Catching the Music

- [Stephen] An old time musician from the Carolina Piedmont said to me, "Catching the music is how I learn. While watchin' that affair or frolic, and I'd see this banjo player, and I'd try to take it in. I'd follow his hands, how he'd throw a note off to one side, how he'd double note a phrase, and I'd go up to him and I'd make myself known to him. I couldn't get enough. I'd climb a tree and look in the window and stand in the dark and listen, keep going on in my mind. 'Cause I had to have it, and I'd go back to him and he might say, 'Oh, you caught that good.'"

- [Narrator] This program is about a young man who is catching the music. His show is called "Banjo Dancing, or the 48th Annual Squitters Mountain Song Dance Folklore Convention and Banjo Contest and How I Lost." It came to Washington more than six years ago after enormous success in Chicago, Cleveland, and Vancouver. "A wondrous artist," said T.E. Kalem in Time Magazine. The Wall Street Journal called him a one of a kind all-American original. "Banjoist is brilliant in theater debut," said Richard Christiansen from the Chicago Tribune. "Banjo Dancing" has played to sold-out houses at the Arena Stage ever since, and is now the longest-running show in Washington theater history. In it, a young man named Stephen Wade plays the banjo, dances, tell stories, and occasionally sings.

- Thanks for comin'. A few years ago, some friends of mine and I drove from Chicago where I'm from to Squitters Mountain, Tennessee for the 48th annual Squitters Mountain Song Dance Folklore Convention and Banjo Contest. And I went there to learn about some old time music. Boy, there were people there that knew all about it. People been listening to the Grand Ole Opry all their lives. They'd heard bands with names like Dr. Smith's Champion Hoss Hair Pullers and the Skillet Lickers and Uncle Dave Macon and the Fruit Jar Drinkers. They were playing banjos and fiddles and guitars and pan pipes and harmonicas and dulcimers and autoharps all their lives. They knew the melodies. The friends I went with did a rotten thing: added me into the banjo context. I don't see them anymore. There were 3,000 people at this thing, four stone-faced judges sitting off to the side of the stage, white shirts and black suits and dark, skinny ties, sitting in these Black & Decker lawn chairs. And right over here was a big, silver cup. It said 48th Annual Squitters Mountain Song Dance Folklore Convention and Banjo Contest. There's no way out, so I assumed the position. I looked at the judges, and I figured I'll play a flash version of "Old Joe Clark." I'll get 'em. Started goin' like this. I thought it was all right. They didn't move. I thought, "Well, all right." I changed tunings. I'll play "Soldier's Joy." That's a good country tune. I starting goin' like this. Their indifference was monumental. I thought, "Well, all right. I'll go one last round. I'll go all the way." And here we'd driven all this way from Chicago to Squitters Mountain, Tennessee, for the 48th Annual Squitters Mountain Song Dance Folklore Convention and Banjo Contest, and you know, I didn't win that thing. I was moping around later, thinking I played too loud and too hard, too fast and too much. And I broke into that dance tune when I thought I wasn't getting anywhere. And one of the judges came up to me and he said, "I seen you play, Boy," and I said, "Yes, sir." And he said, "Keep on practicing." And you know, I've been practicing ever since. My world was remade in 1964 when I heard the Beatles in my transistor radio. Right then I knew I had to play the guitar. Uttering a solemn promise to my father that I'd learn the classical music of Segovia, I convinced him to bring home a red, single pickup solid body electric guitar. I could still play Malaguena, but I'm better at the bar chords of "Walk, Don't Run." It was several years later when I first heard the five string banjo. Instead of a lead guitar in a band, it was a whole band in itself. Right then I fell in love with its music, and I got a banjo. It was a world of sound. Down low it could bark, and up high, it'd be like bells. It could be strident and then whisper, go from a harpsichord to a talking drum. It was like a model T Ford as syncopated rhythm. It could be plaintive and mournful and then explosively articulate. It's like watercolors. It's full of happy accidents. It's free. You can improvise with it. It's asymmetrical and it's interesting to look at. It has personality. It's eccentric. It's hard to tune. It's recalcitrant. It's like a musical mule. It has a voice.

