banjo – Page 4 – Via Negativa

February 5, 2010 by Dave Bonta

The Banjo Project

My cousin Tony just passed on the link to this video, the trailer for a soon-to-be-released two-hour documentary called The Banjo Project: The Story of America’s Instrument.

If any musical instrument can be said to be quintessentially American, it is the banjo. Even in its construction, it tells a story of cultural exchange: the banjo is a drum with strings, a symbolic blending of African and European musical identities. Brought to the New World in the memories and traditions of enslaved Africans, repeatedly re-invented by African- and European-Americans, the banjo has shaped most American musical forms: the minstrel show (the dominant popular entertainment in the US in the 19th century), ragtime and early jazz, old-time folk and the folk revival, as well as blues, bluegrass, country, and new hybrids yet to be labeled.

I liked some of the quotes in the trailer, too. Here’s Pete Ross:

The banjo has always symbolized something other than just music in our culture. It’s completely saturated with cultural associations. It’s always an icon; it’s never just music. Every time you pick up a banjo, it’s gonna symbolize wild, rural, simple, and even clownish.

And Rhianna Giddens from the Carolina Chocolate Drops says something I’d always thought:

Old-time music is, for me, the original integration. ‘Cause you had whites and blacks who in the normal space of things didn’t really interact all that much, but when it came to the music, it was like, they were there! It didn’t matter if you were a black banjo player or a white banjo player, it mattered if you were a good banjo player.

And finally, there’s this great quote from Mark Twain’s Early Tales and Sketches, Vol 2 (1864-65):

The piano may do for lovesick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles, and slate pencils. But give me the banjo… When you want genuine music — music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whiskey… ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose — when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

(Damn. I think there’s more poetry in that quote than in any of my banjo poems so far! Twain was a master of the well-turned phrase, no doubt about it.)

February 3, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Medicine Show (3)

This entry is part 22 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

The banjo knows
what it’s like to be sky,
how high pressure brings
the clearest sound.
I read about a woman
without a vaginal opening
who still conceived
& gave birth through a Caesarian.
This is more or less
how a banjo makes music,
is it not? She had lovers,
oh yes. And one of them,
jealous, had stabbed her
in the stomach,
permitting his rival’s semen,
which she had taken orally,
to find & fertilize
her unsuspected egg.
Maybe this is
an urban legend but
it sounds like something
that ought to happen
in a world with banjos in it.
Who needs root-workers?
The streetcorner pusher,
the New Age huckster,
the Big Pharma barker
all prescribe the same
white bomb
for everything,
expanding like a cloud
in a clear sky.

February 2, 2010March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Groundhog vs. groundhog

In honor of Imbolc and its buck-toothed seer, I uploaded a sharper copy of some footage I shot two years ago. Groundhogs are among the most solitary of marmots, and I think what we’re seeing here is a territorial dispute over some valuable real estate — the crawlspace under my house.

And as long as we’re watching videos, here’s another one I just uploaded, from the three-banjo jam session. There were other songs they performed more flawlessly, but this is the only one where the video is also half-decent (emphasis on “half”). And yes, it is entirely possible that they interrupted the sleep of the groundhog(s) below the floor.

February 1, 2010March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 4: Banjo Jam!

Terry McBride, Steve Bonta, and Tony Bonta play banjos and talk about banjo playing

Here’s what they play:

Blackberry Blossom
Come Together
Salt River (with Steve playing clawhammer style)
Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms
Foggy Mountain Breakdown
Spiderman theme song
Salty Dog

And here are a few links:

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

January 31, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Luck

This entry is part 21 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

Saved by a banjo, she turned
into someone forever glancing
in the rear-view mirror,
someone given to sudden,
unpredictable spasms of laughter.
The amount of space
her arms now claimed with
their emphatic gesticulations
alarmed even herself:
how unladylike!
She stopped smoking & enrolled
in truck-driving school
because, she said, she didn’t
ever want to slow down.
She’d pull into rest areas
on the high plains, hold
the banjo in her lap & listen
to the non-stop wind.

