Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout

Subject: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST,bdatki
Date: 07 Jan 03 - 10:00 PM

Hello,

I would like to know the tuning that is used for this tune. I have heard Mike Seeger perform it, as well as Bob Carlin in a live performance, but I don't have my banjo handy to try to figure it out. Thanks in advance,

Ben

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: Sorcha
Date: 07 Jan 03 - 11:01 PM

Try this:
gCGA#D

G-minor variant

Mike Seeger, Roustabout ("Solo"). Seeger plays this on a gourd banjo, tuned down. He gives his source as "Josh Thomas of Hollins, VA, an exceptional blind black banjo picker and singer", who was recorded in 1970 by Cliff Endress.

From: http://www.banjo.ch/knowhow/stimmungen.htm

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST,bdatki
Date: 08 Jan 03 - 02:45 PM

Thanks! Is this do-able on a modern open back banjo?

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST,Tony Thomas
Date: 30 Aug 06 - 11:55 AM

I am one of the lucky people who have the actual original Josh Thomas recording. At the 2004 Banjo Collectors Gathering Mike Seeger showed me the banjo he believes Thomas used on these recordings.

Thomas played the tune on a fairly inexpensive RB from an off brand that had just been given to him by folk music enthusiasts at a local college. He had never seen a banjo with a non-skin head before, he says on the recordings.

He tuned his banjo in the equivalent of standard G tuning, although on these recordings he is about one step sharp, tuning the banjo closer to G sharp than to G.

However, he plays this song in C, not G. He also has the B string tuned about 1/4 of a step down from B. Mike has figured out how many cents this is, but I forget.

Mike performs this tune on a large gourd banjo tuned down like other gourd banjos, which is what he seems to like to use to record tunes by Thomas and other Black banjoists, even though the banjoists actually used steel stringed RBs in Thomas's case, or steel stringed open backs as in the case of Lucius Smith.

Since Mike recorded it, Allen Hart of Seattle has also recorded it on a steel string five string banjo.

It is really unfortunate that all of the many recordings that Josh made in 1970 have not been released on CD as of yet. One or two are on Cece Conway and Scott Odell's Black Banjo Songsters of Virginia and North Carolina. At the 2005 Banjo collectors gathering, Mike Seeger and Cece announced they are trying to get these recordings released. Anyone who wants to help can contact them.

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Aug 06 - 11:59 AM

Just to note, Thomas was recorded in 1970 by folklorist Cliff Eddress. There are more than 3 hours of recordings including much conversation by Thomas about his life, banjo playing, an dother topic as well as a number of blues, religious tunes, and banjo tunes.
As I said, only a few cuts have been released.

Unfortunately, Thomas who was in his late 70s at the time of the recordings died a month or so after this recording. He was a gem as a musican, and a rather wise and witty person--to use scientific language he was a cool dude who knew life from jump street!

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST,Brian Vollmer
Date: 26 Aug 08 - 03:36 PM

Just did a search for Josh Thomas, and this discussion came up. Presently, I am listening and logging a field recording made by Cliff Endres of Josh Thomas in 1970 for Bob Fulcher. The banjo tunings for the songs on the tape are very interesting. Could these be original? I have never heard these sounds produced before.

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST,Guy de Chalus
Date: 02 Mar 10 - 01:28 AM

I have a video with Mike playing this song. It made cry inside. This is my introduction to banjo music. He's plays in some minor key on the instructional DVD.

gDGBbD tuned banjo but he tuned it down to E minor (I think)
Someday, maybe I'll learn it.

Guy

Subject: Tuningbox
From: GUEST,http://www.autochip.hu
Date: 04 Mar 10 - 08:25 AM

Unbeliavable sounds. I am glad I had the opportunity to see Mike playing live.

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Apr 23 - 11:08 AM

Endress was not a folklorist, he was a hippy with a tape recording traveling around Virginia with his wife. He asked questions no intelligent folklorist or person knowledgeable of what you ask Black people in a still pretty segregated Virginia, especially ex-convicts ask about.

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST,Tony Thomas
Date: 17 Jan 26 - 12:45 PM

Looking at this 20 years later. Mike's version seems further away from what Thomas was actually doing than it did when I wrote about this back then. What strikes me about all of the recordings (about 2004 I received all of the recordings we have of Thomas, they go for about 2 or 3 hours, and involved lots of talk, much of it stupid things two white hippies to a 70 year old Black ex-con in a Virgina that still had segregaton in 1970 like continually trying to ask if he knows about marajuana and other drugs.