- When I was saving up for my first banjo, I picked up a copy of Pete Seeger's "How to Play the Five String Banjo." And there on page two, it said, "Special thanks acknowledgement to the artist and banjo picker, Chicago Fleming Brown." Fleming had drawn some of the pictures in the book. Well, after I got my banjo, I went over to the Old Town School of Folk Music, which was near where I grew up, and I've been hearing about it all my life. And I went in there. I said, "Does anyone know about this Fleming Brown?" The lady behind the desk said, "Well, of course, he teaches here. He's teaching here tomorrow night." So is he good? She said, "Fleming?" I said, "All right, sign me up. I want to be in his class."

- This is Fleming's banjo. This is the banjo he brought to the class the next evening. And inside here is a little plate, and it says, "Paramount Banjo, piano volume, harp quality tone." Fleming was like that. When I met him, I couldn't believe it. I mean, he just made the banjo sound better than anything I'd ever imagined. He'd play real loud. And his voice was huge, and the sound would bounce all over the room, and then he could get back and he'd get real delicate. And I'd be on the edge of my chair. This is the greatest thing ever heard.

♪ Oh the cuckoo ♪

♪ She's a pretty bird ♪

♪ And she warbles as she flies ♪

♪ And she never ♪

♪ Sings cuckoo ♪

♪ Till the fourth day of July ♪

- The way he worked the class is he'd go around the room, and before he'd teach next week's song, he'd have each of us play a tune that we'd been working on. And then he'd criticize it. And when he got to me, a lot of times my hands were shaking, and I had real long hair then, and one time he said, "Well, that's not hair. That's nerve endings." Well, maybe it was a week or so later. And I was playing something that I'd worked real hard on, and it was a real fast tune, and I was playing it really furiously. And he said, when I'd finished it, he said, "That sounds like a piano falling down a staircase." And I just felt awful. And he came across the room, and I had no idea what he was up to. All of a sudden with his palm, he'd picked up my foot. And he said, "Play the tune." And he starts smacking my foot down on the ground. He said, "You have to keep time. You just have to keep steady time. You have to tap your foot." And right then, that moment, when he he'd come across the room and he touched me, it was the beginning. What was Fleming Brown like? He was an individualist. When I met him he lived alone in the third floor attic of a house he owned. His tenants on the other two floors were invariably musicians. His home itself was a small museum. He collected Native American moccasins, old radios, Civil War guns, Japanese swords, Lad lamps. He had a room off to the side where kept different things. One time I was sitting there and the door was closed. I wanted to know what he had in there. And he said, "Well, guess. Take your time." He had 15 antique outboard motors in there. Although he had a lot of instruments, Fleming said, "Don't spend your money on banjos. That can come later. Use it to buy records, listen to people who play it right. Find the people who know how to play it." So I went to see Lawrence Zeller, here standing by his tidy barn with his piercing blue eyes and his tilted cap, and Omer Forster with his pictures of his family, all jumbled up on old wallpapered walls, and under the expert's eye of Kirk McGee in a paneled real estate office, where he worked part-time with his telephone buzzing unanswered. And Clint Howard, who sang with religious intensity, laser beam intensity, who lived in the high mountains of East Tennessee, and the garden at the end of the road with Cherry Log, Georgia, with Chesley Chancey. The white emptiness of Stovall, Mississippi and the unimaginable work conditions that bore Muddy Waters. I went to see Adelaide Simmons who lived in a Mississippi shotgun house. And she recalled the elegance of singing at another time in cafe society and with her teacher, Bessie Smith. And playing late into the Georgia night after we'd come back from the funeral of a friend with Gordon Tanner, and we sat on hospital beds next to their coal burning stove with Doc and Lucy Barnes. Fleming had said, "Find the people who play this music." And these people took me in. And musician that I know best, and the one I met first was Fleming's teacher, Doc Hopkins. I wanted Doc to be on this show, but he said, "Steve, I'm deaf in one ear and I can't hear out of the other." So he wrote out this letter: True History of Doc Hopkins. Doc was born January 26, 1900. There's always been a question why I was named Doc. The answer is that I'm the seventh son of Cindy and James Hopkins. My Aunt Elizabeth, who had no children, insisted that they call me Doc for Doctor because the mountain people had always heard that the seventh son would have healing powers. Letter goes on, tells about how the night he was born by a midwife, who on her way there fell off a mule into the brook and about his curing the thrash in babies by blowing into their mouths, and then about his start in music. Doc began playing the banjo when he was nine. His first instrument was like this, only it was smaller. It was square headed. It had a cigar box drum with a possum hide tacked onto it, and it made what he said was kind of a thud thud sound. This is the oldest kind of banjo, because it's fretless. It doesn't have any of the wires that go across the fingerboard. It gives it a more mellow and more liquid sound. It was also hand made like these ones. Doc was encouraged and inspired and really began in music when in 1909, he went to a county fair in Broadhead, Kentucky, where he saw a medicine show doctor who called himself Dakota Jack. Like most medicine shows, Jack traveled with a troop of two or three musicians who would play in order to draw a crowd, to which he would sell his secret herb, his consults for liniment, and his science soap. Dakota Jack would say, "Nine times in the Bible does the Holy Word say that roots, herbs, barks, and berries is for the healing of the nation." Doc went up to Dakota Jack after the show and told them he played the banjo. Jack handed him an instrument, and Doc played "Free Little Bird," which was the first song he ever knew. Jack asked the boy, "How come he took to singing?" And Doc said, because he stuttered so bad. He was embarrassed to talk. And Jack said, "I'll make a medicine speaker out of you. We'll break that stuttering habit." And then he said maybe someday you could play on my show when you get to be a grown up man. Doc said he was stepping high after that. Well, 10 years later in 1919, after he'd returned from World War I after having served as an infantry man in France, Doc came back to Kentucky and worked as a railroad brakeman. He heard one day that Jack was still making his annual tour, so he set out for Pineville, Kentucky from Corbin on his railroad pass. He met Jack in the hotel lobby, went up to, he said "I'm Doc Hopkins. Do you remember a little kid who played the banjo and sang for you at the Broadhead Fair? I'm the stuttering kid." Jack said, "Oh, I remember that." Well, Doc said, "I still play and I wanna play more." He took out his guitar and played "John Henry" for Jack. Jack said, "I like that one." And he offered Doc $20 a week and all expenses, including cigarette money. Doc says still, "That Dakota Jack was one grand father."

