My
first exposure to melodic style came in the summer of 1970, when
I and several other five string pickers lost the banjo contest
at the Folk Festival of the Smokies in Gatlinburg to Carroll Best,
the pioneering banjo picker from Haywood County, North Carolina.
I had been struggling mightily trying to figure out how to play
fiddle tunes with my Scruggs style rolls, and my version of Arkansas
Traveler, the tune I played in the Gatlinburg contest, was far
less than a success. I remember that Best blew us all away when
he played Soldier's Joy in the key of D in open G tuning, without
a capo. The notes just flowed from his banjo. He moved effortlessly
around the neck in ways I had never seen before. It was an epiphany
for me.
In
an interview in the Banjo Newsletter in 1992, twenty-two years
after I saw him, Best stated that he had come up with the technique
which he called fiddle style in the mid-forties, which would mean
that he was using the technique more than a decade before either
Bill Keith or Bobby Thompson, the two banjo pioneers generally
credited with its invention. Best apparently believed himself
that Thompson, and possibly Keith as well, were first exposed
to the flowing style through his playing. In the 1992 BNL interview,
he said that he first showed Bobby Thompson some of his melodic
style arrangements around 1955, when their respective bands played
on the same show. Six years after the Best interview, in 1998,
Trishka interviewed Thompson. Thompson told Trishka that he couldn't
recall meeting Best. Still, one consistent thread can be found
in both interviews. Best told Trishka that Thompson was playing
with Carl Story when the two met, and later, Thompson told Trishka
that when he was playing with Story, he had not yet begun playing
fiddle tunes in melodic style. Thompson said that it was a remark
made one night by Benny Sims, the band's fiddler, that got him
thinking about how it might be done. He told Trishka that he finally
worked the technique up later, when he was picking with Jim and
Jesse. I think it is quite possible that Thompson could have come
up with the techique later, without remembering where he first
heard it, maybe without even realizing that he had heard it before.
Our memories play tricks like that on us all the time.
Best
was an amazing picker, a true original. What is very telling is
the fact that he was playing melodic style for years, including
in public performances throughout his area, but was unable to
attract any real attention. It was only when more "connected"
banjo players began using the technique, that the banjo community
began paying attention, taking melodic style seriously. Best died
tragically in 1995, before most of the bluegrass and old-time
community had heard of his music, and realized his importance
as a link between the two genres. As is often said, that's life.
There
is a nice biography of Best on a website called Mountain
Grown Music, celebrating the traditional music of Haywood
County, North Carolina. A CD, called Say Old Man, Can You Play
the Banjo, with 35 recordings, is available from Copper
Creek Records. Amazon.com offers the entire Best CD, or any
of the individual tracks as MP3
downloads.
The Digital
Library of Appalachia has 12 recordings of Best, playing with
a variety of fiddlers. These are a free download, just type in
his name in the Search for a performer box, and the results
will list. There is a nice video on YouTube
with Best in a jam session filmed in 1992.
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