountain banjo, and a lot of people around here make—like Rick Ward is one of the people. He’s a ninth descendant of both the Hicks and the Wards and sings southern company ballads and plays and makes banjos, mountain banjos. And his grandfather was a great banjo player who had an unusual style called double knot.

Partial Transcript: We don’t know nearly as much about the interactions between blacks and whites in the early years as we would like to know or need to know. We do know that Dave Thompson played the banjo and lived on—well, they were moving west and they felt they were going to move into free territory before the Civil War. But their ox cart broke down on the edge of North Carolina and they ended up settling on Thompson—what’s called Thompson Mountain now. And we only know this because of their descendants who were still alive in the 1990s.
And they for example—and I believe two or three others in the immediate area that were at least three black banjo players. And they would sometimes go up into Yukon, Virginia, and play on payday when the mines did their paying and it was a good time to bus for money. So we know there was interaction then. Also, some of the other folks around here like the Prophets and possibly Doc Watson’s family sometimes played music with them and there was some shared repertoire.

Partial Transcript: Well, one of the things that’s important to think about the communal life is it was a world of crossroads. Not so much of towns. People lived in the country but they still helped each other out. There would be barn buildings, workings, whoever found the first maize color, corn cobb would get the quart of Liquor that someone had made. And a lot of people in the immediate area came to those events. But for example, there might be a store at the crossroads and after it closed maybe it would be totally quiet. On the other hand, if there happened to be a dance or a party going on that night, maybe the whole community would have converged up on the store.

So the Crossroads community came and went as the social occasion talked about it. And it’s important to—and also, the family farms often had a dozen children to help work the farm because they needed all of that help to be able to raise enough to support themselves. There would also be dances. For example, down around Low Gap and Mount Erie, Round Peak. Particularly Round Peak when Tommy Jarrell XE "Tommy Jarrell," say, was a boy growing up. He was born in 1901 and his dad, who was also a great fiddler, and even recorded on records, would take the older children, leave the mother at home with the younger children—but take the older children to the dance. And we actually got to have a dance in one of the old houses and there were both rooms where they played music and danced in both rooms at the same time because there were so many people there.

And Tommy began playing—Tommy Jarrell began playing fiddle or banjo at these dances before he was sixteen years old. He began learning the banjo from a man who worked for them named Boggy Cockram about the time he was eight. And by the time he was sixteen, he was able to play fiddle for the community dances.

Partial Transcript: He was white. However, he—Tommy did know a few blacks. There was a man who came to buy liquor from his daddy when he was young who played I think—but not in a claw hammer style—by then he was playing a picking style. What we do know about black banjo playing is that the oldest style was down stroking, like clawhammer and it’s well documented in the banjo instructor books of the minstrels starting no later than 1850. But they’re documenting a tradition that had been here since probably 1740.

And then later finger picking came in and that might have been influenced by other West Africans, perhaps even the Grio(???) players. Although, very few Grios were ever enslaved and brought to this country maybe—who knows? Maybe the influence took place in Africa and then came. But that’s an interesting little puzzle because—at the time I wrote my book all of us scholars who were interested in this believe that the Grios who have—and were the primary influence on white banjo playing. And the reason for that is because almost every banjo technique we’re familiar with is still embedded in the Grio tradition.

Partial Transcript: The Griot is like Mali —the Kingdom of Mali has many Griots and it’s a very professionalized family. Many of them play different instruments. The Kora is the most famous and the most complicated. And they were advisors to the king or the chieftain. They were highly respected and they were often well-paid and continue to want to be well paid. Whereas, the spike lute tradition that I discussed earlier is a folk tradition. And the people who play those traditions still live in southern Gambia further south, away from the Islamic influence that had come in from the east. And so it’s interesting—I mean, we’re still trying to understand how those two traditions really influenced southern banjo playing.