♪ Looked out that window and saw the steel drivin' men ♪

♪ Said the hammer gonna be the death of me ♪

♪ Hammer gonna be the death of me ♪

♪ He went up to see that old captain, Lord ♪

♪ Captain said what all can you do? ♪

♪ I can pick, I can shovel, do most any ol' thing ♪

♪ I belong in your steel driving crew ♪

♪ Lord, Lord ♪

♪ I belong in your steel driving crew ♪

♪ First go around that ole steam drill beat him down ♪

♪ Next go around they tied ♪

♪ Third go around he beat the steam drill all down ♪

♪ Lord, he laid down his hammer and cried ♪

♪ Lord, Lord ♪

♪ Laid down his hammer and he cried ♪

♪ John Henry had a pretty little wife ♪

♪ Her name was Susie Ann ♪

♪ Johnny got so sick that he couldn't drive a lick ♪

♪ Lord, she drove steel like a man ♪

♪ Lord, Lord ♪

♪ She drove steel like a man ♪

♪ John Henry had a little baby girl ♪

♪ Dress that she wore was red ♪

♪ She went down the track, said I'm never comin' back ♪

♪ I'm going to where my daddy fell dead ♪

♪ Going to where my daddy fell dead ♪

♪ She went to the place where John Henry fell dead ♪

♪ Said my daddy was a steel drivin' man ♪

♪ She went to the place where John Henry fell dead ♪

♪ He died with that hammer in his hand ♪

♪ Lord, Lord ♪

♪ He died with that hammer in his hand ♪

- Oh, thank you, John.

- [Man] Yes, sir!

- There's nobody that can sing those good old traditional songs quite like our Doc Hopkins, and thank you a lot, Doc.

