A Rain of Frogs 

A Rain of Frogs

In Praise of the Banjo

Tom Ashley’s tremulous high tenor sang through the scratches on the Library of Congress archive disc—“The cuckoo is a pretty bird she sings as she flies / She brings us glad tidings, and she tells us no lies…” Tom was recorded in 1928, a young man with a banjo. In 1964 I sat with Tom Ashley and a pint of gin beside a motel swimming pool in Galax, West Virginia. He sang the song again and told me about the banjo: It can be expensive, factory-made, but for a country boy with wit and ingenuity, it can be built from scratch.

The banjo has every musical characteristic of the grand cathedral pipe organ—with the possible exceptions of size, volume, timbre, and sustain. On the plus side, the banjo is portable.

Of all the music-makers humankind have developed over the last 20 thousand years, give or take, the ones that put the least hardware between the player and the music—the drum, the banjo, and the Panpipe—pass one test. They are intuitive to play and easy to make. If you are marooned on a desert island with only a jackknife, how to wile away the hours after you had whittled yourself a house, stalked game, and plowed the garden with the ear spoon or buttonhook?—assuming you have a Swiss Army knife. You could pare away at a sapling, splitting a manageable length, hollowing it out, and then making bird calls with your new embouchure flute. It is difficult to accompany your singing with a flute attached. Hence, the development of what is believed to be, after the drum and the whistle, one of the first of the rudimentary musical instruments: the banjo.

Tom Ashley

There are three ways to acquire a five-string banjo: buy one, steal one, or make one. From this writer’s personal experience banjo players are either drunk, broke, or both, and often honest. This precludes the first two options, so let’s make our own banjo. First shoot a groundhog: this is the time-honored way; you’ll want his hide. If you don't live in the woods, or are scared of guns, you need not resort to blood sports for your membrane, the vibrating amplifier of your new banjo. The cannonading SUVs of the upwardly mobile will do the job for you. A hunt through the ditches of nearby roadways is sure to provide a newly defunct animal for a drumhead. Nothing beats a thin-skived, salt-cured groundhog hide for that thumping resonance we’re after.

Of course, a fencepost and a matched pair of milk cans: Carnation condensed and Red Rose evaporated. It’s a great world, and you can go to the store for canned milk! Resourceful folk of the early 20th Century capitalized on the quarter-inch mismatch between condensed and evaporated milk cans; it was perfect for sizing and containing a scrap of rawhide. The cans will be a tension regulator for the tiny drum of your new banjo—the music starts here. The fencepost we’ll whittle into a neck.

Strings will be a problem, both in the finding and in the playing. Nylon fishing leader or suture from a local clinic should do. A plywood donut holds the drum and the neck together and, if there’s no plywood on your desert island, perhaps consider moving. Playing the fretless banjo is like doing a crossword puzzle with a blindfold on. You hear better with your eyes closed. And the playing takes more skill, for the stops (called frets on modern instruments) won’t be there, to separate you from your music.

The bagpipe and the five-string banjo

The bagpipe chanter is a melody pipe, the banjo’s fifth string, a drone, but both share a name with a yellowish wild mushroom, the little singer. The chanterelle, or drone string, of the banjo rides the neck in mid-span and shares the fingerboard, at times grudgingly, with the player.

Explore the 12-tone scale, and a world of nuanced open tunings. Pentatonic music—modal music from the five-tone scales—for this writer passes Robert Graves’ test for true poetry: it makes the short hairs at the back of your neck stand on end. Remember Panpipes? They look a little like the bottom of a marimba and are named for Pan, the goat-footed god of empty places. Pan as in panic, the feeling of awe and apprehension at no sound but the thunder of blood rushing through our veins. We are, for a perceptive moment alone, away from civilization and its noise and at the dawn of time with our banjo, flute, or drum.

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” —John Cage.

Our time, human time, starts here. If two cans and a taut wire make for rudimentary telephony, then two cans and a taut hide definitely make for rudimentary music. The transfer of information is basic, the medium simple, albeit the information exchanged is necessarily limited by a narrow content spectrum. My pencil has all the words in it that my word processing program has—and some it never dreamed of.

The Coo-coo Bird

Gonna build me log cabin
On a mountain so high
So I can see Willie
As he goes passing by.

REFRAIN
Oh, the coo-coo, she’s a pretty bird
She wobbles as she flies
She never says coo-coo
Till the fourth day July.

I’ve played cards in England
I’ve played cards in Spain
I’ll bet you ten dollars
I beat you next game.

REFRAIN
Jack-a-Diamonds, Jack-a-Diamonds
I’ve known you from old
You’ve robbed my poor pocket
Of my silver and my gold.

My horses ain’t hungry
They won’t eat your hay
I’ll drive on a little further
I’ll feed ‘em on my way.

RESOURCES:

Download the MP3 from the Internet Archive—www.archive.org

 

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