 from Murph Gribble, John Luskin, Albert York, who were a black string venturer from Campaign Tennessee, recorded in 1946. I've been playing this tune for like, what, six years now? Very long time for me, and have not taught it before, I don't think, so it'll be... But it's a fun tune. There's not too much that's odd about it that be part has a funky structure, but actually broken down. It makes a lot more sense than if you are just listening to a, you know, 60-year-old recording and trying to figure out what is being done. Really, almost 80-year-olds. By the time I got around to it. So we'll get to do a little bit of up-the-neck adventuring. Get to make a few different textures with the banjo. It's a good versatile tune, or requires you to be versatile anyway. We're doing standard G tuning. Seems like the mostly yes. I should also note Murph Gribble, the banjo player on this recording, was a three-finger banjo player. He did not play it like this. This is me learning the tune. For instance, I had to learn like three different ways because I learned it on fiddle and then moved my fiddle version to banjo. Tatiana learned it on fiddle, and I changed my banjo part to suit her fiddle version, and then my bandmate George learned it on fiddle, and I changed my banjo part again to accommodate that. It's a weird recording. There's some gray area there. One of the more important gray areas is that there's no consistent tune structure. They pretty much just play the B part for as long as they want to, and then at some point they just pop back into the A part and start over. They did that with most of their tunes. There's a lot of stuff where you can hear he'll just do some specific variation of the fiddle part that signals it is time to go back to the A part, and that is how the band knows to turn it around again. This tune doesn't even seem to have that going for it. I don't really know how they coordinated. Maybe there was a visual signal that we have lost. I'm gonna try and just do the B part two times, because that seems like it'll be what's easiest to fit in our brains. I feel like it's the morning, even though it's like barely the morning. I woke up very early for me today to drive here for a long time, so if I say something that doesn't make sense, just tell me, and I will try to go back over it again. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I just don't like the morning. Wow. So it's a tough brain thing. I had to do the opposite thing last week. I was in this thing up in the upper peninsula in Michigan, and I had to like site read tablature for like a through-composed, semi-classical thing. Very hard. So there's no easy way. Yeah, I guess the thing here, there's a drop on the top two strings from the second fret on the third string to the open third string. That's the whole A part of the tune. Ale notes are in this tuning. I would definitely have a hard time if you were just like play a G scale right now. It's helpful to know that especially once you start going up the neck, at least on the first string, because sometimes you're just going to have to go up here to get the melody, you know that like 5, 7, 9, like those are all in the key. So those are probably the ones you're going to use, and then you don't have to worry as much about like is that a 6? Is that a 7? Because those just like are 6 or 8 or whatever. Who is those going to be that much? One other thing to note is that obviously we have just ended this on an E minor situation. Pretty much going to hold down the E minor shape when we're playing some B parts. We'll have to sing later. The interesting thing about this tune is that on the recording, the guitar player just stays on a G chord the entire time. The banjo player stays on an E minor the whole time, and the fiddle player goes back and forth between a G and E minor depending on which repetition of the tune it is. It's like a variation for him. So there's this very cool thing that happens on the recording where they're all sort of disagreeing about what key the song is in, and it creates a really cool sound. So this is one, if you're playing it in a jam or whatever, you would play an E minor. It would sound like way too much if the guitar player was to also play an E minor in my opinion, but just a good thing to be aware of sometimes the chords we play don't match the chords of the overall tune. With that, we can go into the B part. This bears some explaining before we start playing it. Basically the B part is three phrases. There's kind of three pieces easier to think about this in terms of those pieces than to try to just go through accounting measures because they don't line up in a super obvious way. The start was just the first one, I guess. Let me see. Yeah, so it's you're in the E minor shape, and then you're, and then, and then... Yes. Yeah, it's E minor shape and then just moving the middle finger around. So our next little phrase we've done, the exact same, right? It's one note different. Important note though. It implies a change to the five. As I said, we don't follow through on any chord changes. It's like