And just one other thing I’ll add—is that even though as mysterious as it is exactly the specific influences of blacks on white, it’s clearly the case that African American music and improvisation and syncopation are characteristics that have made southern music tremendously exciting and mountain music tremendously exciting and quite different from European and British Isles and Sottish and Irish traditions. Although, they did intermix quite a bit eventually

Partial Transcript: Well, so we do know that the banjo—the gourd banjo brought by Africans arrived in Maryland no later than 1740. And for almost a hundred years they were the only ones who played the gourd instrument. In about 1830s a few white people began to take an interest in the banjo, like Joel Sweeney, who was from Appomattox, Virginia, and probably learned from neighbor slaves and slave folks near him. And a man named Ferguson joined a circus and Dan Emmett learned to play banjo from him. He was a white man but he had obviously learned it from blacks. The point is, there was no one to learn from except blacks in these 1830 early years.

Ferguson ended up eventually in New Orleans and again, he taught Dam Emmett so he was quite good. But while he was in New Orleans there were terrible epidemics going on and he died quite young—almost as soon as we—only a year or two after we know that he lived and traveled with the circus. So those were a couple of the earliest players who were white. Around 1840 Sweeney popularized or possibly even invented the five-string banjo. Now, what’s really important about that is that the fifth string he added to the banjo was not what we call the fifth string today. Not the little short string that we still have on the five-string banjo—but it was the fourth long string and that gave the banjo greater melodic expanse, which the Celtic tunes appreciated. So they were played say, on the fiddle. So that was really, very helpful.

He also was influential—well, by 1800 we have—there’s a painting, The Old Plantation of a black musician playing a four-string banjo. You can definitely see the short string on that. But what’s unusual about this, rather than the spike, maybe bamboo or gourd neck—it has a flat fingerboard like we have today and it had two neem pegs. So those influences probably had arrived in the Caribbean or as the banjo was getting from southern and west Africa, from southern Gambia through the Caribbean to the southern states. That’s by 1800. We know that those features had begun to be influential.

And then later around the time of Sweeney, first there were tacked banjo heads but then there came to be bracketed banjo heads and the open-back banjo came in. So the musician might swipe his wife’s flour sieve. That didn’t make her too happy. But then around 1850 people started manufacturing cheese and cheese hoops were described in a lot of the early banjo building and I’m one who called attention to the fact that the cheese may have been significant in that transition from the gourd to open-back banjos. And even if you still go into some old country stores you can see the cheese hoop that would make a great banjo.

So Sweeney was very proud of his banjo and by—I think it was 1842 the minstrelsy had begun taking off already. Sweeney became part of it with the Virginia Minstrels and they may have been the first band to have a fiddle and banjo together. And there are other people in that band who had learned to play banjo who claimed that they had actually put the fiddle and banjo together a little bit before that. And partly, tuning would have been an issue—how to tune the banjo to go well with the fiddle. And there are a lot of accounts of musical shows and people grimacing over the tuning. But on the other hand, a lot of white people grimaced over the black playing because they didn’t understand it. And they didn’t understand how improvisation would have been. And it’s my belief that the first generation of white minstrels really respected the black players. They might have been happy to co-op their techniques and music and ideas, but they really respected their ability and tried very hard to learn their playing techniques.

But it’s very difficult to do. Even today, people find it hard to understand what’s going on when someone’s playing claw hammer. So it’s not surprising that maybe some minstrels caught part of it, others caught another part. And so even though the southern white traditions, once established, continued to go on by itself—meanwhile, as Sweeney went north and others went north and there began to be such—they became a huge rage. It was the first popular entertainment in this country that hadn’t existed before. And I think it arose in part because it was the first time that blacks and whites had lived close to each other and really begun to know each other. And it was a way to explore that and I’m romantic enough to like to think if it had been more successful, we wouldn’t have had to have the Civil War. But I do think that was a key issue and attempt to explore that.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, the minstrel and its effects upon blacks was very complicated. And as you’ve said, at first you have the white minstrels learning only from blocks. And they began to play out and as minstrelsy, began to—black-faced white minstrelsy began to emerge—a lot of even white reviewers commented that the blacks were even better than these guys are. So there was an appreciation amongst some audiences for that. But again, as blacks became more popular eventually blacks did have opportunities in minstrelsy to make a living.

One of the first—well, first of all, it was easier for white people to imitate dancing than learn how to play the banjo or sing the songs. And so the first white minstrel supposedly saw the dance of a stableman, perhaps even traded his clothes and performed the dance that night—either in Cincinnati or in Kentucky, Jim Crow. And it was wildly successful. And then later they began to add the fiddle or—and even sometimes the original rice who did that dance was accompanied by the solo fiddle rather than orchestral kind of music. And that was very popular and he was very popular. And in Europe, all of these minstrels were treated remarkably.

