Washboard players.

Subject: RE: Washboard players.
From: GUEST, Paul Slade
Date: 30 Jan 17 - 03:30 PM

The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band has a washboard player who does a Hendrix routine with it at their gigs. She pours lighter fluid on the thing and sets fire to it before playing it behind her neck, whirling it around propellor style and so forth. I swear I once saw here lay it on the floor and coax the flames up with her fingers, just like Hendrix used to do with his guitar - or is that just my memory playing tricks with me?

Subject: RE: Washboard players.
From: GUEST,Kenny B Sans Kuki
Date: 30 Jan 17 - 03:56 PM

One Good Washboard of many of Tuba Skinny "

Subject: RE: Washboard players.
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 17 Apr 26 - 11:51 AM

From November 11, 2020 in the Smithsonian
Only One Factory in the United States Still Makes Washboards, and They Are Flying Off of Shelves
Sales of the antique tools have boosted since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, with people wanting to avoid a trip to the laundromat

Since Covid-19 broke out in the United States this spring, one unlikely item has seen a spike in sales: washboards.

For the uninitiated, washboards are used to clean laundry, and typically have a wooden frame surrounding a rippled metal surface. You soak clothes in soapy water, then rub them against the metal surface to scrub the fabric. Washboards are antiquated, but one last remaining factory produces them in the United States. In Logan, Ohio, the Columbus Washboard Company still sells about 80,000 washboards per year. Co-owner and factory manager James Martin estimates that 40 percent of the company's sales are to people using them to wash clothes or keeping them for a prepper stash, 20 percent are sold for decoration and 40 percent are sold for use as musical instruments. Washboards are considered percussion instruments, with players using any available tools to make noise on the rubbing surface. It’s a pastime that originated with enslaved laborers on southern plantations.

“We’ve had at least a double increase in sales from Covid,” says co-owner Jacqui Barnett. “We’re selling to a lot of individuals that live in apartment buildings, so they can do their own laundry in their own sink instead of having to face going to a laundromat right now.” The company really only knows how washboards are being used if customers tell them, but Barnett and Martin are able to determine the most likely use based on the shipping addresses—many of which are now apartment buildings in larger cities. It's especially telling considering they haven't changed up marketing at all during the pandemic; the company still relies on its website and advertising in local tourism magazines. . . . No one really knows when washboards started to be used, but the first known patent was awarded in 1797. From there, they continued to gain popularity as the best way to wash clothes—until the washing machine was invented in the early 1900s, anthropologist Cassie Green noted in her 2016 thesis, "Agitated to Clean: How the Washing Machine Changed Life for the American Woman." As the technology improved, washboards were used less frequently, slowly fading almost out of existence after the 1950s.

There's more to the article at the link.

In a discussion of tours:

“A lot of the people that come here really enjoy seeing the old machinery still working,” Barnett says, when asked about the most popular part of the tour. She also enjoys sharing the fun of the washboard as a musical instrument, an experience that happens at the end of each visit. “We give everybody a washboard and some sticks to play with, and we show them how to become a musician playing washboards.”

Subject: RE: Washboard players.
From: Jack Campin
Date: 17 Apr 26 - 01:50 PM

The Facebook "Washboard Players" group has some good videos (I've uploaded some of mine there). It's a private group but anyone can join.

In recent years I've been using scallop shells as well. These get an effect in between washboard and castanets. They work best for dotted rhythms - jigs and hornpipes. I don't know of anybody else who does what I do with them. Galician and Occitan players use a grating chug across the centres of the shells - I use a drumkit style to get more variety, holding the shells by the edges:

- bang the centres together (same place in the rhythm as a hi-hat)
- grate across the centres
- scrape the edges (high pitched swish)
- ascending swish by scraping centre to edge
- deeper bonk by forming a sealed cavity behind the shell with the palm of your hand

With all that you can get a lot of different patterns. They don't break easily - I lose about one shell a year. You can tell when it's going to happen because the sound dulls as the centre crumbles and they smell fishy.

Two useful modifications: sand the edges smooth, and rub an invisibly thin coat of coconut oil over the outer surface of the shells so they slip over each other better. Friction loses oomph.