Dueling Perceptions: The Five-String Banjo in Contemporary American Popular Culture

Abstract

The recent glut of “hillbilly” television has introduced and/or reintroduced millions of American pop culture consumers to the music of the five-string banjo. In some ways this phenomenon is similar to what happened during the 1960s and early 1970s when programs like The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, and others were popular with American television-viewing audiences. What is different, however, is that contemporary Americans are reacting to the people on their screens and to the accompanying music in radically different ways. This article—part recent history of the five-string banjo in America and part close reading of the instrument and relevant popular culture reference points—examines the American general public’s dueling perceptions of the instrument as a device of both authenticity and ridicule in contemporary American popular culture.

Notes

1. The five-string banjo is the instrument responsible for the two most dominant types of banjo music from the middle of the 20th century until now. Those styles, old-timey (clawhammer, or frailing) and bluegrass (three-finger) have come to epitomize an “authentic” southern banjo sound for millions of contemporary Americans. Likewise, they are the two banjo styles responsible for the music contemporary audiences most acutely recognize as “hillbilly.” Though there is much to be written about four- and six-string banjos, jazz banjo, the banjo-uke, and other related instruments, this article will focus on the five-string banjo and the music of the southeastern United States.

2. This notion that the instrument belonged only to Appalachian whites replaced previously held images of black-faced minstrels singing old-time plantation tunes (which itself replaced images of black banjo players). It is quite remarkable how fast the image of the rural white banjo player replaced the image of the minstrel during the second half of the 20th century, especially when a performer as well-known as Al Jolson remained active in the United States well into the 1940s; that, and the fact that at least one major motion picture, Babes on Broadway (1941) starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, featured “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,” a large-scale production of an old-time minstrel show replete with dozens of blackface minstrels thrumming banjos in unison for its grand finale. Also, consider that in 1943 Radio City Music Hall celebrated the 100th anniversary of minstrelsy with a tribute to Dan Emmett in a production later recast as the motion picture, Dixie (Linn 50). In connection with this phenomenon, Roger Cantwell acknowledges that, “while the banjo may be African, it arouses powerful regional and historical associations peculiar to America...few would argue, I think, that the five-string banjo is not in some sense an ‘American’ instrument, with an indelibly American sound” (63). Great work has been done on blackface minstrelsy including, but not limited to, Eric Lott’s Love and Theft and Dale Cockrell’s Demons of Disorder.

3. Rosenberg notes the irony of a Flatt and Scruggs project coming to epitomize the hillbilly stereotype. Throughout the 1960s the two worked hard to earn bluegrass music a respectable reputation. These men performed in neatly pressed suits and ties and yet, despite their work, the notion of the five-string banjo and banjoist that lingered in the popular American conscience was not an image of neatly dressed instrumentalists playing culturally relevant American folk tunes, but, rather, a hillbilly rube displaced from his anti-modern Appalachian home.

4. The newsletter still exists. Currently it has more than 6,500 international subscribers and maintains a social networking presence under the leadership of Hub and Nancy’s sons, Spencer and Donald.

5. The folklorist C. P. Heaton celebrated North Carolina’s banjo heritage in a 1971 essay titled, “The 5-String Banjo in North Carolina.” In large part, Heaton was able to celebrate North Carolina’s banjo heritage because of Earl Scruggs. In 1966, Robert Shelton, music critic at the New York Times, remarked that “Earl Scruggs bears about the same relationship to the five-string banjo that Paganini does to the violin” (qtd in Heaton 75). And in the 1968 publication of Scruggs’s method book, Earl Scruggs and the Five-String Banjo, Nat Winston dubbed Scruggs, “The World’s Most Imitated Musician” (see Heaton 75). Decades later, at an 80th birthday celebration for Scruggs, Porter Wagoner (aka Mr. Grand Ol’ Opry) would say “Earl was to the five-string banjo what Babe Ruth was to baseball. He is the best there ever was, and the best there ever will be” (qtd in Lehman-Haupt).

6. From 1943 to 1945 David “Stringbean” Akeman played banjo in Bill Monroe’s band the Bluegrass Boys. When Akeman left he was replaced by Earl Scruggs. The two men played very different styles of banjo. Whereas Akeman played clawhammer-style banjo, Scruggs played three-finger-style banjo—a technique he is noted for evolving. Akeman and his wife, Estelle, were murdered by John and Marvin Brown after a botched home invasion and robbery in November 1973.

7. Bob Wood’s “rural purge” spared just one show, The Waltons, but it otherwise marked the disappearance of the five-string banjo from popular television programming for some time, though not from popular culture altogether.

8. This lack of attention to detail—having Drew play an Epiphone rather than a Martin as James Dickey wrote in the novel—seems indicative of the filmmaker’s lack of interest in southern music, southern people, and the nuance found in the novel. Dickey also wrote the screenplay for Deliverance; he won the WGA award for “Best Drama Adapted for Another Medium” that year. He was not onsite during filming.

9. The song was used in the film without Smith’s permission. He later sued and won songwriting credit and royalties.

10. Certainly there are other ways to read the film and even the “Dueling Banjos” scene specifically. For instance, in his book, Odd Tribes, John Hartigan devotes a chapter to the film version of Deliverance. He writes that the film “marks an important shift in the narrative forms that make use of poor whites.” He continues, “Earlier films...depicted lower-class rural whites as clearly Other. They were either comic or pathetic, but always clearly debased in relation to middle-class whites. Deliverance signals the first time the cultural certainty supporting this difference is called into question; the terror in this film is generated as much by its interrogation of white middle-class self-construction as it is in projections of threatening forms of Otherness” (Hartigan 137).

11. Fleck has won 13 Grammys (in multiple categories) since 1995.

12. That same year, 2003, Scruggs received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

13. Of course, bluegrass music is still popular with its fans. For the most part, though, bluegrass, remains a niche musical style. While many active bands incorporate the banjo into their sound, without a doubt the most popular mainstream act to feature the banjo so far this century has been the British quartet, Mumford & Sons—who, in 2015, ditched the banjo almost entirely for their new record. Together, their first two albums (featuring the banjo) have sold nearly 6,000,000 copies in the United States. The Dixie Chicks were a country band featuring the five-string banjo that experienced crossover success between 1997 and 2008. The group won many awards, including the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2007, Taking the Long Way. The Dixie Chicks have sold more than 27,000,000 albums in the United States.