Posts Tagged ‘Picking Style’
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.
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.
That’s a frequent question, and not one with a single answer since the banjo is actually a family of instruments. The five-string banjo was the original, featuring a gourd body (later modified into a drum) and a short drone string. It was brought to what is now the United States by African slaves. The finger-picked five-string banjo enjoyed immense popularity in the nineteenth century, finding acceptance in the parlors of the urban middle class. It was used to play material from the classical repertoire, and rural musicians of the southeast adapted it to the Irish-style music they enjoyed.
Shortly after the turn of the century, the prominence of new music forms such as ragtime and syncopated dances, like the tango, led to the creation of the four-string , or plectrum, banjo. The sharp, percussive sound of the instrument was preserved but the quirky short drone string was eliminated. That made the instrument more user-friendly for musicians who preferred to strum chords with a flat pick, or plectrum. The next step was the tenor banjo, with a shorter scale and tuned in fifths to make it more familiar to players of other popular instruments such as the mandolin. Banjo bands were all the rage by the 1920s and other variations included the mandolin-banjo, the guitar-banjo, and the uke-banjo, but the tenor banjo was by far the most popular, leaving its original five-string cousin to be regarded as a quaint relic. Four-string banjos remain popular in traditional Dixieland jazz as well as Irish music, but the five-string was revived in the years following World War II with the arrival of Earl Scruggs and a new musical style-bluegrass.
The banjo is conventionally associated with bluegrass musical styles, and it’s really no wonder. Along with the fiddle, acoustic guitar and fiddle, the banjo is a mainstay in that storied musical tradition. A bluegrass picking style is accomplished by using the fingers in an up-picking motion and the thumb to pick downward. But you can throw those rules out the window if you’re playing in a clawhammer style.
The clawhammer style is much slower and more rhythmic than bluegrass, and it requires a unique grip and picking style. So named because the player must shape his hand into a claw to play correctly, this style is employed by such famous musicians as Neil Young and Eric Clapton. Interestingly, a clawhammer banjo player will sometimes finger and pick with the left hand by pulling off and picking at the top of the neck.