21st-Century Folk Revival

 I just visited Dr. Art Rosenbaum and his wife photographer Margo Newmark Rosenbaum (of well-deserved Art of Field Recording fame) at their home in Athens, GA and we discussed the subject of the current folk revival.  

Both my mother and father were casual musicians during the period of my youth--my father's mostly a woodwind player and is quite good on a tin whistle or harmonica, while mother played "cowboy chords" on a cheap Spanish guitar. Both parents sang several typical folk songs like Frog Went a Courting and Wreck of the Old 97 while my grandmothers sang a wider variety of radio, vaudeville and a few Stephen Foster classics. One grandfather who was from Alabama occasionally sang O Susanna to my mother, Susanne, and especially enjoyed singing "I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee" to her. My other grandfather only ever sang one song that I know of: an obnoxious never-ending children's song called Alleckazip the Barber.

I got my start singing Frog Went a Courting with my father during his many camping trips and from there I began learning numerous old American and Irish folk songs from recordings that he bought. Eventually I wanted to accompany my singing with an instrument of some kind and, to me, the only choice was the banjo. My father bought a $100 banjo for me out of a South Carolina music shop circa 1998. After one summer of working with finger picks and a Scurggs manual I gave up playing music until I saw Ernie Williams of Sand Mountain, Alabama play at a small public concert in Florida.

Ernie absolutely amazed me with his traditional overhand picking (which he calls "frailing" or "rapping") and his loud, brilliant voice. Williams taught me how to play overhand style banjo that summer and encouraged my singing as well. Soon after that I met George Gibson and my mind was blown yet again. I set about absorbing every detail of his picking and singing and for years I did my utmost to closely emulate and preserve his unique art.

It was not until I came out of the Army in 2006 and played briefly with a "jugless" jug band in Gainesville, Florida that I started to develop my own style. About 2007 I traveled to Boone, North Carolina where I played on the street with fiddlers and guitarists and eventually began performing in bars and for house parties outside of town where traditional square dances are still an occasional occurrence. It was really during those years in NC, TN, VA and WV when I became what I would describe as a true banjo songster.

But those first ten years from 1998 to 2008 were lonesome indeed. In those days I felt like the only banjo player in the world--indeed I did not know of any banjoists younger than fifty and of those I only knew two or three. It truly seemed a dying art in those days, but all that changed when I came home about 2006 and started uploading my music on the internet. About that time this newest generation, those just a few years younger than myself, seemed to start taking up the old instruments and their songs. Today in 2018 we are in the middle of a full blown folk culture revival--not just music but many of the old folk ways have been taken up again, as I say, mostly by this current young crop of kids.

The photo I've attached documents the first meeting of my boyhood mentor George Gibson and Nora Brown, my youngest "student" and one of the most promising banjo songsters of the current revival. To me this photo represents three living generations of what was not long ago considered a dead tradition.