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sharing their knowledge of string band music with a younger generation of listeners and musicians. In the same line, the fiddler and mandolin player, but above all multi-instrumentalist (he played 22 instruments), Armstrong Howard (1909-2003) was subject to a revival throughout the 1980s. He had been playing with Carl Martin and (the much underrated, versatile purveyor of many styles) Ted Bogan for much of his career. Other chocolate drops come to us here: in the pre-war era Howard, Bogan and Martin formed a string band known, at a particular moment, under the name of the Tennessee Chocolate Drops (their name in fact inspired the Caroline Chocolate Drops). Carl Martin (1906-1979), born in Virginia, and son of a slave who also played the fiddle (known as Fiddlin Martin), was a born entertainer and he is said to have been able to play any instrument with strings. He played the blues, but he also played hoedowns, polkas, old and new pop songs, and anything else that would entertain and please the crowd. His life was a repository of a great deal of Americas musical and social experience. In the 30s he and his aforementioned musical partners Bogan and Armstrong migrated via many stops to Chicago, where they continued to play, adding songs in German, French, Spanish, Polish, Yiddish, and even Chinese to appeal to people of all the different neighbourhoods where they would play. Carl Martin was part of a rich musical tradition in Appalachia a tradition which mixed blues and ragtime with pop and the styles of white musicians from rural mountain communities. This brings us to some questions: when did this string band music emerge? Were the bands black or white? When did the blacks start to play fiddle? When did the banjo and the fiddle meet? These are most interesting questions which touch the very essence of the emergence of the roots music, but to which to a high degree only provisional answers are available (for the moment) due to the lack of sufficient written/recorded material. This lack of material is probably due to the very fact that there has existed very little interest for these questions in the early days of the ethno-musicological explorations. It may well be that the old-time string band music is the earliest form of musical collaboration between African American and European American (often Scottish-Irish) musicians. Recent studies by Epstein (2003) and Conway (2005) have tried to shed some light on the matter. When British colonists settled in the upper Southern states North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia they brought along the violin (fiddle) and many traditional fiddle tunes. African Americans introduced the gourd banjo, together with their (syncopated) playing techniques, tunes, songs, and a variety of tuning methods. Conway documents how musicians from these ethnic groups met in the Upland South states and combined the elements of old-time string band, fiddle and banjo, together for the first time. The music that was played was suitable for both listening and dancing. Epstein doubts the idea that the banjo, an African instrument, was infused in the musical tradition by (the sole) way of the minstrelsy shows. She argues that blacks have played an essential role in the creation of the string band music. In fact, she traces the evolution of all genres of African American folk music back to the use of African percussion instruments and the banjar which were meant to encourage dancing as exercise to maintain the health of slaves on board of the slave ships (and thus maintain the value of the commodity). She also puts forward a number of reports of African Americans playing percussion instruments and violins to entertain themselves and whites.
There are indeed indications of slaves who played the banjo and used percussion instruments in the American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. Slaves are supposed to have played the fiddle as early as the late seventeenth century Percussion instruments and ensembles are known to have been banned later on due to fears concerning their potential use as signals for slave insurrections (though in some regions they survived). It can be contented however that in the 18th century black fiddlers were as prevalent on the plantations as were banjo players. Slave fiddlers have played music for the plantation owners and also for their fellow slaves, combining polkas, marches, jigs and reels of the European tradition, but tuned according to syncopated rhythms and tonalities derived from Africa. John Griffith (2010) asserts that this possibility to play music and to interact with fellow slaves during community events, gave the African Americans a sense of rarely experienced individualism and intimacy in a social context which otherwise completely dehumanized them. The material on when violin and banjo were played together in an ensemble is open for more discussion. Though there are some indications that already in 1774 these stringed instruments are being reported in proximity to each other, it is not clear whether they were played together. Epstein thinks that the banjo and the fiddle were probably indeed played together already then. Conway however disagrees and suggests that the combination of fiddle and banjo dates back to a few decades later, to the 1850s. The first definitive registered example of an instrumental grouping of banjo combined with fiddle is the white minstrel group, the Virginia Minstrels, a group which is said to have premiered to a paying audience probably on January 31, 1843. Unlike earlier blackface acts that featured solo singers or dancers, the Virginia Minstrels appeared as a group in blackface who performed more elaborate shows. However, there is a point to be made that, regardless of which race first played banjo and fiddle in harmony, African Americans influenced the sound and the repertoire of those early antebellum blackface (white) minstrel groups. They taught the first generation of white banjoists how to play. Whitlock, one of the founding members of the Virginia Minstrels, claimed to have met Americas pre-eminent banjoist and early blackface minstrel performer, Joel Sweeney, and to have taken some banjo lessons from him. Joel Sweeney is the earliest known person to have played the banjo on stage. According to a 1969 article in The Iron Worker, a trade publication of the Lynchburg Foundry Co. of Lynchburg, Joel Sweeney had learned to play a four-string gourd banjo at young age from the black men working on his fathers plantation in Virginia. He also learned to play the fiddle, sing, dance, and imitate animal sounds. Until this