this, let's do it. I'll do it one time before everybody joins in. The timing of the first one. We have now learned the whole tune. The one that it goes up is like we're trapping out on that. I don't think so. It just feels long, right? It feels like it's not. Yeah. So again, we start on, we do it one time, and then from the second time on join when you're ready. Yeah. Yeah, I think, because I played it for too long, but it is. We learned the tune. We have plenty of... So we can either try to like rush through a second tune. That would be a stretch, but we can try. Would you just show us how you make special use of the extra string on your banjo? Uh, yeah, this is not the best tune to show that, because I just hit it. I don't ever play melody on it really. Really? Okay. No, it's just like a low drum, but there's like one tune I play. I'm going to move on to another topic. This is rolling. Great. There you go. There you go. So this tune is Rolling River from Murph Gribble, John Luskin, Albert Gore. I tried to do it, and it just didn't work at full speed. So, yeah, that is in there. The down slide is there. I tried to do it there, and it just kind of turned into like... And I was like, that's not a compelling sound. So I decided to... You're going fast. That sounds fun. Yeah, everything sounds great when it's too fast for you to know how it sounds, you know? Jake, could you make a choice to drop the thumb down to the first string instead of using fifth string there? Yeah, it's a different sound. Even the notes are the same, but different things happening. It's so far away from your thumb. It is far, but I also think I do that sometimes. So I drop them to the second string instead of the first sometimes. But also, I think there's just a... There's like a ring thing that is different. And that's like getting too detailed for like 90% of the time you're playing a figure in a jam or a band, no one's going to notice that for you. But even like, I learned to play this tune as the thing that I'm doing with the fiddle player, but like, honestly, even the A part, if I was doing it by myself, I might... ...in tune. And the ring happening at a time, that tends to suit my taste for solo banjo a little bit better than single string maneuvering. But for the most part, it is as I taught it to you. Can you tell us something about the original performers and the original recording? Yeah. So, as I said, the original recording was from Campaign Tennessee in 1946. I don't remember who the folk was who made it. Was it work? No. Worked it on Bridger and Patterson. These were different folks. So, these recordings are on a compilation CD that you can buy or stream. It's called Altamont, Black String Band Music from the Library of Congress. There's more Gribble-esque in your recordings that are on that compilation that you have to go to the Library of Congress to find or ask me because I boot like them and I can send you the Google Drive link. And, yeah, it's a very cool compilation disc. Those performers were from close and relatively close to each other and from the same time period. So, I want to say that Frazier and Patterson recordings are from 42 and the Gribble-esque recordings are 46. One of the key differences. They're two very different sounding ensembles. Frazier and Patterson were like a radio spectacle band in Nashville. To my understanding, a radio guy was basically like, you two both play string band music. You should be a duo on my radio show and that's how they became a band. So, they were always in show business and my sense is that Nathan Frazier was kind of like a trick banjo player, like he was really flashy and had a lot of gimmick. He was also very modern and does a lot of things in his playing like those syncopated drop thumbs that I use a lot in this, like that opening rhythm we did. Where I learned how to do that from listening to those recordings and just like cross-referencing with other lessons I had with living players, you know, how you learn tunes at the beginning. And then I realized that he was doing a lot of the same licks that like John Herman and Richie Stearns reintroduced, you know, 30 to 40 years down the line, which is pretty cool. By the same token, I would argue that Groobelusk and York are actually an early bluegrass band and don't get called that because they're black and because they were playing like that before Bill Monroe was. But you know, it's three finger banjo, it's flashy, they passed the melody back and forth. I do think there's a noteworthy difference in that we know black string bands of that era had two separate repertoire that they would play for black versus white audiences. And the folklorist who reported Frazier and Patterson was John Wesley Werth III, who was a black folklorist, a very rare thing now, rarer still at the time when he was around. And he was affiliated, I think he did his undergrad at Fisk University, did his master's degree at Columbia, and then went back to Fisk to teach and collect. And Frazier and Patterson were performing at like the centennial celebration of Fisk for like W. E. B. Du Bois