There It Is

Published: Fri, 05/27/22

There seem to be clawhammer banjos all around me just now. Most nights, we take the family hound up to a momentarily unused schoolyard to frolic with other similarly inclined canines, and in a recent chat with the owner of a golden doodle named Rooster, I discovered said owner was a one-time cellist turned aspiring old-time banjo player. Meanwhile, at a recent end-of-school party for my pal Bret's daughter, I got an up-close look at, and listen to, her graduation present, a glorious handbuilt frailing banjo obtained with no little effort by road-tripping halfway across the state a few weeks prior. Bret's daughter is, among other things, a gifted classical-and-otherwise bass player, so what is it, exactly, about playing a low-register bowed instrument that foments this desire for Appalachian-style banjo mastery? I'm reminded of a conversation I once had with bluegrass-and-otherwise banjo master Tony Trischka, in which I wondered about the tendency for Scruggs-style pickers to take up the seemlingly antipodean pedal steel guitar. After knocking it around for a while, the best we could come up with was: "Sustain envy?"

It's a minute and scarcely-relevant detail of my own musical history that I learned – well, perhaps that's putting it strongly, but – to play banjo before settling on guitar. My parents' friends ran a somewhat hippie overnight camp in New Hampshire, and my first summer there, I signed up for a few days of banjo lessons. I learned just enough to discover how challenging the basic clawhammer groove is, yet came home fired up to get my own instrument and keep learning. At this point, my parents gently re-directed me to the guitar, borrowing a neighbor's three-quarter-size Harmony and signing me up for lessons at the local rec center. Since my return from camp coincided with my sister playing me Sgt. Pepper for the first time the night I got home, the whole guitar scheme seemed solid enough, and while I did get my hands on a banjo of my own a few months later and fitfully worked my way through the Pete Seeger book for a while, it was really never much of a contest.

The rec center teacher, Lucille Magliozzi, was a bluegrass fan, which is not so surprising considering she was the sister of Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of the locally-produced NPR show Car Talk, and whose intro music for decades was David Grisman's "Dawggy Mountain Breakdown." So while normal kids were learning Led Zeppelin riffs, AC/DC moves and, in due time, whatever the heck it was Eddie Van Halen was up to, I was starting to flatpick fiddle tunes and learning to fingerpick. The flatpicking never got beyond playing the basic tunes, but fingerpicking really lit me up, especially because I quickly figured out I could sort of stick the melody notes on top and thus play some semblance of a recognizable song without having to actually open my mouth and sing.

Curiously, in spite of all this serious rootsiness, I missed some essential milestones along the way, including, surprisingly, "Freight Train." This is especially weird considering that, in their infinite hipness, my parents actually took me to see Elizabeth Cotton and Mike Seeger perform, and I'm pretty sure the Happy Traum book Fingerpicking Styles For Guitar, which I distinctly remember checking out of the local library, included a version of the song. But I hadn't heard "Freight Train" when I had access to the Happy Traum book, so I know I didn't learn it then.

While I have no recollection of where or when, I did learn it eventually, of course, or I wouldn't be writing to tell you about this week's new lesson on Youtube, in which I explain how to fix your Travis picking in six steps, using "Freight Train" as an example. "Travis picking" is the catchall term I was first provided with to define any kind of alternating-thumb pattern picking, and I realize it's pretty much of a misnomer given that, among other things, the melodic specificity and drive of Merle Travis' music is pretty much the antithesis of the accompaniment patterns I first learned. Still, as Emperor Joseph II observes in Amadeus, there it is. You can find today's lesson at the link below:

Fix Your Travis Picking In Six Steps

More soon,

David
 
For organized, ongoing weekly lessons that help you learn tunes, turn them into complete songs, and start improvising, register for the Fingerstyle Five membership at www.fretboardconfidential.com