time, all performances on the banjo seem to have been from black players. The success of the blackface minstrelsy was a vehicle which popularised the Southern old-time string band music. Banjo and fiddle dominated the 19th century musical entertainment scene. Starting with the Virginia Minstrels first public performance minstrelsy became hugely popular all over the country for the next fifty or more years. In this way, minstrelsy and old-time string band music became closely intertwined. As Conway asserts early minstrels and string band musicians borrowed banjo techniques, tuning methods, some songs and tunes from the same source: namely, African American banjoists. From a comparison of methods of tuning the banjo among African American, minstrel, and white Appalachian musicians, Conway concludes that blacks and white Appalachian musicians shared several tuning methods that the minstrels did not use. Following this, she is convinced that white Appalachian musicians learned these tunings directly from African Americans and not from minstrels. Both the minstrelsy bands and the early string bands were inspired by tunes in the Scottish and Irish repertoires, just as white and black old-time string bands listened carefully to the tunes played by the minstrels. Epstein contends that separating authentic African American folk music from songs written for or adapted from European sources for the minstrel stage is particularly difficult because slaves quickly took up [minstrel] songs and sang what they learned was expected of them. When, after the Civil War, African Americans painted their face black to join professional singers and to perform as minstrels (the shows were however owned by the white) they became the expert in the slaves and plantation music. Some of those new African American minstrels borrowed traditional material, but some also added material of their own, as for instance James Bland did : he wrote over 700 songs, including Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, published in 1878, which, in a slightly different version, was the official State Song of Virginia from 1940-1997. He was often called The Worlds Greatest Minstrel Man and toured the United States, as well as Europe. Minstrelsy declined in popularity in the late 1890s, and was gradually replaced by other forms of popular entertainment such as musical theatre or vaudeville. Minstrelsy groups could continue to perform as travelling entertainment, but for primarily black audiences. This evolution went together with the beginning of the recording industry during which many of the earliest African American recording artists were building up their repertoire. In the wake of W.C. Handys meeting with the legendary guitar player in the train station of Tutweiler in 1903, the 1910s witnessed a huge popularity of vaudeville blues (performed by white) which became popular on stage also in the Northern States. This vaudeville blues was followed by the first wave of recorded blues by blacks after 1920 which was in the first part of the twenties female and vocal. As we know, the record companies largely (though not completely) ignored the wealth of the existing African American string bands The race records were associated first with female vocal artists and in a further stage with the male, country blues artist (playing his guitar). The musical wealth of the black string bands did not fit in the marketing strategies of the new music business. This music was considered as outdated and the record companies didnt want to take any financial risk to issue this genre that was considered to be unsuitable for the market. The names of genius performers as Joe Thompson, Ted Bogan, Carl Martin and Armstrong Howard would remain in the shadow of icons as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and Robert Johnson. The string band genre underwent however the impact of the new technology: existing string bands started to adapt their repertoire to enable the connection with the market. Some artists were active on both the string band scene as the guitar blues stage (see for instance Peg Leg Howell). In any case, many a blues artist who made fame in the twenties or thirties had his roots in the old string band tradition and the minstrelsy, and had played the banjo and/or fiddle in their early career (Lonnie Johnson is a clear example of this). The guitar however, sometimes combined with the mouth harmonica, had become the main instrument of the sonic landscape, pushing to the background the banjo and fiddle, which had been at the core of the complex music evolution that predated and partially paralleled the blues. Bands such as the Ebony Hillbillies and the Caroline Chocolate Drops fortunately help us to remind that blues, jazz, ragtime and other genres have their roots in a rich and deep interplay of warm and vital black and white string music which is the basis for the very particular fabric of American and modern popular music. As a band member of the Chocolate Drops has formulated it : (This music) means taking the past
into the present into the future, (like) a bird flying forward but touching its wings to its back in other words, taking the past into the future with it. If you havent finished your chocolate drops yet reading this article, you can have a further taste of the Carolina Chocolate Drops on this video on their website. Sources: ________ - http://www.thegrio.com/entertainment/ebony-hillbilliesbring-down-home-sound-to-streets-stage.php - http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/theebony-hillbillies-go-underground-with-their-old-timeyjams/Content?oid=2027656 - Charles Wolfe, Rural Black String Band Music, Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 33. - http://www.thefreelibrary.com/African+American+oldtime+string+band+music%3A+a+selective+discography.a0179615963 - http://www.allmusic.com/artist/joe-thompsonp131609/biography - http://www.bluesmandolin.de/page11.html - Dena J. Epstein : Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Music in American Life), 2003 - Cecilia Conway : African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (Publications of The American Folklore Society), 1995 - http://www.cgim.org/sweeneyclan/misc/musical.html - http://www.pbs.org/americanrootsmusic/pbs_arm_ii_fiddle.html - John Griffith, Sports in Shackles: The athletic and recreational habits of slaves on Southern Plantations, 2010 (Voces Novae : Chapman University Historical Review, vol. 2, n 1) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Minstrels - http://gotriad.news-record.com/content/2010/01/13/article/old_time_string_music_comes_alive_again - http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/02/arts/howard-armstrong-94-string-band-fiddler-and-mandolinist.html