The Glory-Beaming Banjo

The old-time music community lost one of its biggest champions this week. Kerry Blech died on Monday, Sept. 18, in Gainesville, Florida, and left behind an incredible legacy of musicianship, scholarship and fellowship. Kerry left a lasting impact on those who knew him. Upon learning of his passing, I started to see remembrances of him on Facebook from the likes of Alice Gerrard, Chuck Levy, and many others. I never never met Kerry in person, but even still he had a huge impact on my journey into old-time music.  On the advice of Old-Time Herald editor Sarah Bryan, I began emailing Kerry in January 2018 in my quest to learn more about Ohio's old-time music history  and the Kent State Folk Festival . Not only did he respond, but he provided me with a wealth of information and photos to help me in my research. He also connected with me others to reach out to learn more.  He was an encyclopedia of old-time music knowledge, and he was so generous with his time and willing to ...

Over this past weekend, I learned that old-time musician Christian Wig died on April 21. Born on Dec. 12, 1949, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, he became immersed in the folk music scene in Northeast Ohio during the 1970s. Throughout the next few decades, Wig would play in a number of folk and old-time bands, including the Blue Eagle String Band, North Fork Rounders, Boiled Buzzards, the Mustel House Muskrats (a reference to the Mustill Store in Akron) and others. Wig also released a series of solo albums.  Known more for his fiddling, Wig actually started on banjo. According to his website , he got a Bacon resonator banjo in 1969 and began learning from Pete Seeger's book. He later got an album by Art Rosenbaum, which inspired him to learn clawhammer style. However, he had trouble figuring it out until he met Stan Werbin, the future proprietor of Elderly Instruments . Wig wrote that Werbin was a friend of his cousin's at the University of Michigan, where Wig was visiting in 1971....

David Brose died in January. I didn't know the man personally, but he had a significant impact on my journey into learning old-time music. Through his work as a folklorist, Brose was responsible for the bulk of the available recordings of Ward Jarvis, a fiddler and banjo player who lived in Athens County, Ohio.  While I was introduced to Ward Jarvis through the Field Recorders' Collective , the world of his fiddling and banjo playing really opened up to me when I received a copy of Brose's field recordings made in the mid- to late 1970s. Brose went on to produce two albums released in 1979 that featured Jarvis for Ohio Folklife and the Ohio Arts Council, Rats Won't Stay Where There's Music with his sons and Traditional Music Music From Central Ohio with a variety of other musicians from the region.  Thanks to these recordings, I was able to learn tunes like "Icy Mountain," "Tomahawk," "Pretty Little Indian" and others as part of my Ye...

This past weekend brought sad news for the old-time music community. We lost Mac Benford on Saturday and Clyde Davenport on Sunday. I first saw a post on Facebook that Davenport, 98, seemed to be on his deathbed, so it was a bit of shock to learn later that day that Benford, 79, had died. Benford, of course, was the banjo player in the Highwoods Stringband. According to his website , Benford began playing banjo in 1960, when he was a student at Williams College. He sought out living masters of the time to learn from, including Wade Ward, Kyle Creed, Tom Ashley and Roscoe Holcomb. Benford moved from the East Coast to California’s Bay Area in 1967 and began his professional performing career with Dr. Humbead’s New Tranquility Stringband and Medicine Show, which contributed a version of "Dubuque" on the 1985 compilation Young Fogies . The band specialized in recreating the old-time music found on 78-rpm records from the 1920s. The band played all up and down the West Coast...

The old-time music community lost one of its great champions yesterday. John Cohen died at the age of 87. He was a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, singing and playing guitar and banjo. Cohen was also a photographer, filmmaker and musicologist. From 1972 to 1997, he was a professor of visual arts at SUNY Purchase College in Harrison, New York. In addition to his notable work as a musician, Cohen was instrumental in documenting old-time musicians through his photography and films. He is credited with "discovering" Roscoe Holcomb and featured him in his 1962 documentary, The High Lonesome Sound . He co-produced the influential album High Atmosphere in 1975, which included Cohen's field recordings of Dillard Chandler, Wade Ward, Gaither Carlton, Frank Proffitt, Fred Cockerham, Estil Ball and others. His photography has been published in numerous books over the years, including one just released on Sept. 10, called Speed Bumps on a Dirt Road: When Old Time...

