{"id":38,"date":"2014-08-29T21:11:33","date_gmt":"2014-08-29T21:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=38"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:57:24","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:57:24","slug":"joyful-noise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2014\/08\/29\/joyful-noise\/","title":{"rendered":"The Banjo and the Blues"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most respected bluesmen\u00a0in the Midwest, Gordon Bonham \u201980<\/a> learned from some of the masters of the genre.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up in Hammond, IN, so after I graduated from Wabash I would go to downtown Chicago as often as I could,\u201d Bonham says.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was one thing to hear the blues on records, another to get to\u00a0sit in the front row and hear someone like Otis Rush give you the real thing.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Bonham\u2019s own career took off\u00a0years later, when he moved\u00a0to Bloomington, IN.<\/span>\u201cI went down for the weekend and ended up staying for about 16 years. In three days I had a band, and in two weeks we were opening for John Lee Hooker.\u00a0I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve had a night off since.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Bonham\u2019s playing attracted the attention of mandolin player Yank Rachell, and Bonham played with the Indiana blues legend for many years. Through Rachell, Bonham met Chicago blues pianist Jimmy Walker and played\u00a0in front of tens of thousands of\u00a0people at the Chicago Blues Festival.<\/span><\/span>\u201cJimmy was one of those guys who got on stage and just started playing. He didn\u2019t tell me the song, the key, the feel\u2014you just had to figure out what he was doing and jump in. That was\u00a0a real education, and I\u2019ve approached music that\u00a0way ever since.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

That includes Bonham\u2019s\u00a0current project funded by a\u00a0grant from the Indiana Arts Council\u2014studying the 5-string banjo and bringing it kicking\u00a0and screaming into the blues<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

A couple years ago Indiana\u00a0Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf\u00a0 wanted to learn to play Delta blues on the guitar to add a new direction to his career. He got a grant from the Indiana Arts Council to do it, took lessons from me, and did real well. We\u2019ve done a few gigs together with me playing as he reads his poetry.<\/p>\n

One day Norbert said, \u201cGordon, you should get one of these grants.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had been interested in the banjo since I first heard a guy play clawhammer style back in the 1970s. I\u2019ve always been intrigued by the sound. So I thought,\u00a0Why not write a grant to learn more about and play the banjo?<\/em><\/p>\n

And my proposal was a question I\u2019d often wondered about: If the banjo came over from Africa and was the most popular instrument in America in the 19th century, why didn\u2019t the blues\u2014which appeared in the late 19th century and early 20th century and was created by African-American musicians\u2014have any banjo in it? Why didn\u2019t Charlie Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson play the banjo?<\/p>\n

\"Rhiannon-Giddens-Goodtime-240x300\"<\/a>The first thing I did after I got the grant was to travel to the Madison Folk Festival to meet with members of the Grammy-winning group Carolina Chocolate Drops, four African-American musicians from North Carolina who play old-time string music, blues, and even some Irish ballads on fiddle, banjo, and guitar. I walked into their trailer and asked them, \u201cWho plays blues on the banjo?\u201d They all looked at me like I was out of my mind. Rhiannon Giddens (left) picked up her banjo and started to play a song that she said was \u201ckind of like the blues.\u201d<\/p>\n

But did they know anyone who played Delta blues on the banjo? They couldn\u2019t think of anyone.<\/p>\n

After more than a year working on this, I\u2019m not sure I have definitive answers, but I\u2019ve got some ideas as to why you don\u2019t hear the blues on the banjo.<\/p>\n

The most unfortunate reason is that the banjo was connected to racial stereotypes. In the 1820s, minstrel shows began. White actors blackened their faces and portrayed slaves in comedy skits, often including shameful racially based jokes. This tradition took the country by storm\u2014by the 1830s, every circus and medicine show had a minstrel act. They were even inserted between acts of plays.<\/p>\n

\"200px-Joel_Sweeney\"<\/a>Claiming he had learned from a slave in Virginia how to play the banjo, Joel Walker Sweeney added the instrument to his act. Pretty soon every minstrel act had to have a banjo player, and these skits portrayed slaves as clowns and buffoons. I\u2019m sure the stigma carried over into the way African Americans felt about the instrument.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019d asked Charlie Patton, one of the first blues players of the 20th century, why he didn\u2019t play the banjo, he wouldn\u2019t have said, \u201cBecause they used the banjo to make fun of me.\u201d All this had happened 50 years earlier.<\/p>\n

But because of the stigma, banjos weren\u2019t in his community, weren\u2019t being played, at least in areas where these early blues players lived.And the banjo was seen as a happy instrument\u2014the instrument of a clown.<\/p>\n

In the 1940s, when Earl Scruggs blew the lid off the banjo world with his three-finger style, Uncle Dave Macon, a banjo player from more of the \u201chappy\u201d tradition was asked, \u201cWhat do you think of this Earl Scruggs?\u201d Uncle Dave replied, \u201cHe\u2019s not even funny!\u201dHappy wasn\u2019t what the blues guys were feeling when they were developing this style of personally expressive music.<\/p>\n

\"$T2eC16JHJIEFHSQY3n)GBR5rnbtmi!~~60_57\"<\/a>At the time the blues was beginning, banjos were expensive. As they became more and more ornate, the prices went up. In the 1890s a banjo could cost between $100 and $200, while you could pick up an acoustic guitar for $10 at Woolworth\u2019s. So that\u2019s another reason we don\u2019t hear blues on the banjo.<\/p>\n

The third reason we don\u2019t hear blues on the banjo has to do with the very nature of the instrument. As I\u2019ve listened to old blues songs and tried to come up with ways to play, I\u2019ve found that the banjo doesn\u2019t create some of the sounds we\u2019ve come to expect when we think of acoustic blues. Most people expect a hard-driving bass rhythm, often played with the thumb, to accompany either vocals or slide playing on the other strings. But the banjo has a fifth string played with the thumb that\u2019s higher than the rest that gives the banjo its characteristic sound.And the blues tends to have long, drawn-out sustaining notes. The banjo has a plunky, non-sustaining tone.<\/p>\n

Still, I believe the banjo deserves to be an instrument of the blues. Even its history could be a blues song! It is a soulful instrument whose sound can be haunting one moment, joyful the next. The tone may not be what blues listeners are used to, but that difference breathes new life into old songs. It frees me to play them\u2014and others to hear them\u2014in new ways.<\/p>\n

Songs from Muddy Waters\u2019 \u201cCan\u2019t Be Satisfied\u201d to Blind Willie Johnson\u2019s \u201cSoul of a Man\u201d sound good to me on the banjo.One of my goals from this grant is to show up to work some night and just play the banjo all night. Right now I could do about 10 songs, but I\u2019d like to be able to walk in with the banjo and do my thing.I think it just might work.<\/p>\n

Watch Bonham plays blues on the banjo\u00a0and resonator guitar<\/a><\/p>\n

Read Howard Hewitt’s article on Gordon Bonham.<\/a><\/p>\n

Edited from \u201cWhere Blue Meets the Banjo,\u201d presented at Wally Tunes, the fifth annual Alumni, Faculty, and Staff Symposium at Wabash. Bonham\u2019s primary source was\u00a0<\/em>That Half Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in America\u00a0and Popular Culture<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>by Karen Linn.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the most respected bluesmen\u00a0in the Midwest, Gordon Bonham \u201980 learned from some of the masters of the genre. \u201cI grew up in Hammond, IN, so after I graduated from Wabash […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-class-notes","category-features"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2014\/08\/03-gordon-talks-banjo-horizlores.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":639,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/639"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}