The banjo dilettante.

I spent a couple of hours in the studio yesterday wrestling with a five string banjo for a track that I'm recording with Alec Fraser.  It's Alec's banjo, left at his studio by some long-ago musician who never came back to pick it up.  I play a bit of banjo - I was even getting hired for sessions a few years back - because the standard open G tuning resembles standard tuning on the guitar - it's D G B D low to high, with a high G on the short fifth string, compared to D G D G B D on the guitar.  The only string that's really different is the first string, down a whole step.  So I quickly figured way back whenever I first picked up a banjo that I just needed to mentally move every note on that string up two frets.

Since we were basing our recording on Dock Boggs' version of the old-time country standard "Sugar Baby" (also known as "Red Rocking Chair"), I started with what is reported to be Dock's tuning on that song - "sawmill".  With a G on the short string, it's D G C D low to high.  So I think of it as the first four strings of the guitar in open G, with the second string notes adjusted to be down one fret.  If you play in D in that tuning, you get the flat seventh, the C, ringing out strongly, as well as the G, which is the fourth of the scale.  The G sounds especially strange if it's brought into the picking pattern over a D minor chord - "Sugar Baby" is essentially over one chord - D minor.  When the high G appears (courtesy of the short drone string) it creates a D minor eleventh chord.  This rather spooky chord contributes to the air of strangeness in Boggs' original 1927 recording.



Alec and I ended up trying a million permutations of the tune, changing the banjo tuning to D G A D (plus D on the short string) which better resembles the folkie guitar tuning "dadgad", which strangely enough is D A D G A D low to high.  I even switched to lap slide guitar, then standard guitar for a while, and ended up back at the banjo.

Though I enjoy playing the banjo (I like anything acoustic that loud, for starters) I realize that I am a guitar player playing a banjo, and that I have not seriously checked out the body of knowledge that is banjo culture.  To be honest, I don't know that I'll ever be a "real" banjo player - I think that I pretty much have to play one or the other, and I'm not ready to give up guitar yet! To complicate matters, there are four-string and five-string versions of the banjo.

The banjo has an incredible history, with origins in west African folk instruments like the akonting and banjar.  Enslaved Africans in North America fashioned their own instruments, and when the blackface minstrels imitated them in the 19th century, a banjo craze began.  Any survey of early recorded folk music in the American South would find the five-string and four-string banjo to be ubiquitous in both black and white musical culture.  In the early part of the 20th century, the banjo was a staple of the recording industry, with ragtime 4-string banjo cylinders by Vess Ossman and Harry Van Eps selling strongly.  It was also a standard part of the rhythm sections of dance bands, again both black and white.

When Eddie Lang burst on the scene with the Mound City Blue Blowers in 1925, he began to popularize the guitar to such an extent that banjos were basically gone from dance and jazz bands by the 1930s.  The development of the microphone helped, and once guitars were electrified in the middle of the 1930s, the banjo was well out of fashion.

But the banjo was not to be silent for long.  It had always had a strong presence in country music, and the offshoot style of bluegrass was to sustain the banjo most strongly in American music.  Bluegrass music is an oddly classical strain of country music, and the strong attack and short decay of the five-string banjo sound encourage high-speed complexities and cascading chromaticisms.  The four-string banjo has survived, in a more frozen form, in the "Dixieland" traditional New Orleans jazz band.

Early songsters and bluesmen like Little Hat Jones and Moses Mason used six-string banjos, tuned like guitars, on their 1920s recordings.  Hot Five and Hot Seven banjoist/guitarist Johnny St. Cyr used one on pioneering jazz recordings with Louis Armstrong (in a lower-rent version of the creepy trend of using dead people to advertise products, Johnny is pictured with [a non-Deering] six-string in a recent print ad for Deering's six-string banjos).  The six-string banjo is making a comeback with banjo dilettante guitarists like myself.  Here's a nice talk about and demonstration of a six-string.



I think I need one.  But would playing a six-string banjo further damage my already rock-bottom banjo cred? The banjo life is an all-encompassing one.  Respected Toronto jazz guitarist Tim Posgate knows a thing or two about making the leap from guitar to banjo.  Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell both sound great on banjo, though not very much like conventional banjo players - I suspect, like me, they spend 99% of their time on the guitar.