January 26, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Banjo Origins: The Pleistocene

They say the banjo evolved here, like the horse & the cheetah, only to go extinct after the first influx of human immigrants. Siberian hunters would’ve known the use of a taut hide for calling ancestors, but add strings & perhaps the other world gets too familiar, like a mammoth looming out of the fog or a short-faced bear, the sudden bone knife of a moon — things best kept at arm’s length. Imagine calling hai ai ai & hearing plucked strings respond with a hee and a haw, dancers turning from a shuffle to a caribooted tap. Maybe the spirits started joining in instead of waiting for a properly trained shaman to come visit.

No one knows exactly why the first banjos died out, but unaccustomed to humans & our devious forms of disguise, the way we wear others’ skins & paint ourselves the color of life when we mean to kill, the banjos would’ve been easy prey, ripe for the picking. Picture that last & most furtive banjo, its store of songs incomprehensible to anyone but itself, how silence must’ve made it taciturn & given it the uncanny ability to hear, by pressing its one enormous ear to the earth, whatever might’ve been coming on the lone prairie.

January 19, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Banjo Origins (1): The American Instrument

This entry is part 20 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

One scant & skinny time
alone with the astrolabe,
Columbus had a vision of stomachs
blown up thump-hard
& strung with horsehair,
& when he came to,
his mouth was full of the taste
of bitter almonds. All day
his shadow crept around him
on the deck, seeping into
every godforsaken cranny as
he plotted his next voyage:
ascending the world’s nipple by ship.
Surely the Caribs hadn’t
gotten there yet & spoiled it
with their deplorable dietary preferences.
But he saw again
those stark ribs—
frets on a lute, rungs to the crow’s nest–
& below, that pot
in which by the cheerful sound of it
something was bubbling,
something irreplaceable
was being melted down.

January 15, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Medicine Show (2)

This entry is part 17 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

The folk concept of a dancing crow pre-dates the Jump Jim Crow ministrelsy and has its origins in the old farmer’s practice of soaking corn in whiskey and leaving it out for the crows. The crows eat the corn and become so drunk they cannot fly, but wheel and jump helplessly near the ground where the farmer can kill them with a club. —“Jump Jim Crow,” Wikipedia

While a blackface
musician pays Jump
Jim Crow for
the assembled yokels, oh Lord—
the fake Indian sweating
in a scratchy blanket
holds up a bottle, holds it up:
pale blue universal nostrum of frost
whose patent can stay pending
almost indefinitely.
It’s impossible not to buckdance.
I swear they turn a key
somewhere in my liver
& banjo us with the bright
plink of coins.
This is one church where
we’re all in on the joke
& no one expects the wine
to be anything but whiskey.
A freight hurtles by & we rock
in its sudden wind,
its whistle better
than any pipe organ.
When your baby wails
like that, cracks Indian Bob,
it’s time for a spoonful,
& the banjo man winks & taps
his rawhide belly.
Somewhere John Brown
is plotting treason, & You—
You are with the sparrows,
rapt, watching how
comically they hop.

January 8, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Banjo vs. Guitar

This entry is part 19 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

The Banjo Player, by William Sydney Mount (1856)

Where guitar says body, banjo says head.

Where guitar says soundboard, banjo says membrane.

Where guitar says six, banjo says one for each finger.

Where guitar says bridge, banjo says keep going.

Where guitar says hole, banjo says full.

January 7, 2010 by Dave Bonta

The Dueling Banjo

This entry is part 16 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

Don’t be fooled:
this whitefaced smile,
these nickel-plated teeth,
this laughter can fuck you up.
Just ask the sadistic master
whose slave put the banjo on him—
composed a devastating satire
with a rolicking tune.

Men was a-singing it while cutting
trees out in the woods.
Women singing it in the fields.
Even the little children
played games to that song.
Pretty soon folks was singing it
all up & down the river.
Master Robert couldn’t go
nowhere among the slaves
without hearing something of it,
maybe just the tune without the words,
like they was humming it—
so Richard Creeks remembered
decades later.

Why laughter? Because tears
were expensive, love meant staking
your happiness on a master’s good will,
but laughter was free.
The banjo doesn’t ask which star
turned a blind eye on your birth.
It doesn’t lullaby or sweet-talk
like some guitar.
And because its father was a goat
& its mother was a gourd vine,
all the while you’re shaking,
head tilted back, it’s climbing
& stripping your tree.

Italicized lines condensed and lightly edited from “Richard Creeks on Songmaking,” in A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore by Harold Courlander (Southmark, 1996), pp. 376-377.