And so then later as the banjo came into it and then the fiddle and banjo, the troops began to travel into Europe and Queen Victoria was very impressed with Joel Sweeney and supposedly gave him a red money belt. And when he came home from that trip he was lighting his cigars with dollar bills and—but there’s a report that they made—the Virginia Minstrels made—600 pounds in one night in Cork, Ireland. That is a tremendous amount of money today for a single band to make in a one-night show. So that’s fascinating data.

Partial Transcript: Well, they went from—the minstrel shows went from say, this single dancer to—by 1842 at least four members with the banjo, fiddle, maybe a tambourine and bones. And that was the core group and they experimented with a lot of different songs and stuff. And really—my interest in the minstrel show has been mostly folk influences upon it at various times. There was a black dancer, Juba Lane early on and he also played the banjo. And he was such a good dancer, he had learned in New York actually in the Five Points District and he’s even been written about by Charles Dickens. His wild dancing in New York City.

But he was such a good dancer that finally no white people would compete with him. And eventually, he moved to London and danced there quite famously, but unfortunately, he too died fairly early. But that was one of the opportunities that a black man did fine and did get to enjoy for at least a certain amount of time. And the images—a lot of the images in minstrelsy are so stereotyping and depressing and yet they also give us information about the instruments. We can see that minstrels were still playing gourds at a certain point and then we can see that stopped. And to add to that, blacks—like whites—took up the new open-back banjo. They were excited with this new banjo too and very few people continued to make and play gourd banjos. Although, a few did—even into the early twentieth century.

Partial Transcript: There’s debate about that. A variety of white analysts have said that they wanted to put that, as well as slavery, behind them and not mess with it. But then there were others who just kept playing the banjo right along and because it was their music and they cared about it. So it’s—and there are some black musicians who feel that that—the analysis of their trying to get rid of it is overdone. But I think both things were happening.

Interviewer
Are there particular well-known musicians that—performers that we know today who got their start—black musicians, who got their start through the minstrel shows?

Cece
Now, that’s history that I really don’t know.

Interviewer
I heard Louie Armstrong was one of those who—

Cece
That’s probably true. I mean, and certainly, he was an influential and an early figure, old enough to have been influenced by minstrelsy. And speaking of white musicians, Uncle Dave Macon from western Tennessee—eastern Tennessee was—also had a lot of minstrel technique as well as many other styles. And it turns out that he grew up quite close to a lumber company that hired a lot of blacks and the—John Lusk was the fiddle player and Murphy Gribble was the banjo player. And early in the twentieth century, they were considered one of the best dance string bands by both blacks and whites. And even more fascinating is the fact that Lusk’s fiddle was quite elegant and it had been passed down to him by his grandfather and the grandfather said he had been trained in New Orleans in the 1840s to play not only all the white dances, but he also played all of the black, Suky Jumps and other dances.

Partial Transcript: So another potential area of influence was Uncle Dave Macon, who a lot of radio listeners thought might be black. But of course, he was white and he did have a lot of minstrel tunes and he played about five different styles and was one of the oldest white early players. And so he gives us a real glimpse into the past. And he lived very near to well-known players—John Lusk, he played fiddle, and Murphy Gribble, who played banjo. And they were fantastic and people in the area, both white and black, considered them the best dance band. And we’re lucky that recordings exist of them. Not commercial, but at least there are recordings.

And Lusk’s grandfather—Lusk, whereas, the other guys in the band had mail order instruments, Lusk’s was a very beautifully crafted fiddle. And it had been handed down from his grandfather, who told him that he had learned to play in New Orleans in the 1840s where he was trained to learn the white dance music as well as the Suky Jumps and kitchen hops of the black culture. So that’s one of the really interesting and important things about black fiddle players, is that many of the most traditional ones had two major repertoires—a white repertoire and a black repertoire. And that included Joe Thompson, Carl of Martin Bogan and Armstrong, and many others that we know about.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think one of the things we want to do is go back to when I was talking about the settlement of Beech Mountain in Madison County, which are—again, the two oldest mountain settlements. And Beech was settled around the time of the Revolutionary War and Madison a little later. And if we look for a quick history of music that arrived on this continent that was not here with the Native Americans, it begins with unaccompanied singing. The ballads being the most intense and the most complex sung English poetry—the earliest English poetry. And they are riveting still today.