Thomas himself is trying to figure out how to relate the rhythms of old time black banjo playing to the more modern type of blues scale that is coming in with Gospel and Blues music when he was younger.    His solution really is NOT the standard blues scale. His approach is ubnimuch mre minor

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST,Tony Thomas
Date: 17 Jan 26 - 12:59 PM

His B string is tuned kind of half way from B to B flat and has a more minor feel for it than other Black or any of the white traditional musicians who have record versions of this tune which is quite common and has many versions by white southern and Black southern old time players. Like many of the traditional players, even though this tune would be pitched in G (if the banjo is exactly in standard concert pitches) he tunes his 4th string to C, not D.

Mike and a number of other people have tried to use this recording to try to use Thomas as asome express throwback to earlier Black banjo playing. However, if you listen to the full recordings, or even to the several recordings the Endresses made if Thomas, you will see that Thomas's preoccupation was trying to find a way to integrate frailing banjo of the ferocious type he played to playing Blues, especially the commercially styled Blues that black recording artists made in the 1920s and to play what might be called Blues gospel that became a massive popular form of Black muic in the 1920s.   

It is unfortunate that the entire recordings that Mike obtained have never been made accessible. anyone interested in this now (2025) can email me at [e-mail] and put Roustabout in the title of your email.

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST,Josh Thomas pitching
Date: 17 Jan 26 - 01:39 PM

Josh Thomas's pitching on this tume is entirely different than the several versions that Mike recorded. With what was pretty standard for many Black and white "traditional" and for that matter blue grass banjoists from the Southeast in that time, Thomas was tuned up to G Sharp for G on his banjo. Mike has his banjo tuned down. In most of the recordings Mike made., mike used a nylon string banjo or a gourd bano that was tuned down 3 or 4 steps.

Mike was creating a disstorted ahistorical picture of Thomas as someone who fit into whatever notions he had about the Black past or something, rather than fitting Thomas into what other Black banjoists of Thomas's era were doing. When we came upon Black old time banjoists in the late 20th century, he would be always asking if they wanted to play the big gourd banjo someone from LA had made for them, but they continually rejected it.

Mike knew that Thomas did not play any such thing, but played a standard inexpensive steel strung cheap resonator banjo of the type that was widely available in the South in the 1950s and 70s I know because Mike got that banjo and brought it to the Banjo Collectors gathering (now called the banjo gathering) and showed it to me, around 2006. I have a photo of Mike Holding it.

About 2014 or 15, I did a presentation on the banjos played by the Black banjoist on the digital library of Appalachia, contemporaries of Thomas for the banjo gathering. Almost every single one of them the original banjo they played before coming in contact with old time banjo enthusiasts was some kind of resonator banjo, often a Japanese invasion banjo. Often if you see a picture of a historic Black banjoist holding a fairbanks or Vega banjo open back. Invariably, these banjo were lent to them for the recording by people like Tommy Thompson or other old time music enthusiasts.

I own a bottom of the line Recordking King "Dirty 30s" RB precisely because it is like the banjos white and black old time banjoists who old time music entusiasts came upon in the 60s and 70s who played inexpensive RBs like that, although one or two played more expensive Gibson RBs.

Mike tended to want to pluck poor Josh Thomas out of the world he really lived in an use him as an express train back to banjo antiquity.   The entirety of the Endress recordings suggest that Thomas was typical of hs generation of Black banjoiss who were trying to figure out adapting the blues and modern gospel music to the banjo.

Subject: RE: Tuning for Josh Thomas' Roustabout
From: GUEST,Pitching sharp
Date: 17 Jan 26 - 01:51 PM

Just to emphasize. The pitching on all of the recordings Endress made for Josh Thomas was the equivalent of G sharp for G maybe a few hundredths of a entire pitch about that. That pitching was pretty standard for white and Black old time banjoists from Virginia and North carolina at the end of the 20th century. For Black traditional banjoists from that area and time from Elizabeth Cotten to Rufus Kasey, it was pretty standard to have banjos "tuned up" so much that for years I kept a banjo tuned abut 10 or 15 cents above G sharp to work on learning their music. Some like Rufus Kasey of Virgina tuned even higher. On some of the recordings Kip Lornell and Cece Conway did of Kasey, Kasey is tuned up to B flat for G.

Especially at a time when the actual recording of Thomas was NOT available, Mike's decision to play this on a nylon string banjo either a Gourd banjo or a reproduction of a 19th Century minstrel bsnjo was a disservice to Josh Thomas, tht may have had more to do with Mike's fantasies about an old Black musician, or his own vocal limitations, than what Thomas was actually doing, especially at a time when on a small group of people had the copies of the Endress recordings which Mike had obtained some time in he 1990s.