and like all like the black luminaries of the time, which is pretty cool. Frazier and Patterson were reported by white folks, famously a very odd recording session because the white guys who set it up decided we're going to do it in like the local general store. Not thinking through the fact that the general store was segregated and black people weren't supposed to be in there. So the store made an exception. Good on them. But you have to think that would have been an extremely uncomfortable situation for the band. And you know, they were already playing, they're like sanitized white people friendly repertoire, which was different from some of the other stuff they had and there are recordings of some of the other things that they did. There's a website that's just like GribbleLaskinYork.com and it has more stuff on there. But the recordings that are out there are recordings they made for a white audience in an establishment where they were not legally supposed to be at the time. One of those ways in which, you know, when you go back and study those old field recordings, I think there's a tendency in old time music to treat those as like the gospel truth of what the music was when like really that's just how it was played that one time on that one day in sometimes a very odd set of circumstances. Like a lot of those recordings come out of players being completely out of their element and, you know, in some academic setting or in like a commercial or radio setting that they weren't used to or, you know, they hadn't been playing for the past 40 years. And then some folklore shows up and it's like your neighbor told me you played fiddle when you were 20. Here's an instrument, play me tunes and they're like, I don't remember any what's going on. You know, there's a lot of those out there also. Was that true with some of the early recordings of Dink Roberts when he was three pound? I don't think so. So Dink had at least been playing slide guitar and Dink Roberts was a black banjo player from Hall River, North Carolina, who had a super weird banjo style. I have made some study of it, only how one tune that I teach and I taught it enough times that I didn't want to overlap today. And he was a very good slide guitar player. He played guitar blues. And my understanding is that the folklorists who went to record Dink were only interested in finding black banjo players and therefore just did not record most of the music that he could play. Not that I know of. And I checked I was talking to Justin Robinson about this just in July was one of the original members of the Carolina chocolate drops and extremely deep scholar of black string band traditions, especially in North Carolina. He's really done a lot of focus study on the area that he is from and where he now lives. And he's done a lot of looking into Dink feels strongly that there's also a really significant indigenous influence in the way that he plays because it was also native. And yeah, he had his own weird thing going on. But again, another situation of the folklorists capturing this tiny fragment of the thing that he did and like not the main fragment I heard. But I think Joe and Odell Thompson, who were the ones who taught the Caroline will Joe Thompson was the one who taught the Carolina chocolate drops, who then taught me. So I don't know my fiddle granddad. He stopped playing for I think like 40 years, like when he went off to the war, World War two, I'm pretty sure he stopped playing during her just before the war and then didn't pick it back up again until folklorists rediscovered him and like the eighties or whatever. So there was a lot of picking things up and putting them down as urbanization and modernization drove the music in new directions. And that's also a new recording. And I have a recorder rolling. Yes. Reparations, my very first movie, which is out of print. I don't have it with me, but it is on all the streaming things. So if you want to hear that in practice, you can hear the me of six years ago play it. It's not what it sounds like now, but it is. It hasn't changed that much. Any other questions about banjo things? Yeah, the question. Oh, so you heard you heard that song and it got in your brain. Like, where do you go from there? Like, how do you start working up a song like that? What's your creative process? And then when do you feel good about it? That could never end. Well, yeah, that's definitely, I mean, that song is a moving target is that the original recording of Rolling River is like my favorite old time recording at all. Like, it's so good. And it's because of the weird chord tension thing and everything else, there's like a specific mix of things there that I have never been able to replicate. I've done this in a bunch of different formats where like, you know, I first heard this, heard the tune, I was like, I need to learn this tune and then I couldn't really figure out the structure because the B part is super weird. And then Tatiana and I sort of figured it out together with me playing banjo and it was really fun to play. It sounded nice to me, but didn't have