And the old singers called them old love songs. And they are all about love, although many of them are bloody and all about jealousy and death, murder. So maybe not with the English who first sailed along the coast, but maybe no later than the time of the Scots-Irish—in the 1700s, those songs were getting into the mountains and settling there and remaining very influential. Although, there were also Germans and there were some blacks and the Cherokee were nearby—those songs are still sung and valued despite all the new music that’s come since then.

Then the fiddle starts arriving in the 1700s also and I think there are fascinating puzzles about that. Had the French dancing masters brought some of the French fiddle tradition with them? And there’s stories of a black man, two stable hands escaped on horses from a barn in Maryland and eventually ended up in Wheeling, West Virginia—what’s now West Virginia and they began working on barges there. And this black player finally ended up down on the river playing for the future King of France, who complemented his fiddle playing.

Then there was an early player—fiddle player whom Daniel Boone knew in Kentucky. And he might have been one of the first blacks of the 4,000 blacks living in Kentucky who was freed for his bravery in protecting—trying to protect the daughter of a young white—the young white daughter of one of the local Boonsboro folks. So we begin to get glimpses of the influence of old black fiddle players in the mountains. And meanwhile, blacks were the primary dance fiddlers for blacks and whites on the plantations as well as often, in the mountains.

The first reference known to me of a black fiddler is Accomack, Virginia, 1690 where a black fiddler played for whites to dance. And then all through the 1700s blacks were the primary dance fiddlers on all the plantations. And they also probably became the first dance callers as identified in a—I think it’s an 1830 reference to a dance again, in New Orleans. So blacks were tremendously influential through their fiddle playing. Then 1740 the banjo arrives and I told you a little bit about that history.

So basically, the short version of the history of traditional music is unaccompanied singing, solo fiddle playing, solo banjo playing. And when the fiddle and the banjo began to start getting together was at different times and different places. And it’s hard to know that—for example, the white Hammons family in West Virginia—those musicians could play fiddle and they could play banjo. They knew the same tunes maybe on both of them. But they never played the fiddle and banjo together. They maintained that older solo tradition.

And then about in the early 1900s, the guitar—which was an expensive, hard-to-make instrument—became inexpensively available through mail order. And Tommy Jarrell, the old fiddle player said that the first people around his area of Mount Erie to play the guitar were blacks and women—people who were not so much playing maybe fiddles and banjos at that time—and got fascinated by this new instrument that could support the voice. And out of that, we had two new genres—the blues coming up around that time and the early country like the Carter family. And then bluegrass arrives around the time of World War II. So that’s kind of a short story of the history of traditional music.

Partial Transcript: Well, remember that the blacks were the primary fiddlers of the 1700s, which is the same time that the Scots-Irish are arriving. So I think they probably got just as excited about—and actually, black influence upon white fiddle playing predates banjo influence. And I think that’s when it was happening and you begin to see crooked tunes and syncopated tunes. And so I think there was—just as minstrelsy became very exciting to black and white players at a certain time, I think even before that it was very exciting for fiddle players.

And again, because the French were on the other side of the Mississippi River and way down south, their influence—how much of the influence they had, it would have been really early and less, later.

Partial Transcript: Okay, so we made it up to the fiddle and banjo being put together. And then we have the guitar added to that string band. And there were black string bands just as there were white string bands, although less of them usually. And good musicians like to hear good music wherever it comes from. And to go back—there’s another specific example say, with Tommy Jarrell, who—his fiddle playing was short bow and vigorous and very rhythmic. So you feel African-American influence, even though he had minor influences.

I think partly that came from his having played with an older white man who was a banjo player in his father’s generation and a great player. And the banjo just automatically had more black influence within it. And then he tells the story of two black songs that he learned. One, he and his brother were boys and had gone to a show—a tent show I guess that came through town and a black woman sang this song. And they were so moved by it that they paid their money again and want to hear it a second time. And he learned the song from that as a young man.

