Click
here for a PDF version suitable for printingINTERVIEW WITH GEORGE GIBSON (EDITED)
Videotaped the day before the Black Banjo Gathering in April 2005, in a hotel in Boone, NC.
MARC FIELDS: Where did you get your music from?
GEORGE GIBSON: I grew up in Knott County, Kentucky actually at the confluence of the Big Doubles, Buffalo and Little Doubles creeks. At that time they all dried up in summer. My father had a country grocery store. About 1950, a neighbor who was 5 or 6 years older than I was playing oldtime banjo, and that was very rare, because in the Forties, fellows older than I started playing bluegrass. The culture had collapsed. All the things connected with the old music was gone. This fellow's name was James Sloan, and he had learned from a couple of outstanding banjo players, and I'd heard a rumor that my father had played.
He probably hadn't played banjo in 10 or 15 years when I bought one and probably drove him crazy beating around it. One day he picked it up and started playing, and he was an outstanding oldtime player and he used somewhere between 15 and 20 tunings. And I learned some from James Sloan. People in that area they learned by emulation, that is you didn't ask older people what they did or how they did it, you listened and then you tried to duplicate the same sounds. Which means you might of got some of the same sounds but you used a lot of different techniques getting those sounds.
There was one fellow who lived up the creek from me, his father had made him a little fretless banjo, and he played "Morphine," or was trying to play it. He eventually gave it up and joined the Air Force and became bluegrass player.
I'll show you a little something about it [Morphine]. One oldtimer I heard play it said something to me about the music that alerted me that something was going on with the left hand. He said son there's more music in the bottom string of the banjo than any string. When he played Morphine on the off beat he'd be filling in here... [PLAYS MORPHINE]
Sometimes I brush up, it's hard for me to describe. My father had an unusual way of playing but I didn't ask him about it until he was 90 yrs old and visiting me in Florida. [shows how he did it] and I do some of that but I don't play exactly like he did.
From what I've been able to figure out from the oldtimers that stopped by and the way I developed, the style was singing. You very rarely played just an instrumental, you sang with just about everything. The style had a lot of picking up here, doing a lot of things with your left hand. You can hear more of that in some of the players who were recorded earlier like Clarence Ashley. You hear some of that in his playing.
MF: You said that by the time you were hearing the banjo, the old time style had all but disappeared…
GG: Yes, the culture collapsed and the songs disappeared. Well, a lot of those songs went into bluegrass -- "Shady Grove," many others, "Cripple Creek." I learned all those tunes, but I didn't know at the time I learned those tunes where a lot of them came from. A lot of them came from African-Americans and in Josiah Combs' book Folk Songs of the Southern Mountains, he does go into that. He was from Hemet (?) Kentucky and he was collecting songs around 1902, and he collected "Ground Hog" from my grandfather's cousin in 1915 and a few other tunes like that.
Beginning in the Twenties with the radio and the phonograph, the first music they heard reinforced their music, and then in the Thirties as the coal fields in eastern Kentucky where I'm from, the coal camps started coming in in 1910, 1920 and a lot of people left to work in the coal camps. And in the Thirties that started going down too, people started leaving to find jobs elsewhere. World War Two a lot of people moved out. After World War Two, a lot of soldiers left and never came back...
So up and down the creeks there were a lot of empty houses, so you no longer had the dances in the schools. They might have had lingered on in one or two school in Knott County, but schools were consolidating. But that all ended. There were no school dances after I -- I attended one -- after the Fifties.
MF: What can you tell me about the dances before World War Two?
GG: There were dances in the home, dances in the school. On Buffalo Creek, I have no record of a fiddler playing there. It was usually a lone banjo player and the tune he played 90 percent of the time was "Hook and Line," and that's an African-American tune. It came in to eastern Kentucky prior to the Civil War.
MF: What's your best guess about when and how the banjo came to the mountains?
GG: The banjo came into the mountains with the first settlers. It did not come in the settlers that were considered upper class.... The banjo was the instrument of the backwoodsman, people on the frontier. Moving out of east Virginia were a lot of mixed race people, and they moved generally to the counties in southwest Virginia, northwest North Carolina, over into northeast Tennessee and over into Kentucky.
I grew up around a lot of people who were mixed race. I didn't know at the time they were mixed race. But one of the best banjo players on the creek was mixed race, but he was known as white. You read a lot of stuff about mulinjuns today, but there were a lot of people of mixed race.
MF: So they used the clawhammer style?
GG: Clawhammer's not a term used in eastern Kentucky. I call it the downstroke style. The downstroke style was always played for dances, although a lot of oldtimers would occasionally play a little 2 finger or 3 finger, but the dances were always played in downstroke style. It is my opinion that it came out of east Virginia with the first slaves, freed African-American, mixed race people, backwoods people.
The earliest reference I've found to the banjo in Kentucky is the 1790s. The banjo has always been a dance instrument. All the early citations to the banjo in the islands as well as colonial America refer to the banjo as an instrument for dance. Now it's my opinion that in colonial America, the banjo was adopted by young people, for their parties, for their courting rituals. And I found a reference to that in South Carolina near Greenville in the 1780s. I believe actually that's when the basic cultural exchange started. [He cites a book by Paul Haney about free African-American families around the time of the American revolution].
It wasn't something that was valued or something to be passed on to the next generation. It was the instrument of the younger folks. Now a lot of people who went down to the mountains to record found that oldtimers hadn't played in 10 or 15 years, and that wasn't unusual. Generally a man would quit playing by the time he was in his late 30s or 40s. He got more family or church oriented, but you always had a few people who played. And I must say, in my research, as far as I can tell, there were probably more women playing the banjo than men. Everybody you talked to had a grandmother or a great aunt who played banjo. My uncle Mayo Hammons' wife played banjo. I think he may have also, most of his children did…
MF: What kind of banjos did they play?
GG:I have a friend not far from here who remembers the first brought home banjo he saw. It was a Sears-Roebuck banjo. He by the way saw a gourd banjo played at a school dance in Grapevine Creek in 1946.
MF: What do you think is the significance of the Black Banjo Gathering?
GG: The banjo's an important contribution in America, and I think that it's great that more African-Americans are getting more interested in the banjo, and I thought I should be here to support it.
If you follow the history of the banjo from Africa to the mountains, it's American history in a microcosm. You see the stereotypes, you see all that. If you're reading history to learn more about the banjo, than you're learning how history was really written. And it wasn't written about the common folks that played the banjo.
There's Boucher's statement -- the banjo is the instrument of the lower classes. Then he goes on to make another statement, that it's almost the only instrument in use among the slaves. Of course the fiddle was also immensely popular among the slaves and the free slaves, probably more so than the banjo.
MF: Would you like to play something for us?
GG: [starts tuning] I'm going to the tuning my dad used for "Darling Corey" which was an east Kentucky song. [shows how he tunes it] I have a friend who calls them dulcimer tunings, when you tune two strings alike on the banjo…