the same thing that the original recording have. It's like this hum that happens the whole time. It's just like such a clean ride of a tune, the way that they play it. And I was like, maybe it needs the guitar. So I added the guitar and it didn't sound the same way. And then I was like, maybe it needs the three finger banjo instead of my claw hammer adaptation. So I started playing it on fiddle and my bandmate George Jackson was playing it on three finger banjo and it's closer, but it still doesn't sound like that. And at the end of the day, it comes down to like the Viking and the recording quality, I think. Like there's a thing the tape is doing on that recording that I can't do live or with modern recording technology. So maybe I just need to record the next album on tape that I could do that. But yeah, it's always a moving target. My general process for learning tunes, because this is one I have spent like more detail time on than I do most of them, be ready to slow things down. There's a program called the Amazing Slowdowner that a lot of people have. I have used it quite extensively since it's familiar to some of you. Is this like an app or something? What is it? It is an app, but it's also a computer program. You can get on your computer and you can get it on your phone. I mostly use it on the computer because phones don't like you to actually have files anymore. But it basically lets you plug something in, shift the pitch however much you need, because oftentimes on those old recordings either the people weren't in tune or like the record or cylinder got like copied to tape at a weird speed or an inconsistent speed or the recording. There's a lot of things that can go wrong pitch-wise. So you can fix that. You can loop certain sections of the tune over and over and over again. Like you can set a sound thing or a time loop on the recording. And you can choose how fast it goes. So you can slow it way, way down. You can slow it down too much and it gets harder rather than easier. That's what it's possible to do. But if you don't feel like spending the 40 bucks on Amazing Slowdowner, which it is a worthwhile 40 bucks, if you look up recordings that are on YouTube, you can now slow YouTube videos down. It has less fine control than the Amazing Slowdowner was. You can go to 0.75 times or 0.5 or 0.25. 0.75 is for me the bottom limit of how slow something can be and still be useful for learning purposes. Beyond that I'm just like, wow, sine tones. This is not a song anymore. So I have found that one is good for extremely slow. I don't know what's going on. And then full speed, whereas Amazing Slowdowner lets you adjust to wherever you need to be. Yeah, I always do that. I usually try to spend a little bit of time with just whatever surrounding context and tradition there is. And that can be different depending on the region and the person that I'm studying. Because sometimes I just don't know enough about what was happening around them. But like when I was learning tunes from like Tiadar Jackson, who's a black fiddle player, was a black fiddle player from outside of Austin. He plays in a style that's like between old time fiddle and blues fiddle and Cajun fiddle, which is very cool, but I only play one of those three things. So in order to like actually get the tune down, I had to do a little bit of study on the other two styles. Or even if it's just listening focused in a focused way in order to really understand what he was doing. And I still think I need to like, you know, when I play his tunes, I'm like, I need to spend more time learning blues fiddle. Because I'm not like getting the tone that he's getting because I don't use the bow that way and I need to learn how. They all develop over time, but I think it's just about zooming into the details on the tune itself and speeding it up to playing speed very slowly. And then also keeping the big picture in mind. I appreciate it. Yeah. So what inspired you to add a deep, a base drone string to the picture? Partially the fact that I was playing in duos constantly at the time when I commissioned this. So it was kind of a practical like there's never any low end in the band and I'm tired of that situation. Which it does do a lot to remedy this banjo is great in a duo situation. It's also great solo for that reason. It doesn't always cut the way I would want in a band because it overlaps a lot with the guitar, not tonally and pitch wise. But I got the idea from there is a black string bands called the Snowden family band who were from Ohio pre civil war. Like they moved up there as free men before emancipation happened. And apparently maybe the original source of the song Dixie that apparently they might have written this is like a satire of like, can you imagine missing the south? What an awful place. And then it like went completely over the heads of their white audience and then it turned into the anthem of the Confederacy. Fascinating tale there. They were neighbors of him. Yeah, Daniel Decatur, I met the black facements for the popularized that to live down the street from them. So the assumption