EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE SEEGER

Videotaped for The Banjo Project in August, 2003
Lexington, VA

The interview with Mike Seeger took place at his home in Lexington, VA over two days in August 2003. Mike also invited two of his banjo-playing friends who lived in the area—Dave Winston and Bruce Clark—to come by. Their interviews will be included in future installments.

Marc Fields: When and how did your involvement with the banjo begin?

Mike Seeger: I’m not sure when I first heard the banjo, because my brother Pete was playing the banjo by the time I was 3 or 4 years old. But I also heard recordings, Library of Congress field recordings that my parents had. And between the two of those, I just loved the music of the five-string banjo. Whether it was from Joe Russell down in Marion, Virginia or Wade Ward from around Galax or my brother Pete.

MF: When did you start playing?

MS: Well, I didn’t start playing stringed instruments really until I was about 18 years old. My mother always wanted me to play music, and I felt like I couldn’t. I had tried the family guitar and the family dulcimer and she wanted me to play the piano. And I just didn’t do any of those, and they were around, but after I started taking guitar lessons, which I did for about 5 or 6 months, then as soon as I quit trying to play my classical guitar or anything like that, which I never did much anyway, I took up the banjo.

And that was about the time I was going to college. And I flunked out of college and played the banjo. And I got a 25-dollar S.S. Stewart banjo and started playing like the people that I wanted to learn from, which included my brother Pete, and Wade Ward, and Bascom Lunsford. And a couple of the people I had especially heard on those Library of Congress field recordings.

MF: You didn't listen to pop music on the radio?

MS: My parents [composers and musicologists Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger] wouldn’t allow a radio in the house when we were growing up. But by the time I was 11 or 12, I had been given a radio by my uncle, and I was never a person to listen a whole lot to popular music. I knew a little bit of "Mersey dotes and doesey dotes" and things like that, and I was really tickled when the Weavers began singing those kinds of songs, some traditional songs on popular music programs. […] I was not exactly your usual American consumer of music. I valued the older songs above the pop songs. I was educated by my parents.

MF: Were ou aware of a connection between their political and philosophical outlooks, and the music?

MS: I think it was implicit. I think that their talk of mission on behalf of this music

included the social-political issues. I found myself spending a lot of time in the kitchen, if I was playing music or just hanging out. And that would be usually with an African American woman or man who worked while my mother worked teaching piano.

MF: What were you looking for in music? What was it about the music that so appealed to you?

MS: […] If I need to put it in words, I love the accessibility of this music. It resonates with me, I love the feeling of it. I love the breadth of the, the stylistic breadth that you have. In other words, there’s incredible stylistic variation in all the instruments and in singing as well. I love the history of it. And to me, when I’m playing, and also when I’m listening to somebody or trying to figure out what they’re doing, the feeling is really the most important thing.

Mick Malone once asked me, the famous Irish musician, said something like "In Ireland, a great fiddler in our country, is someone who plays well and knows a thousand or two thousand tunes. But someone here doesn’t have that larger repertoire quite often. Maybe 75 or 100 tunes." And to think about it, I think that what’s valued in this country is style and being, your individuality of style and your identity. And I sometimes think that’s part of the thing that, one of the things that America is about. The freedom and ability to express yourself in a certain way.

MF: When you consider the development of American music, what is the banjo’s role?

MS: The banjo is an icon in a way for what’s happened in America, in the development of American music as a whole, in that it was an African instrument when it came here, it became an African American instrument here. It met with the fiddle, and undoubtedly changed in the 17 and 1800s and eventually began being played by European Americans. […] It’s been totally involved in American musical history in the past almost two centuries very very strongly.

MF: Most people don’t realize the variety of banjos that were made, four- as well as five-string…

MS: Those instruments, like the tenor banjo, banjo guitar, banjo ukulele, banjo mandolin, banjo cello, were things that banjo makers wanted to make, and sometimes there were good uses for them. In jazz bands for instance, the tenor banjo is a great cross between a drum and a guitar or something like that. It’s loud, and it could compete with the brasses for instance. They’re still banjos. They’re still banjos, but they’ve got different necks on them and so you get different sounds.

I love playing the banjo mandolin, the banjo ukulele, it’s a wonderful rhythm instrument, and sometimes, actually, a melodic instrument. Within a string band, for instance. I love playing banjo guitar. It has more of a pop, And percussion, of course, banjo does that, [more] than the guitar, and you play the same thing as you play on the guitar, and it comes out sounding quite different and having a very different emotional feeling.

MF: What aspects of the banjo's history are you most interested in?

MS: I’ve focused in mostly on the music of the banjo player that I can actually meet, and I’m interested in the history, but I tend to be interested in the music that’s made at the grass roots and not so much for stage. I mean, it’s funny; I make my living playing music on stage that's not meant to be played on stage.

