Subject: RE: What is clawhammer style
From:
GUEST,Dave in England
Date: 20 Aug 01 - 09:35 PM
I've just found this thread and have read all the entries for the last year or so and found them very interesting. I'd like to ad a few words into the discussion if I, as an Englishman, can be so presumptious. I believe that 'frailing' 'drop-thumb' 'clawhammer' or whatever one calls this rapping, down-driving style, has developed a mystique around it that is unwarrented. It wasn't, as some people claim, the predominant style in the Appalachians, only one of several regional styles, two-finger picking, was very popular in some regions, as was pre-Scruggs three-finger picking, also,of course, what Pete Seeger called 'up-picking' or 'the basic'strum'. In my experience all these styles have a place and a role to play depending on the song, style, rhythm, needed for any given performance. The good old 'knockdown style' of players such as Cousin Emmy, and Uncle Dave Macon, is great for hell-for-leather songs and square-dance tunes, whereas 'clawhammer' or a more delicate 'drop-thumb' is great for slower pieces such as Clarence Ashley's 'Cuckoo'. 'Up-picking' as performed by Derroll Adams and Buel Kazee is an ideal song-accompanying style. And I find that a simple 'two-finger' style alternating between 'double-thumbing' 'pinching' and the odd 'brush' the perfect accompaniment for slow ballads such as Obray Ramsay's 'Little Margaret'. 'In England the Old Timey community which is growing all the time has become fixated on 'drop-thumb frailing' and very few people use anything else, which is a shame as it means other styles don't get heard and much Old Timey banjo in Britain, and in the U.S. is very samey, this along with the usual line-up of banjo, fiddle and guitar, makes eventually for a rather predictable, boring, repetitive sound. The rule with folkmusic is that there are no rules, traditional players developed their own styles,frequently in isolation from other players, and dependant on type of banjo -fretless (a la Frank Proffitt, resonator-backed - Wade Ward, open-backed fretted etc... musical aptitude, manual dexterity, musical background -did father, grand-father, Uncle play ? Did itinerant black workers pass through area? Standardisation was unknown, there were as many types of banjo (from Seers and Robuck's finest to home-made tack-head banjo's made from catskins, sieves, and a few odd bits of lumber), styles of playing them, ways of singing the songs, variety of tunes and tune varients, as there were people. It's only in the folk revival that we have to pigeon-hole, categorize, and pin-down the music like some butterfly in a museum case. There is no correct version of any tune, only good or bad versions and renditions, there is no 'correct' style of playing the banjo (if it works for you then it's right), and nobody out there, not even Dwight Diller, is any more right than you are.All he can do, and seems to want to do, is to teach his pupils a very specific sub-style as performed by the Hammons family who influenced him as a young man. If you want to sound like Dwight Diller clones then learn from him by all means but you'd be much better off listening to half a dozen, a dozen, or a hundred, traditional and revival banjo players, and synthesising the things you hear into a style or styles that suit your, needs, temperament, instrument, musical needs etc., and then you'll sound like yourself, and one day people will be pulling up outside your house and asking you to show them what you do. A last couple of thought - again, there's no right or wrong when it come to playing with nails, bare-flesh or reversed picks, there are fine banjo players playing in all these styles. People such as Ken Perlman put a small piece of Scotch tape over their nail and tuck it in behind the nail, this seems to last him for several numbers. After years of trying every and anything to stop my nails wearing out I have finally settled on acrylic nails, painted on as a wet cement and which sets rock hard (Martin Simpson uses the same stuff) and can be filed and shaped as short or as long as required, It hasn't quite got the bell-like quality that playing off a natural nail gives, but being virtually indestructable it takes away a whole problem area of playing and allows one to concentrate on the playing and not worry about how long the nail will last. The material is the same as that used for false-teeth plates and if you want some sort of nail cover I recommend it unreservedly. Of course, some people get a great clear sound off the top of their finger/s with hardly any nail at all. Again, there's no right or wrong sound or way of achieving it, it's what works for you. Two of my favourite banjo players are Ron Mullinex (WV), and Art Rosenbaum (GA) - Art, like Mike Seeger, is a fluent player in all the styles mentioned above, and like Mike, has spent as much time as anyone recording, interviewing and listening to the old time players. Wishing all you pickers across the pond the very best, from Dave in England.
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