Posts Tagged ‘bluegrass banjo’
What Defines Bluegrass?
For many years I have used the term bluegrass to describe music when I really didn’t know what the exact definition was. Bluegrass originated during the 1940’s in the US and is actually of sub-genre of country music. Many countries have influenced the bluegrass sound, including places as diverse as Ireland and West Africa.
Bluegrass has a distinct string sound, as its most common instruments are the fiddle, banjo, mandolin and acoustic guitar. During the music, each instrument will take a term improvising or soloing while the others play the accompaniment. While bluegrass may not have a large mainstream following today, many of the world’s biggest bands will dabble in the genre. The most notable recent addition to mainstream bluegrass was with the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers movie Brother Where Art Thou.
Considered one of the pioneers in bluegrass banjo picking, J.D. Crowe first came to prominence as a member of Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys. His personal twist on the three-finger style of Earl Scruggs during the 1950s helped define the traditional bluegrass canon on over thirty recordings with Martin. The 1960s saw the formation of Crowe’s own band, The Kentucky Mountain Boys (with whom Doyle Lawson made his recording debut); by the early 1970s The Kentucky Mountain Boys had morphed into The New South and with a stellar lineup including Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs, and Jerry Douglas. Crowe artfully blended traditional bluegrass with material from such diverse sources as Fats Domino, Gordon Lightfoot, and Gram Parsons.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky on August 27, 1937, Crowe began picking the banjo at age 13. He continues to tour and record to this day with the current edition of The New South. His contribution to bluegrass music has been recognized by Gibson Musical Instruments with a signature-model Gibson banjo, the “Black Jack”, named after one of his original banjo tunes. Crowe also has his own model of the increasingly popular Blue Chip thumbpick, and has left his mark on the world of banjo bridges with his preferred slightly-wider string spacing, now known as “Crowe spacing” and offered as an option by most bridge makers.
The choice of wood type for your banjo may seem to be solely a cosmetic consideration, but it can have a big impact on the sound of your instrument as well. While it may seem counterintuitive, wood choice can have the biggest effect on tone through the neck. While bluegrass banjo rims are almost always made of maple and the veneers on the resonator have little impact on tone, the neck of your banjo is usually a solid chunk of mahogany, walnut, or maple and represents a significant proportion of the banjo’s vibrating mass.
Conventional wisdom is that mahogany, being a less-dense wood, is the warmest of the three woods and tends to accentuate the bass response of a banjo. Maple, a very dense hardwood, is considered to be at the opposite end of the scale with more “bite” and “edge” and enhanced treble response. Walnut is generally thought to fall somewhere in between mahogany and maple tonally. Keep in mind, however, that variations in setup and in individual instruments can make for a brighter mahogany banjo or a deeper-sounding maple one.
Even though I grew up in the north, my family always admired musicians from the hill country of Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia. Not a weekend would go by when my dad didn’t bring out an Earl Scruggs or Bill Monroe record and encourage his kids to dance around the living room. As I got a bit older, I learned to appreciate the intricate finger-picking style that was such an inherent part of bluegrass.
It wasn’t long before I saved up enough money to go shopping for beginner banjos. In those days the pickings were slim in my part of the country, so I went to a secondhand store and found a beat-up but still functioning model. Kids today are lucky in that they can find a banjo for any skill level without even leaving the comfort of home. Luckily it’s not too late for me to indulge in a little online instrument shopping myself.