Throughout all the development of the banjo, you have to keep in mind how much that we don’t know, that’s not written about, and how much people just meet people and pick up a little bit of an idea from here, a little bit of an idea from there. And then they have their own ideas, and how much that’s influenced the way our banjo music is today.

MF: What are your sources, and what do you consider to be authentic?

MS: Well, when you begin talking about authenticity, you have to say authentic what? And it’s the mixing of different things in America which has created so much of our music. In a sense, the music I play is rural popular music or working class popular music, or well, I guess working class including farming class including subsistence farming class. But not entirely, because bankers and salesmen and people like that also played this music as well in the old days, early days. Urban popular music existed on one side of that, and it was always interchanged, back and forth.>

[…] And the minstrel stage was at least in my understanding of it an area where there was a mixture of urban showmanship and rural working class people, both black and white, creating a music for the stage. And then that music was picked up and influenced. Some people more that others out in the country, and that’s the kind of music that I play.

Uncle Dave Macon, for instance, the great banjo player and singer/songwriter. He was the star of the Grand Ole Opry. Played some songs which to me were totally earthy songs, right down to earth. And some of his songs were from the minstrel stage. And some songs were gospel songs. He did all of those things […] So at some point, you just have to say, well, that’s authentic that, and this has a feeling of being back in the country, this appealed to people. For me, of course, I know that "Lady Gay" is an old song, and it has a feeling of an old song, and I like it for that reason. "Oh Death," that Doc Boggs sang, is an ancient, couple of centuries old, thing.

(47:30) that gosh, could have gone back farther than that for all we know. All we know is the ballads go back to then. But we also know that some of the songs of Uncle Dave Macon were created in the 1800’s from the minstrel stage.

MF: How and why did banjo playing change in the 1920s and 30s?

MS:Let’s say prior to 1925, people who played old time music or fiddle tunes would have played mostly at home. There weren’t many schoolhouse shows, or public performances of this kind of music. There were contests, fiddle contests, and possibly banjo contests. And sometimes musicians would play at public gatherings such as country fairs or court days or whenever there would be a crowd around.

In the early 1900’s, the automobile came into being. The most important thing was basically the industrialization of the south. People then had money, and therefore could also give rise to people who could make money playing music. At the same time, the guitar was gaining popularity, as was the mandolin due to the popularity of it in the north. And through the guitar teaching manuals and the Sears-Roebuck Catalogue, and finally in the 20’s with first recordings and then radio finally made it possible for people to make a living playing this music, dispersing their music in a way in which the music of one person could reach thousands, tens of thousands of people and then dominate the musical cultural landscape that way. It was a revolution in the way that this music was thought of.

After that period, then there was a period of commercializing the music. In other words, they would have to learn new songs, because having a regular radio program for instance means you have to have new songs. Therefore, you have to create songs or look around and find new songs, and much faster than you would have before. And also, it was part of urbanization. You would want to reach for the urban world a little bit, but still have some country identity, so you wouldn’t get too far ahead of your public. It was a time of great change.

MF: In terms of who played the music, what had actually changed?

MS: Well gradually, after the appearance of radio and records, it happened over the next 15 and 20 years that fewer and fewer people in the rural areas played music for themselves. And more and more people turned on the radio or bought records of other people playing music. So it reduced largely the number of people playing music in their own homes.

And the banjo went into real decline starting in the late 20’s through, into the time when Earl Scruggs started playing the banjo and that began building slowly a new market for banjos and great numbers of people playing the banjo. And my brother Pete in the urban areas but also to an extent in the rural areas, people would get his book on how to play the banjo.

MF: In something of yours I read, you made a powerful analogy comparing the popularization of southern music to mining…

MS: The music that we’re speaking of is a cultural resource that we’ve built up over thousands of years. And it goes on, but for the first few years of commercial recording, they pretty much mined out what was there. The record companies treated it like something that would go on forever, but the musicians soon figured out that they had to create renewable resources, so they created different kinds of things that were more based on other sources, and they started conforming more to urban popular music. But one of the reasons that I feel it’s important to keep the music alive is that it is a resource that we can continue to use without using it up as long as we don’t consider it a commodity, but as something to use regularly and to continue using.

MF: To what do you attribute the resurgence of interest in old time music?

MS: The resurgence of what we call old time music has been growing and growing, just progressing. I like to think of it as a continuum from some of the people such as poets back in the 17, 1800’s using what they call folk material, from Child who collected ballads, to Sharp who collected tunes to go with the ballads, which was then a unique idea. And then in the 1930’s the idea of style being a very important part of the music, then that was incorporated into what we call the revival.

[…] I feel that we’re in a very exciting time for music now, because of the diversity, and because we’re finally to the place where people are really taking the whole music as part of their lives now. Not just the words, not just the tunes, but a style and a way of thinking of the music and having it as part of their lives…