Buzzard bait

I am currently working on a new book project. I can’t and won’t say exactly what I am working on – and that drives me a little crazy because there is so much cool stuff going on and I want to tell everybody . . . but it isn’t time just yet.

Anyway, I took a break from writing and took a long walk in the woods to I organize my thoughts. I was drinking in the scenery and mulling over how to relate some musical concepts in plain English when I realized that I was lost.

Getting lost never brothers me because it almost always means I am going to see or experience something new – but it wasn’t quite as much fun today when i realized that I was being trailed by turkey buzzards!

Jacob and The Guitar Man

I hope this missive finds you on top of your day, or if not, my hope to raise you up.

I have been an avid follower of yours for five years now, since April 2007. I had been given a loaner banjo to use indefinitely. Not being setup correctly it was difficult to play.

I then did a search for banjo instruction on clawhammer and in addition to the usual suspects, a link to your early videos (not your ancient vids) on basic frailing while sitting under the stairs out on archive.org.

Thank you.

The video link in the website box is of a new banjo friend here in town, great deep voice and a nice picker by the name Tyler Gregory. He often is found busking on the sidewalk with a goodly crowd. While playing on rather our main downtown corner, an autistic boy of eight who is also blind wanders into Tyler while playing.

If you make it out to Kansas anytime please stop by and kick around Lawrence for an evening. Bring the Banjo.

My best wishes to you and your family.
-J
Lawrence, KS

Sing

Peter in Ireland writes:

hey pat,sorry to bother you again,but ive found myself in a rut. im mortally scared of singing infront of people and here in ireland,thats a big part of being a musician.
friends and family are always asking me to see some american folk songs and id love to.but i cant find the confidence.
i so afraid of them saying im a bad singer,what should i do?

When I started in karate I went to a couple of truly awful dojos. One place in particular was especially bad. It was an old garage and during training sessions the teachers would open up the garage doors so that the kids in town could watch us train. I was eleven or twelve years old and I was always uncomfortable practicing with other kids watching and laughing.

One day my teacher noticed how uncomfortable I was. He marched over and shouted, “What’s the problem, Costello?”

“Can we close the doors? Those kids are laughing at me.”

“@#$% them.”

He said it so flatly that I just stared at him for a moment. He leaned down so we were nose to nose. “Did you hear me? I said, @#$% them.”

He straightened up and pointed to the kids out on the sidewalk. “Those kids would give anything to be where you are now, but they don’t have the guts to do the work. They’re jealous. They hide their envy by laughing at you. So @#$% them and get back to work!”

It wasn’t exactly a Kodak moment like in the movies, and the advice would have been delivered with more subtlety, but he was right. Worrying about being laughed at is a pretty lousy reason to hold back on your dreams.

I’m nearly deaf. It was hard for me to learn how to sing (and to play the banjo, and the guitar, and the harmonica . . .) but when people laughed at me I just said, “@#$% them” and I kept on going. Nobody laughs at me now.

If you want to sing then sing. If people don’t like it just cowboy up, say @#$% them and focus on doing what you love.

Life is too short to worry about what people might think. Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Sing, love, live, don’t step in anything soft and, most importantly, “@#$% them!”

Old Time Banjo vs Old Time Banjo

Sometimes in the mid 1980′s Dear Old Dad and I were at a jam session held in a firehouse somewhere in Lancaster or Bucks County. The jam was going pretty good when this guy walked up with a banjo and played so badly that it threw all of us off. We kept on trying to jam but this guy was making such a mess of things that the jam was basically over.

Once the group had broken up I introduced myself to the guy hoping I could find out what went wrong. He was playing a nice old 1920′s Vega banjo, but it sounded terrible. I asked him about his instrument and he proudly turned the instrument around so I could see the honking huge sponge he had stuffed under the head proclaiming, ”The guy who sold me this banjo in Galax told me to never take this sponge out of this banjo!”

That was my first encounter with the new version of old time banjo as well as being the first time I heard anybody reference Galax, Virginia.

From that point on I started hearing about Galax over and over again, but the creepy thing was that almost everybody who dropped that name was a horrible banjo player. It wasn’t until we made the mistake of attending the Brandywine Friends of Old Time Music Festival that I got a clear picture of what was going on: old time music had developed a new subculture – and it wasn’t pretty.

It’s hard to describe exactly what happened because none of it makes any sense. For example, I was taught to look at music in simple terms and to explore all the musical possibilities. In the new old time music scene musical illiteracy is held in high esteem to the point where banjo students are discouraged from learning chords.

When you take musicianship out of the picture there really isn’t much for a banjo student to do except memorize the finger movements of tunes. Because of this, the new old time jam devolved into a group of people sitting in a circle playing tunes like Over The Waterfall over and over again. Over time the tune falls into a weird sort of monotone because everybody is playing melody. There is no interplay or harmony. Just the tune repeated ad nauseum.

In other words, the jam had gone from a musical conversation into a cultist chant. Forget about making music, tune to double C, play exactly like everybody else and fit in fit in fit in fit in.

The argument the new old time banjo crowd made was that this was how they played in Galax . . .

Back in 2001 Dear Old Dad and I were in Galax, Vriginia filming interviews for The Down Neck Gazette. We were in Barr’s Fiddle Shop getting footage of some local pickers jamming. During a break I put down the video camera, pulled a funky old banjo off the wall and played a little bit of The Baltimore Fire. One of the old timers looked up at with an amazed expression on his face. Then he said something that put the terminology debate in perspective for me.

“Where did you learn to play like that? I haven’t heard good old time banjo like that in more than twenty years!”

Retreat news (and other stuff)

The August banjo retreat (8/9 through 8/12) is just about booked up. There are only a couple of bunks left so if you want to come get in touch with me right away.

We are looking at hosting another folk musicians retreat the first weekend in November. This would be open to all instruments. Workshops would be expanded accordingly. What better way to get ready for winter. Let me know if this sounds good.

Don’t forget to tune in (and turn your friends on) to Keys To The Highway.
You may have been to a rodeo, a world’s fair and a goat roping but you ain’t never seen anything like this. Lots of fun and great music.

Keep your ears to the rail and your eyes on The Daily Frail for Somerset Banjo news. Exciting and wonderful things are in the works.

phone: 410-968-3873
email: ask.patrick@gmail.com

More later.
Until then don’t step in anything soft.

Peace to all,
Pat Costello (Dear Old Dad)

 

Lowell Jacobs!

Lowell Jacobs

Dear Old Dad dropped me a note with the happy news that Lowell Jacobs will be at the Crisfield Banjo Retreat!

Lowell has a lifetime of banjo building and repair knowledge to share, and he is a heck of a nice guy.

Lowell built the banjo I learned to play on (well, he actually built the neck) and he has been a dear friend for about as long as I have been making music.  I am thrilled to have the chance to hang out with him again!

To see the elephant

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.

Old Joe Clark

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.

Old Joe Clark

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.

Lynchburg Town

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.