- In 1948, Fleming Brown was struggling. He had the wrong strings on his banjo and was having trouble with the tunings. He asked Pete Seeger, who was passing through town, for help. And Pete suggested that Fleming contact Doc Hopkins, an old time singer from Carlin, Kentucky, who was working at WLS radio. When Fleming called Doc at the station, Doc said, "Well, I can't teach you, but I can show you. Why don't you come down 'round five," and Fleming said, "Well, I get off work around five, so make it 5:30. Doc said, "Oh no, five in the morning. That's when we start our program." Doc was working on the wake up show called Smile Awhile program then. At Christmas time, 1982, Fleming, Doc, and I got together for what would be our last time. We'd gone out to dinner that night and come back to Fleming's apartment. And Fleming picked up his banjo and started playing "Going Down the Creek," which he'd learned from Doc, and he starting going like this. And Fleming said that what Doc had said to him was said, "What I want to do is this. What I want to do is just slide on the third string like that, and at the same time, I want you to pick off on the first string like that. So you have both going on at the same time." Doc nodded, and he said, "Yep." And Fleming said, "Yeah, you told me to come back when I get it down," and Doc said, "Yeah, you was back the following week." The whole evening went on like that, those two guys remembering everything, Doc talking about how he'd hobo-ed and been held up by Pretty Boy Floyd on the train and how he'd gone AWOL at one point from the Army and had to come back and do 30 days bread and water, and Doc and I talked about how, when I started performing I was his side man, and some of the places we've played. And we talked about learning the songs. And mostly what we wound up talking about was how Doc had taught Fleming and Fleming had taught me, and Fleming said, "We are a family. Family is not necessarily just blood." Here's the end of Doc's letter. Well, Steve, this is about all I feel up to writing at present, so I'll hang up for now and write you whatever I think of at another time. Wishing you good health, good business, and a good bed to sleep on. Yours continually, Doc.

- I use nylon strings on the guitar 'cause it makes it easier on my hands. And since I've gotten to be 80 years old, I have to be careful with my hands. They're little tender. I don't play so much, but I've still got the spirit. Whether I've got the voice for the guitar or not . I worked at this show business many, many years. Well over 20 years I was on the air and playing the show, in fact, about 24 years, playing in-person appearances on the stage and a few short movies, recordings, and generally the show business. And I never did get the hang of it. And so I finally, after I'd been in it all of those years I decided to quit and go to work, getting a job and go to work and make an honest living. So here I am back. I retired from honest work, and here I'm back carrying an old guitar around again, playing some of these school dates, and listen to these youngsters that really can play. And will sit down and listen to me play. And don't think that I don't appreciate it, friends. Thank you. Every time when you applaud for me, it's just like saying "Sic 'em" in the dog fights. I just break my neck, see. Let's see, what was I gonna sing? Yeah, this is a sacred number. It's called "Sail Away to Glory."

♪ In my journey for the Lord ♪

♪ I am trusting in His Word ♪

♪ Led by fire at night and a cloud by day ♪

♪ From this troubled shore of strife ♪

♪ In this wilderness of life ♪

♪ Some happy day I'll sail away ♪

♪ Sail away to glory ♪

♪ Oh how sweet that story ♪

♪ While on this earth, I labor, watch, and pray ♪

♪ From a low veil of sorrow ♪

♪ To a bright, glad tomorrow ♪

♪ Some happy day I'll sail away ♪

- Catching the music means more than hearing a song and learning it on your own. In the 20th century, it also means documenting it, recording and preserving it for others. The man who's done more than anyone else to record and preserve American folk music is the great folklorist Alan Lomax, who in the 1930s and early 1940s headed the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. With his father, John Lomax, and later on his own, he roamed all over America, finding and recording her native voices. School children in Alabama doing jump rope rhymes, Texas prisoners singing work songs. He recorded Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. He was an active conduit getting songs to singers. He was responsible for issuing the first albums from the collections of the Folk Archive at the Library of Congress. On one of his forays into the Appalachian mountains of Southwestern Virginia, Alan Lomax met and recorded a family named Smith.

