I mentioned earlier that my first encounter with frailing banjo happened while I was sleeping by the fire in Dear Old Dad’s Sioux lodge. Well, there is more to the story.
So there I was, half asleep in the tipi curled up on a Victorian carriage blanket made from a silver-tip grizzly pelt when I heard somebody at another campsite playing Wildwood Flower. Dear old Dad and I listened and said pretty much at the same time, “That’s it! That’s the sound!”
Up to that point the two of us had taken bluegrass lessons and we were completely miserable. Even at the ripe old age of seven I was pretty sure that everything about the sound of bluegrass was pretty cool, but at the same time everything about the culture surrounding bluegrass was and still is ugly.
Taking lessons in bluegrass banjo was kind of like being indoctrinated into a weird cult. I sat in a smoke-filled room hiding behind my banjo while I was told to practice finger movements with no explanation other than, “follow the tab.” Nothing made sense and nothing was as fun as Steve Martin and Kermit The Frog made it look on The Muppet Show.
I should note that back in the 70′s Steve Martin was young and having fun with the banjo. I miss that Steve . . . oh well.
Where was I? Oh yeah – so Dear Old Dad and I were stuck taking bluegrass banjo lessons hoping desperately to someday have fun with the banjo. We knew about Grandpa Jones from Hee-Haw, but everybody told us to stay away from that stuff.
Then we heard Wildwood Flower drifting out from the night. Dear Old Dad ran right out and found the banjo player. He listened to some tunes and asked the banjo player to show him what he was doing – and the dirty rotten #%$&* turned him down cold.
So we knew there was an alternative but now we were faced with the question of where to learn this weird thing called frailing. We searched and searched for years without finding any resource.
Then one day I was at the Radnor Library and I spotted a guy in filthy buckskin trousers and a even filthier homemade shirt roaming the aisles with a filthy banjo strapped to his back. I walked up to him and asked him if he knew what frailing was. Without saying a word he swung the banjo from his back and started striking the banjo strings with his filthy fingernails.
My mother and I each took one of his hands and walked him out the door and down the street to my father’s hoagie shop.
The filthy guy was named Paul and the day I met him he had spent the day volunteering at Ridley Creek Plantation. He was an old Washington Square beatnik full of stories about Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan and just about everybody else from the old New York folk revival.
Paul never charged my dad a dime for the help, and once Dear Old Dad started taking his banjo everywhere Paul wound up hosting a weekly jam in his living room. They called themselves The Wednesday Night Banjo and Doughnut Marching Society.
While all of this was happening I was starting to teach myself how to frail the five-string banjo. Dear Old Dad would come home from Paul’s with a notebook full of songs in tabulature and I would sneak off with it and try to decipher what the numbers all meant.
One night Paul showed up all excited because Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl were playing in the city for the first time in years. We went to the concert and, this struck me as weird at the time, Paul brought his banjo. I mean he sat and watched the performance with his banjo in his lap.
When the show was over Paul introduced me to a very frail elderly woman. I didn’t know who she was, but she was nice to me. She took Paul’s banjo and played some tunes. It took me a moment to realize she was playing left-handed on a right-handed banjo.
She played and asked me if I was a banjo player and I told her I wanted to be. She gave me some advice that I still hold in my heart to this day.
Paul and Peggy Seeger had struck up a conversation. They remembered each other from New York adventures. Miss Peggy turned her attention to me and the next thing I knew I was getting a quick frailing lesson. Again, I wound up walking away with advice I follow to this day.
I got to meet Ewan MacColl as well, but I was too young to realize who I was talking to. I asked him why he cupped his hand to his ear while he sang. “It makes you look bored!” I said. His reply sounded a bit like a growl.
As we left Paul asked me, “How do you feel about meeting Libba?”
I gave him a puzzled look and asked him, “Libba who?”
“Elizabeth Cotten. She wrote Fright Train. She was giving you some banjo tips just now.”
That was my start. I learned my craft from countless other resources and accidental encounters with cool old dudes, but that was the moment I started putting the puzzle together.
That phrase, “Putting the puzzle together” is a pretty accurate description of how I learned to play the banjo – and how I became a musician.
Nowadays we tend to look at learning as collecting answers. We go to school and most of our learning time is spent memorizing answers to pass tests – and right there is where a lot of music students run into trouble because there is nothing to memorize when you are learning to frail the five-string banjo.
The first song I learned on the banjo was a tune called Old Joe Clark. At first I tried to learn the tune from tab, but that never felt right because I would struggle so hard to remember what to play that I would get lost.
Then I heard Dear Old Dad singing the song:
Old Joe Clark’s a fine old man
Tell you the reason why
He keeps corn liquor in his house
Good old Rock and Rye
Once I started singing Old Joe Clark the stuff I was playing on the banjo started to make sense. It hit me out of the blue that in order for what I was playing to sound like anything I had to phrase the notes as if I was talking through the banjo.
The second song I taught myself was Lynchburg Town.
Like Old Joe Clark I started out with just the tab from Dear Old Dad’s notebook, but once I started focusing on phrasing the notes to match the meter of the lyrics things started to make sense.
Goin’ down to town,
Goin’ down to town
Goin’ down to Lynchburg town
to lay my ‘bacco down
After working through a handful of songs this way I picked up a songbook that didn’t have any banjo tab. I read the lyrics and as I was reading I started plunking out the melody on the banjo. Once I added in the rhythm I was playing City of New Orleans.
Suddenly it made sense. I could hear a melody and play along. I could also look at lyrics on a sheet of paper and get a feel for the rhythm and melody just by the flow of the words.
Nobody taught me how to do this and I didn’t just pull the understanding out of the blue. I simply looked until I could see the patterns – and in those patterns I found myself getting a feel for the logic of music.
Over the years I had more breakthroughs in understanding. None of it came easy, but after working for countless hours I would get this rush when things clicked and I could see the pattern. That moment where. after hours of hard work, the clouds would lift away and suddenly I had a deeper understanding of my craft.
Even better, there were moments where, after struggling madly to understand something for weeks or months, some cool old dude would quietly point out what I was missing. I remember this one time an old guy pointed out the way a seventh chord can sometimes lead you into a chord change. Once I understood that about a hundred tunes popped into my head and we sat there picking through them all laughing every time that G7 came along.
In the 1800′s there was an American phase that was used for this moment of understanding. They called it, “Seeing the elephant”. The phrase may have originated from an article published by The New York Times on March 1, 1861 entitled Seeing The Elephant:
It is narrated of a certain farmer that his life’s desire was to behold this largest of quadrupeds, until the yearning became well nigh a mania. He finally met one of the largest size traveling in the van of a menagerie. His horse was frightened, his wagon smashed, his eggs and poultry ruined. But he rose from the wreck radiant and in triumph. “A fig for the damage,” quoth he, “for I have seen the elephant!”
A soldier walking away from battle or a pioneer who survived the trip across the prairie might be heard to say that he or she had, “Seen the elephant.” It was a way of saying that you had seen something – you understood something – that could not be put into words.
There are gurus who will claim to give you all the answers, but without comprehension- without seeing the proverbial elephant – the answers are not all that useful. Knowing the finger movements to a handful of songs is not the same as being able to communicate through the language of music. Faking it may get you brief attention, but attention is a short and hollow thing. People tell me I am this, that and the other thing all the time – good and bad – but none of that matters compared to how I feel when I can tell my wife how much I love her through a few notes of a song.
Best of all, even after so many years and miles and adventures there is always another elephant out there waiting to be seen.
