Johnny Had a Wedding,Phoebe Didn't Come
Updated: Sep 11
I was in a college dorm room in 1973 listening to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and their album with May Belle Carter. It was called "Will the Circle Be Unbroken". I heard them playing "Soldier's Joy" on the banjo. What was that sound, I wondered. It wasn't bluegrass. It was something else. That sound tickled me. Where was it from? You know how you are walking along and you hear or see something just at the corner of your awareness. You turn your head. Then you turn and look. The sound I heard was old time banjo played in what they called "the clawhammer" style. That sound took me on a journey. I saw an article in the paper about an old country store in Blackey, Ky called C.B. Caudill's store and I took off to the place one weekend. On the porch playing was Austin Miller, playing and thumping his foot on the old wooden planks. He was playing his own two finger style, not clawhammer. But still the sound was familiar to what I heard on the album. It was relaxed, almost meditative, not hard driving. It made you settle down.
I have spent the rest of my life in search of that sound. And I found folks of my family roots on Big Branch in Leslie County that played the same kind of music. That sound took me to many a great old time banjo player's door. Chief among them was Lee Sexton. I went to workshops and festivals all over. It took me to America's folk festival on the national mall where I found the roots of the banjo in Africa. I played with Dinda Sare from Mali and he could play everything I could play on his ngoni ,a cousin to our banjo.
I learned there were a great variety of old time ways of playing the instrumemt- brush stroke, thumping, two fingers styles. In the video below you will hear a difference in old time styles. I am playing Johnny Had A Wedding, Phoebe Didn't Come. In the A part you will hear that clawhammer or overhand style of playing. In the B part you will hear a thumping brush stroke style. Notice the difference?
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