Posts Tagged ‘Gibson banjos’
Musical Genres On The Banjo
Banjos have a long history dating back to ancient Egypt, and they’ve evolved today into four basic genres. Folk or Traditional music features a clawhammer (also called a frailing) open-back five-string banjo. It’s usually played with the index finger and the thumb, and produces a melodious sound. It grew in popularity during the American Civil War as soldiers strummed and plucked it around the evening campfires. The standard strings of the day were made from purified cattle entrails, and the banjo head was made from calfskin, giving the instrument a mellow and relaxing tone. Though most clawhammer banjos use steel strings today, many nostalgic players prefer a modern synthetic string set that emulates the old sound. Notable clawhammer banjo artists include Grandpa Jones and Pete Seeger, and Dave Guard (The Kingston Trio).
Dixieland Jazz music came of age in southern Louisiana in the early 1900s and found its home in New Orleans. Four-string banjos became prominent in Dixieland bands due to their volume and percussive rhythm sound. They were strummed with a single flat-pick, and accomplished players such as Eddie Peabody and Perry Bechtel would also pick out the melody notes. The two standard four-string Dixieland banjos are the 19-fret tenor model and the 22-fret plectrum model. Their popularity exploded during the early jazz age; some call it the electric guitar of its day. By the late 1920s, Gibson, Vega and other instrument makers had added a resonator on the back that projected the banjo sound toward the audience, and a bell-bronze tone ring that gave the banjo more depth and clarity of sound.
Irish Folk music has been around for centuries; today the 4-string, 17-fret banjo is the standard for the genre. It’s tuned the same as a fiddle and mandolin, making it easier for musicians to play multiple instruments. Artists who helped popularize Irish Folk music include Gerry O’Connor and Seamus Egan. Listen closely to the style of music, and you’ll discover where bluegrass music got its roots.
The most popular banjo music today is bluegrass, which got its name from Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. Monroe hailed from the bluegrass state of Kentucky. Though he was billed as a country artist during most of his career, his unique style of music developed into a category all its own. Banjo legend Earl Scruggs joined Monroe’s band in 1945 and appeared on the Grand Ole Opry stage for the first time. His unique style of picking electrified audiences. He played a five-string resonator banjo with a thumbpick and two fingerpicks, often at breakneck speed, with a clarity and precision that constituted an entirely new and exciting sound. By 1948 Scruggs left Monroe to form his own band with singer Lester Flatt. Foggy Mountain Breakdown and The Ballad of Jed Clampett became two of their most popular songs. Scruggs, who turned 86 in January 2010, is still touring with his banjo.
No brand name looms larger in the bluegrass banjo world than Gibson. The company’s story goes back to the late 1800s when a young man named Orville Gibson, son of an English immigrant, moved from his native New York to the rapidly-growing industrial town of Kalamazoo, Michigan (“Yes”, said the Kalamazoo Chamber of Commerce in a 1980s publicity campaign, “There Really Is a Kalamazoo”). Although Orville worked a variety of odd jobs to support himself, he was a musician and luthier with radical ideas about instrument construction. The mandolin was the most popular fretted instrument of the day, and Orville’s vision was to apply the same principles of carving and top graduation to the mandolin that Stradivarius and his contemporaries had employed in building their legendary violins.
Orville’s creations were a dramatic departure from the round-back “tater bug” mandolin, with its flat top and its back formed out of narrow strips of bent wood. A group of Kalamazoo investors saw money to be made in marketing Orville’s designs to the mandolin-buying public and the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company was formed in 1902. Always an enigmatic figure, Orville appears to have had limited involvement with the Gibson company after its first few years. The Gibson company refined and built on Orville’s ideas and responded to the increasing popularity of the tenor banjo by producing its first banjo in 1918—the same year that Orville died back home in New York.
After some initial stumbling in search of the right design, by the late 1920s Gibson was a dominant force in the 4-string tenor banjo market. The company also made a precious few “old-timey” 5-string banjos, primarily for the rural Southern market; it was one of these banjos that Earl Scruggs would use in the years immediately following World War II to develop a new style of picking for bluegrass music. Despite changes in ownership and a relocation from Kalamazoo to Nashville, Tennessee, Gibson banjo production has continued to the current day. Since the late 1980s, the company’s banjo output has consisted largely of reissues of its classic models of the 1920s and 1930s.
Gibson’s now-legendary Mastertone banjo line was introduced in 1925 and quickly became an industry standard, but by the late 1930s the banjo had fallen in popularity. Anxious to kick-start flagging sales, Gibson announced a new product that fixed an old problem. The new “top-tension” Mastertone design, introduced in 1937, was intended to make life easier for banjoists contending with the fickle calfskin heads. Calfskin heads were the standard before World War II (Remo Belli would later develop mylar heads) and calfskin needed frequent attention. Changes in the climate, especially in levels of humidity, dramatically changed the tension on a calfskin head and changed the banjo sound. Retensioning the calfskin head was common, and by moving the tension hook adjustment to the front (or top) without removing the resonator, Gibson made the tensioning process much easier.
While they were at it, Gibson introduced other changes such as carved solid-wood resonators, radiused fingerboards, and bold Art Deco cosmetics. Most important to modern players, flathead tone rings were also standard on the top-tension models. The three new top-tension Mastertone styles 7, 12, and 18 were, according to company literature, the “alarm clock” that was going to “wake up new possibilities in banjo playing”. The banjo’s time as America’s favorite fretted instrument had passed, however, and the top-tension line faded away when Gibson suspended banjo production during World War II.
The top-tension banjo had no real champions among the first generation of bluegrass banjo players (although Don Reno did occasionally use a style 18), but as the decades passed, Gibson’s prediction of top-tension-fueled banjo innovation seemed accurate, though delayed. A young Bill Keith used a converted TB-12 for his groundbreaking performances and recordings in the new melodic style when he joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in the 1960s. A Style 18 has been in Bela Fleck’s arsenal since the 1980s, and a Style 7 is the favored banjo of Noam Pikelny of Punch Brothers fame. Although Gibson top-tensions are once again out of production following a revival in the 1990s and early 2000s, the banner has been taken up by other companies including Ome, one of whose top-tension models has found favor with virtuoso Matt Menefee of Cadillac Sky.