Once it became clear that it was clawhammer banjo I wanted to learn, the one resource that everyone recommended was the three-volume "Clawhammer Banjo" recordings by Charlie Faurot . For people who play this style of banjo, he was our Alan Lomax, a man who set out to record the living masters of our beloved five-stringed instrument. Faurot died Sunday at the age of 77. Born in Chicago and educated at Yale, Faurot began recording old-time musicians in the 1950s. By the 1960s, he started publishing the recordings as a side business to his careers as a banker, math teacher, swimming and water polo coach, and computer systems consultant. A few years after retiring, Faurot founded Old Blue Records in 2003 and began publishing old-time recordings he made from the 1960s to the present, including albums he had recorded for County Records. Looking through all the albums on the Old Blue Records website, it surprised me how many of Faurot's recordings I owned without realizing...

My grandma died Sunday night. She was 91. Two weeks ago she had a stroke. We went down to see her in Columbus the next day. She showed signs of recovery and was moved to a rehabilitation facility last week, but we learned Saturday that she had pneumonia. That was that. I'm thankful that I got to see her one last time and tell her how much I loved her, but it is not a memory I care to hold onto, seeing her weakened and struggling to talk, tubes attached to her paper-thin skin. Instead, I choose to think of her in that mountainside house in  Brevard, N.C. , where she and my grandfather moved to in 1984. My grandparents were migratory. They met and married and had four children in Nebraska, moved to Illinois, moved to Kentucky, moved to Florida and then to North Carolina. We used to pack up the car, always on some bitterly cold morning during winter break, and drive the 10 hours south to visit and celebrate Christmas, leaving the frigid North Coast for the Blue Ridge Mountains. Us...

RIP Doc Watson We lost another one. Doc Watson, 89, died Tuesday in Winston-Salem, N.C., following abdominal surgery. Watson was born in Deep Gap, N.C., March 3, 1923, the sixth of nine children, who lived in a three-bedroom house. Although Watson was famous for his guitar playing, he also was an accomplished banjo player , learning to play the five-string as a boy. When he was 11, his father gave him a homemade banjo with the skin of a cat used for the head, according to NPR . GBB has been following the news of Watson's hospitalization after he fell at his home last week. Watson was always one of those musicians whose albums I never owned, but that I keep meaning to buy. His influence on the 1960s folk revival and later generations of musicians is evident in the work of today's bands like Old Crow Medicine Show, whom Watson is credited with discovering, and the Avett Brothers. Over the weekend, my wife wanted to listen to the Avett Brothers "Live, Vol. 2,...

Earl Scruggs, 88, the innovator of bluegrass banjo picking, has died. Back when I first picked up the banjo, in 2008, Scruggs was the only banjo player's name I really knew and when I heard the term "Scruggs style" I thought that this must be the way. I borrowed his banjo instruction book from the library and started picking out painfully slow notes. Thumb, index, middle: the forward roll. Middle, index, thumb: the backwards roll. And so on. After six months of trying, I was frustrated that nothing I played sounded anything close to how Scruggs did it, but nobody else sounded like him either. He at once invented a style of playing and broke the mold doing so. Listening to Flatt & Scruggs made me realize that I'd be better off learning clawhammer style banjo. But beyond being a singular talent on the banjo, he was also a great ambassador of the instrument, spreading its popularity far and wide. Legions of men and women owe their interest in the banjo t...

Photo: Down Home Radio Show Joe Thompson, 93, the last known black string band musician, died Monday night. He was born in 1918 in Orange County, in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, and moved near Mebane in 1948, where he spent the rest of his life. Thompson learned to play the fiddle from his father, Walter Thompson, and played square dances with his brother Nate and cousin Odell Thompson for many years. He received the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007 and the North Carolina Heritage Award in 1991. You can view his performance at the Kennedy Center website from the NEA ceremony in 2007. The Carolina Chocolate Drops credit Thompson as an inspiration and mentor for their music, and released a live album with the fiddler from a 2008 performance at Merlefest. The Dust Busters visited with Thompson in 2010 and recorded the meeting for an episode of the Down Home Radio Show (which is where we swiped the photo above). To...

This morning brought the sad news that Benton Flippen , the legendary fiddler from Mount Airy, N.C., died yesterday. Benton Flippen was a fixture at old-time fiddlers convention and was noted for his distinctive fingering style, which included many slides. In 1990, he won the North Carolina Heritage Award for his musical contributions. There are many recordings available of Mr. Flippen: Old Time, New Tunes An Evening at WPAQ, 1984 (with the Smokey Valley Boys) 270 Haystack Rd.  (with the Smokey Valley Boys) Fiddler's Dream  (with the Smokey Valley Boys) Beware of Dog  (with the Smokey Valley Boys) The Banjo Hangout has a nice little tribute to Mr. Flippen in the forums. His obituary is also available. Below, he plays his signature tune, "Benton's Dream." ***UPDATED June 30, 2011: The Mount Airy News pays tribute to Benton Flippen