Then another example was much later when he was living in town and—Ronald N Spencer Done Gone Down—that’s the name of the tune. And one night when he was lying in bed late in the night he heard a black man coming home singing the words to that song. And later his white brother-in-law had learned the tune on guitar and he heard that and then Tommy put that together into a fabulous fiddle song that was one of his finest. So he learned that song from the black man, but whether he actually ever met him I don’t know.

We did—when we were filming him, we did go down and take Tommy and we visited with the younger members of the family. And that was very interesting. So it all gets very complicated and we don’t know enough. Another—the Foddrells were a black band in—

Interviewer
How do you spell that?

Cece
F-o-d-d-r-e-l-l-s. Just over the border in Virginia. And they—the father, Posey, owned a store and there was a lot of music at the store and a lot of music with white people coming and playing also. So that was another place where there was close friendships made and great music played.

Partial Transcript: Well, that’s—I think that’s going to take other scholars to be able to help us solve those. Because just—you’ve got to look at each little region. And I know a lot more about North Carolina than I do a lot of the other Mountain states. And then there’s the whole issue of coal mining. And North Carolina didn’t have coal mining so as you move into those coal mining areas, a lot of the farming land was decimated. At times there were strikes and other things and blacks were brought in from the deep South to become a part of the workforce. So there began to be a lot of influence there and that’s very interesting.

And then there were also European immigrants that were brought in. And some of the—there’s been some very good work done on the dancing there. For example, there’s—there was some Charleston going on in one area and the dance partly imitated the black Charleston. Whites were doing the dances. But then there was I think may be Hungarians who had been settled there and you can see the influence of their dances on this.

And so that was a much more multicultural area. Later everywhere was multicultural in the early days with the Germans and the English and the Scots-Irish. I think actually less English kind of came into this area than the Scots-Irish. And the German influence tended to be more in material culture and food I think rather than in musical. They were great music—instrument builders and influential—the dulcimer was influenced probably by a German instrument. And a lot of the Germans became the finest instrument makers.

Partial Transcript: Well, yeah. Of course. So you’ve got AP going with a black fiddle player who was learning the songs and teaching them to him and then he was writing the songs for the family to do. That was highly important. Likewise, Bill Monroe was influenced by a black musician early on. But again, most of my work has been in the styles that preceded the genres of country music or bluegrass. Bluegrass, you know, is everywhere in this state and it has a lot of presence. So it doesn’t need to be kind of nurtured in a way that I think some of the older traditions do.

And so let’s go back now for a minute to the Cecil Sharp. Here we are in the hundredth anniversary of Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles being in this region for three different summers. And a lot of people like to fuss at Sharp for not collecting all the music that was going on. And it’s true that he missed a lot but what he was looking for—or what excited him so much was that music that he loved that was dying out in England had been preserved here. And why was that and why was it so good and he wanted to preserve that. And he did go ahead and also preserve at least a dozen fiddle tunes.

And maybe he got the analysis of the Kentucky running set, all scrambled up. But at least he described it enough for people to be able to wonder about what it really was. And so I think people who do feel were—are impassioned to do it for various reasons. And about the best we can do is be thankful that they were there so that we have something even if we wish someone else had been recording more banjo tunes.

Partial Transcript: I’ve read a lot of it and he was here. He wrote his—part of his first draft of his book here.

Interviewer
All right. Because he talks about Cecil Sharp walking into a black settlement, realizing he’s in a black settlement, completely—immediately turning around and getting out as quickly as he can, you know, the other side of the tracks and his derogatory comments he makes of negroid music.

Cece
Well, fortunately, I haven’t even read that part of Sharp or Phil. But, you know, I don’t doubt that he could have been very prejudiced.

Interviewer
But he had—I mean, I understand that he had—he was looking for what he was looking for and that’s what he was looking for. And so everything else was less important and so—
Cece
In his mind. I mean, where he was going to spend his time and money?