is that he learned it from them did not understand that it was a joke and then went down south with it and they also didn't get the job. And so on and so forth. But there's a photo that exists of Ben and Lou Snowden who are the two brothers who were sort of the centerpiece of the band. Sitting in the open gable in their house, which is where they played their dances out of the family would be up in this open gable and people would like dance and party out on their lawn. And Lou Snowden the banjo player had an extra peg in the middle of his headstock and I was like I wonder what that's about that seems like too much and then three years went by and I was like it's because he's playing in a duo with a fiddle player, and I wanted some low end, and I want that so when I asked this is a Cedars instruments banjo from my friend Will down in Horset. And when I asked him to make it I was just like would you put on an extra string for me and he was like I've always wanted to see what would happen. And, you know, I never really know banjo. I say until I buy my next banjo, but it's it's not in the in the sites at this point. And what is it tuned to the low string I keep as an octave of the third string so they're both right now. Or usually their G's or A's. Yeah. One other interesting thing about the Snowden family band is we have a very small amount of documentation of women playing old time music as well as black people, partially due to bias on the part of the folklorists I'm sure, partially because the women probably wouldn't have been out like playing dances and stuff because they were expected to do stuff around the home so they were responsible for a lot of the teaching and transmission of this music, but would not have been as free to go out and perform it. And partially because these instruments had like unsavory connotations back in the day like these were drinking, carousing, partying instruments and affiliated with the devil and like no good Christian girl was supposed to be playing these. The Snowden family band on its marketing materials prominently bragged about the fact that their fiddlers were women that to Ben and Lou's sisters, whose names I don't remember because they never got recorded or photographed to my knowledge. I think one of them was Rose, they played the fiddle in the band and that was like remarkable to people at the time that these two women were doing it. Of course it's like couched in a very patronizing language and the advertisement it's like featuring two women who have mastered the violin and like despite the frailty of their sex. It's unfortunate but also cool because there isn't that much about that from that time period. As far as I know they're the only two black women who played fiddle that we have any information about at all. There's some black women who played banjo like a baker and live a cotton but as far as I know fiddle wise they're it. So another cool thing to look into there's a book about them called Way Up North in Dixie that is sort of about whether they wrote Dixie but also it's just like we have a ton of letters from this family of black string band musicians who were freedmen in Ohio in the early 1800s and life was real weird. It's a great window to a different time. Is that the family that the genuine Negro Jig is from? Purportedly, yes. And that they have that as a tribute? Exactly well I think that's another Emmett thing. I could be wrong but I've been trying to figure out whether we have like concrete information about genuine Negro Jig or Snowden's Jig or whatever and whether or not that is definitively from them and whether Daniel Decatur Emmett wrote down the sheet music or whether they did. I have not yet discovered the truth but I hope to talk to the people who wrote that book someday and get more information about it. I'd love to like see the letters. I think maybe Ben's fiddle is still around. What is it called again? The book Way Up North in Dixie. Aside from like word of mouth where do you find a lot of this history? I have read a lot of books and I have on my website there's a page that you can click just on the top right that says Black String Band Resources that you can click and it has like a list of every book that I've read and some books that I've only read part of and some books that I haven't read but come highly recommended. There's another one that's about to come out that I think is going to like blow everybody's mind. It's called Well of Souls and it's written by my friend Christina Gatti who was one of the contributors to Benjo Roots and Branches that came out pretty recently and she's like she is doing all of like the cutting edge Benjo research and theorizing these days. She's a powerhouse. I'm going to be moderating the book launch in October in Baltimore but I just got my advance copy and it's very cool. So I encourage y'all to look that up when it comes out. Or maybe pre-order. Pre-ordering is a very big deal for authors. What's that called again? Well of Souls. It has a foreword by Rhianna Giddens. So yeah. Hi, are we done? Are we done for lunch and jamming? Yeah.