The Banjo Guru

When Earl Scruggs introduced his three-finger banjo picking technique to Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1945, the new musical genre now known as bluegrass took flight. Scruggs’ hard-driving approach was supremely well-suited to rendering the melodies of vocal songs, with the relatively simple melody notes embedded in showers of “filler” notes, and executed with three-finger “rolls”. Traditional fiddle tunes were more difficult to render in this style, since their denser melodies left little space for the filler notes characteristic of the Scruggs approach.

Fiddle-tune melodies could be played on the banjo using a “single-string” approach in which the thumb and index finger of the right hand played up- and down-strokes similar to a guitar or mandolin player using a flatpick, but this technique was decidedly choppy compared to Scruggs’ smooth-flowing lines. The next great leap in bluegrass banjo styles would have to wait until the early 1960s, when South Carolinian Bobby Thompson (playing with Jim and Jesse and The Virginia Boys) and New Englander Bill Keith (occupying Scruggs’ old slot in the Monroe band) independently developed what became known as the “melodic” style.

The technique of playing melodic-style banjo retained the basic three-finger approach but opened up the fingerboard; Thompson and Keith combined open notes and fretted notes, with higher-pitched notes often being played counterintuitively by fretting higher up on lower-pitched strings. Suddenly, complex fiddle-tune melodies could be rendered note-for-note without sacrificing the smooth flow of the three-finger style, and banjo players everywhere began assimilating the new technique by studying landmark recordings of instrumentals such as “Dixie Hoedown” (by Bobby Thompson with Jim and Jesse) and “Sailor’s Hornpipe” (by Bill Keith with Bill Monroe).