Cece
And, you know, and that we wouldn’t want him being that way around black people. And it was interesting—you know, Tommy Jarrell had some old verses in songs that might have been offensive to black listeners and players. And as he got older he quit singing those out at big festivals. Because he didn’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings. And one time he and another banjo player were at the dance festival doing a big concert and he met Willie Trice(???) who was a fantastic old blues player—had diabetes, had lost both legs. A very interesting man and the banjo player kept asking him, “Well, do you know soldier stories? Do you know this?” You know, all of his tunes, and finally Tommy said, “Be quiet. If you want to know about the man’s music let him tell you about it. Don’t be asking him about our tunes.” You know, so I don’t know. It’s all very complicated. But—

Partial Transcript: Well, there’s others who know more about it than I do but—a lot of the black dancing was called flat footing and it was feet flat toward the floor. Whereas, a lot of the white solo dancing was perhaps more Scots and Irish influenced. And yet the upper body was quite straight. They could dance with a water glass on their head or on their shoulder or something. And those began to get tangled up. And it was interesting to hear Dink talk about this, the black banjo player. Because when the slow drag came in, which I guess would have been blues dancing in the early part of the century, he didn’t like that at all. He liked fast dance music. So—not old stuff. You know, he would talk about—black people just had different tastes. His son was a very good dancer, James.

Partial Transcript: Okay. Well—so they finally caught on that there was a lot happening and they split the records into hillbilly records and race records. But at least they recorded a lot of black music. Now, they were no longer interested in banjo music. The minstrelsy had run a huge rage from the 1840s until at least 1890 and there still were dribs and drabs of it in the twentieth century. So for the race recordings, they wanted guitar and music and the blues particularly. There were quite a few black fiddlers who were recorded. And occasionally, people ended up in the wrong category.

But for example, there was a black fiddle player who played with a white band but all the photographs were just of the white people in the band. So that was part of their whitewash effort there. And meanwhile, with the white music at first, they were interested in the fiddle playing and the string bands and the skits—the skillet lickers and stuff like that. And, you know, one of the stories was that Grayson and Whitter were a couple of the first people to record and a lot of the people out in the mountains, you know, that were sent—well, if I’m a lot better than they are. If they can get recorded I ought to be able to get recordings too.

And a lot of them were recorded and a lot of them went up to New York and were—there’s a story about Eck Robertson, the famous Texas fiddler who had thirteen parts to Sally Gooden, one for every one of his girlfriends. And that he went to a Civil War reunion early in the twentieth century in Richmond at the Jefferson Hotel. Very fancy. He’s in his three-piece suit and they played for a big square dance there and was all quite formal in a way.

But then he and his band decided to go to New York and try to get a recording. And they go there and they said, “Well, oh, we have a lot of fiddle players.” But actually, when he played a couple of tunes they paid attention. They did record him. But then they released the band in cowboy outfits. So that was another—there were thoughts that updating was helpful to make things more popular or whatever.

Partial Transcript: Well, part of what happened was that in the late nineteenth century, various instrument makers like SS Stuart wanted to uplift the banjo and wanted to market it to young ladies and to college orchestras. There were banjo orchestras that had like twenty members playing every conceivable type of banjo in three-piece tuxedos. And they succeeded quite well. And part of what happened there was that they erased the black roots to make it easier to do that.

And they also erased a lot of the rural white roots, you know, even the continuous influence of white tradition into bluegrass is sometimes not fully appreciated. But anyhow, the main thing was erasing the black roots. And then there were less people playing it—for whatever reasons, there were less people playing banjo. Well, I think another important thing was that when the guitar became easily accessible in the early 1900s blacks loved to sing and they had a more complicated song and banjo interaction than anything else. That’s one of the remarkable parts of black banjo songs. And it’s an underappreciated genre for that matter.

And it’s one of the harder things to learn. And sometimes the melodies follow each other, other times the vocal and the banjo melodies are completely different. Other times there’s a kind of rhythmic rift going on with a vocal. And so there was a lot of complexity in banjo songs. The guitar sustains its notes in a way that the banjo doesn’t and supports the voice. And I think blacks fell in love with the guitar and that that’s partly why they took more interest in that after—I mean, they had been playing the banjo for hundreds of years and here was this new instrument that was so fascinating. And so that’s how we got the blues and many other traditions that came after that in black culture.