- There were two records that my banjo teacher Fleming Brown, bought in 1947 that made them want to play the banjo. One was "Texas Gladden Sings Blue Ridge Ballads," and accompanying her by turns on a guitar fiddling banjo was her brother Hobart Smith. Alan Lomax told me that Hobart Smith was the finest instrumentalist he ever recorded. The next time Hobart Smith recorded was in October, 1963, in Chicago. He came there to make his only solo album, and he stayed with Fleming Brown. Fleming said that week was one of the greatest pleasures of his life. They taped hours of music and talk, and Hobart told Fleming how he'd work out a tune. Hobart Smith was a great banjo player. He was also a wonderful fiddler. Here he is in costume playing in a movie about Colonial Williamsburg.

- I've been to the cornfield many a time. I was a farmer. And I'd hear a good fiddle tune or a good banjo tune. And I'd commence whistling, and I'd whistle that till my mouth got so tired. And I'd go home. To keep it on my mind, I'd go pretty fast. I'd go home and I'd whistle all the way into the holler on the mountain. And then I'd hang my banjo. It'd be hanging on the wall sometimes. That's just where it's at, and I'd come in, whistle that loud, and that banjo danced with me on the wall, you know, that sound. I'd go and get 'er. I kept that right in my mind. And I found that tune on them strings before I quit. I never stopped till I found it, 'caused I loved it. I loved it. Here's a tune called "Pateroller Song," that Hobart Smith showed Fleming, and Fleming showed me.

- Before the Library of Congress' efforts to document American folk music, many folk musicians were recorded on commercial records. During the 1920s, the recording companies identified a new market. Country folks were willing to purchase records of songs and songs styles that were familiar to them. Thus, the commercial record companies, like the folklorists, helped to document and disseminate the older tradition of Anglo-American and Afro-American music. During World War II, many of these records went out of print. And after the war, it seemed to Alan Lomax like a good time to make them available again.

- Alan Lomax put together a collection called "Listen to Our Story." And this was the other record that made Fleming want to become a banjo player. And here was the other musician who for Fleming, if Hobart was the best player, then this man was the most versatile: Uncle Dave Macon. He was an effervescent spirit. He shouted while he played. He recited. He twirled the banjo. He danced, he sang, he frailed. He finger picked. He played alone. He used a band. He was a songwriter. He was a populist. He sang songs extolling the newest Henry Ford car and then sang songs celebrating the mule. He was beloved. He didn't enter show business until he was 56 years old. He was the first star of the Grand Ole Opry. He was the grandfather of country music.

- And now, friends, we present Uncle Dave Macon, the Dixie Dewdrop with his plug hat, gold teeth, chin whiskers, gates-ajar collar, and that million-dollar Tennessee smile, and his son Dorris. Let her go, Uncle Dave!

♪ Me and my buddy started out the other day ♪

♪ Studied a plan how to get away ♪

♪ Light come on and it caught us in the dark ♪

♪ Waiting for the train to start ♪

♪ Conductor was a on the rope ♪

♪ And he hollered to his passengers all aboard ♪

♪ Billy reached up and pulled a string ♪

♪ Banga banga banga went the banjo train ♪

♪ Take me back ♪

♪ Take back ♪

♪ Take me back to that Old Carolina home ♪

Whoa, yeah!

♪ Take me back ♪

♪ Take me back to that Old Carolina home ♪

♪ Well the train pulled on to the very next stop ♪

♪ I looked around, about 17 cops ♪

♪ you outta seen me run ♪

♪ Banga banga banga with my Gatling gun ♪

♪ Take me back ♪

♪ Take me back to my old Carolina home ♪

Oh, yeah!

♪ Take me back ♪

♪ Take me back to my old Carolina home ♪

- Oh, I thought he was the grandest man in the world, and always did, as long as he was living. To me, he was the greatest entertainer.

- [Stephen] His most apt pupil and accompanist for 20 years was musician, Kirk McGee.

- He'd just come out there and then he'd sit down. Of course, he'd tell a story or two, you know? And I called it selling hisself. The first thing he'd do, he'd sell hisself to the audience, you know? Then anything he did was all right, and he would talk some religion. And then that's a reason he got by with a lot of his stuff. You know what they say? "Well, he's a religious old man. It don't make no difference what he says."