So I think that’s another part of the story as well as the erasure of the historical influence. And so when we had the black banjo gathering in 2005 it was partly to revise stereotypes and to reintroduce this history and to help reclaim the banjo history for African Americans. And about 130 people came to the conference from all over the country and probably double the black population of Boon for that long weekend and got very excited about knowing that not only did they feel a connection to the old music, but that there was a historical connection.

And it was at the 2005 gathering that Rhiannon and Justin and Dom met each other. One from Arizona, one in Richmond, another from Gastonia, and decided to move to Durham and they had met Joe Thompson and worked with him and played with him maybe every other week at his home. And had—so the tradition was not broken. Because of their devotion to Joe’s playing, they really had the direct, face-to-face exposure to black traditional music. And then they—at first I think they moved during the—the gathering was in the spring, in April and they moved almost right after that. In December they came up here for a festival we had including one of the Africans and played for free.

They were playing all over the place and they were the hit of the show and I thought they were staying overnight but they had to drive home. We did finally manage to raise enough money to pay for their gas. But then in the spring of that year, they opened for Taj Mahal and supposedly he said, “I can retire now.” And gave them his agent and they became internationally famous almost right away and it’s been better and better ever since in a lot of ways. So it’s thrilling because they can really reach out to young black audiences and help that tradition grow. And there are more black players now than there were before then.

Partial Transcript: Well, that’s again—not too much of my expertise. But the big record companies became the gatekeepers and so they controlled what was paying. And that—you know, narrowed the field. I mean, and that’s part of the digital revolution that’s exciting, is that anyone can make their record now. Part of what depresses me is this sort of grab-and-go download individual songs. Because if we lose the CDs, the thing about an old record—they had great notes. And to go back to black and white influence we need to at least mention the anthology—the Harry Smith anthology of American folk music.

Because that was the first time that black and white music I believe was released in the same package. And Harry Smith’s notes where he could summarize a song incredibly well in just a few lines. And each package—the whole package was a work of art. The notes were incredible. I mean, he could say so much in so little. And so that was tremendously important. And so all those recordings from the 20s and 30s—a lot more understanding came to be known about it.

And those recordings were highly influential upon the revival—like with the New Lost City Ramblers and in the south with the Hollow Rock String Band with Allen Jabour, who we just lost in January and Tommy Thompson. And then with the Red Clay Ramblers and also the other string band, Fuzzy Mountain and on, who played a lot of great fiddle music.

So if we lose the whole artistic package that comes in a record or a CD and have only whatever cut strikes, somebody, as they fly by, you know, the history’s going to be erased again. And that concerns me a great deal. I could not have written my book without record notes and they were more beautiful and fun at that time.

Partial Transcript: The most meaning of it. I mean, and we may—if people happen to be exposed to it, they may be able to appreciate it but they won’t know the history without—history’s part of our identity. I mean, just like the black influences were erased, tons of the other influences can be erased. However, I will tell you another little story. I mean, so my mother lived to be ninety years old—
—so much of parting. I mean, it’s often more a way to escape than a way to connect with family and friends. And yet, I think the old music really—people can learn to play that themselves. A lot of the words are witty or deep and they can change some of them if they feel like they need to and learn how to connect more. And like learning—the young people here who are still in high school, they have really great musical resources and the immediate vicinity like the ballad singer and banjo maker and player. But then when we bring these national shows in, they do workshops with them and they get to hear totally different kinds of music.

Like a couple years ago, we had Liz Knowles and her band from—who play incredible Irish music. And one of the young boys was fascinated with the uilleann pipes and, you know, he may never get around to taking them up. But that made some kind of connection with him and that musician. So anyway, I think—

Partial Transcript: Well, I think the live music is the first step. Because then you can get to know the musicians who are playing. And they may be local or they may be national—but a lot of—like the concerts here at the Jones House, seat maybe forty people. So there’s plenty of sense of connection. And a lot of the programs that I helped Mark put on—some of them—we always have a discussion part in it. Not very long but just to kind of let people have a sense of back and forth with the musicians. And I think that helps. And then maybe two kids want to learn how to play.

And then right now, there’s a string band that’s touring with Cecil that all started as little youngsters who’ve become—you know, maybe they will or maybe they won’t become as famous as the Chocolate Drops but at least they’re well on their way to music being a part of their community life.