- When I met Kirk McGee, he was the oldest living member of the Grand Ole Opry, where he'd played, except for his service during World War II, every Saturday night for 54 years. He'd had a bad stroke by then. And his hand shook while he played, but no matter how long he'd have to wait, he'd get to the notes. He played two finger Fandangos up and down the neck. Then a Stephen Foster piece, then a novelty song, then a Blues from Memphis. And then an early ragtime piece off on down, all over the fingerboard. He caught songs as a kid from section hands who gathered at his father's country store during their break. He learned from phonograph records, from Edison recordings, from piano rolls, from sheet music, from singing school hymnals, from his mother's Civil War ballad singing and his father's fiddle playing, and through all these different kinds of songs he'd fight to play. I said, "Well, you just play anything." He said, "You just find more and more on it all the time."

- Here's a tune called "Under the Double Eagle" I learned from Kirk McGee.

- [Man] Whoo!

- No matter what the provenance of the song, with Uncle Dave, with Kirk McGee, with Hobart Smith, you'd always know who was playing. Behind that sound was a rural presence and a rural solution. When Fleming got turned on by those two Lomax records, there was when he heard the banjo, what he called an earth quality. The drive of the banjo is like the scratch and scrape of the fiddle.

- You know, this music has a sound that was created in the American upper South at the end of the 18th and the earlier 19th century, when black and white musicians came together. Black fiddlers and banjo players brought with them from Africa, musical sense, syncopation, that met and blended with the British American tunes and dances. So together they made a new music. And the banjo is really a kind of a metaphor for America. A black instrument brought here by slavery, and then shared with rural whites. Finally, it's a coming together of people, black and white, to make a new music for us all.

- Music is a thing. It should be honored and respected, because it is a gift of God.

- The only way into Virgil Anderson's house was over this bridge, which he made, swinging over Rocky Branch on the Cumberland Plateau here in Kentucky. It's always wonderful visiting Virgil and Mabel Anderson. I love learning from Virgil and playing with him and his son Hershel.

- Boy, he's his dog , isn't he? Dog get all full of fleas. He's got that, aw, little dickens. He's got it, boy. When I like a feller, I call him . Not too bad, but I call him a little booger, and this and that. Music is something to think about. It's a charm to the world. God gave it to us for a pastime here. Just think about how good God is. What else could He done? He even give us the talent for music, and there has to be people for all things, some to entertain others, and here we are trying to entertain others, you see? God knows what He's doing.

- Fleming said, "You said you never really have a song until you've played it 500 or 1,000 times. And then when you aren't worried where you're gonna put your fingers, and you say, "Well, let's see if we could do something else here, but keep the same flavor," he said that's when you really start to learn, he said, because that's when you put yourself in the music. He said, "Sing a song like the way you tell a story, like it's attached to you. 'Cause in the great performances, you'll find, he said, a welding of the instrument and the singer. Together, they become inseparable. It becomes a natural extension. It becomes not a song with banjo accompaniment, but a performance, a musical performance. Something would point to the greatest mountain banjo players. When they played, they were saying, "This is who I am."

♪ Out on old Smokey ♪

♪ All covered with snow ♪

♪ I lost my own true lover ♪

♪ By courting too slow ♪

♪ The grave will decay you ♪

♪ And turn you to dust ♪

♪ Not one girl in a hundred ♪

♪ That a poor boy can trust ♪

- Over and over in locating and learning this music, I see that it comes from the deepest heart of the people, that the greatest players are the deepest exponents, that what they played was what was real to them. It was personal. The music was a way of talking, a way of telling the truth. It was always a great compliment when someone could say of another, "He could make that banjer talk."

- The last time I ever saw Fleming was in the hospital. He was slipping away, and I picked up his hand, and there on the top of his first finger was a thin indentation, the imprint left by a metal string, a line made by nearly 40 years of banjo playing. And it makes you think of something he had said three months earlier. We were in the hospital, and he sat up in the bed and he put his hands together in a square. And he said, "I know the secret of banjo playing." I said, "Well, tell me, what is it?" He said, "It's all in a little box. And someday I'll show you what's in that little box." And I don't know, but I think the collected works of Hobart Smith and Uncle Dave Macon and Kirk McGee and Virgil Anderson and Doc Hopkins and the archive of folk song and the old time record labels and Fleming Brown are all in that box. They heard a secret. Thank you.