A posthumous honour for the BIB

The BIB editor writes:

Exactly a year after my retirement as editor, the BIB reopens in order to make public a welcome and important contribution from Tony Thomas, a leading scholar of banjo history; one of his works is cited below.

The contribution arrived in the form of a series of comments on the BIB post Alan Lomax, the banjo, and bluegrass (CORRECTION) of 14/18 Aug. 2020, which mentioned the Black banjo-player Murphy Gribble and the white folklorist and banjo-player Stu Jamieson. Mr Thomas's contribution follows:

First, Stu's views should be primary since Stu is the one who found Murph Gribble by asking his grand aunt in Champion Tennessee who had the best string band in their area in 1946. It is Stu along with Margret Mayo who recorded the band in 1946 and who returned several years later to record the band, and to record Gribble playing not only as a band, but to record Gribble playing solo, using Stu's Fairbanks banjo. Stu was familiar with the style of playing because his grandfather, a person Stu idolized in all things had played the banjo in this style. In the last years of his life I spent hours talking with Stu about this. What Stu noted was the similarities in the propulsive attack of the whole band of which Gribble was the leader.

At the same time all the other sourcing especially my friend Bob Carlin's work is important on this subject. Others I know who have discussed influences with Earl found that Earl said early, being someone born in 24 and a teenager in the 1930s and early 40s talked about doing on the banjo things he heard Charlie Christian do on Benny Goodman records, and also very strong influence like everyone with ears in North Carolina in the late 30s and 1940s, to try to do things that Blind Boy Fuller was doing on guitar on the banjo, and a bunch of other influences. To be sure the Gribble Lusk band had a drive and was banjo-driven with Gribble as the leader deciding to lead the band from banjo (he was reputed to be a great fiddler fron an early age and had become more or less of a professional musician due to limitations in his physical capacities due to being injured in the Great War).

Looking at this band and Gribble's banjo only in a narrow and uninformed view of its similarities to bluegrass reflects not looking at it in relation to Black music which surrounded it, or its crucial role as essentially the only viable Black string band ever recorded while it was still a vernacular band performing for audiences and money, Stu told me that a big problem was when he received permission to use the town general store to record them the first time, the store was packed with with white people who wanted to hear the band under Jim Crow even the band was afraid to go there and perform and Stu's aunt or grand aunt who suggested the place and lived locally received disrespect from local white folk for years for Stu and Margret's treatment of the band members with equality calling them Mr. Gribble and Mr. Lusk and that Stu gave them a ride home about 10 miles in his car rather than letting them walk in the night.

These recordings are really more important than their limited relationship to bluegrass, but of the survival of a significant Black string band tradition. Also quite meaningful is Gribble's three or possible four-finger banjo style, rather than frailing and two-finger picking. We have found that this banjo style was widely used by African American musicians, most notably Gus Cannon all whose 1930s recordings were in this style and who taught anyone who approached him for banjo lessons this style correctly called the guitar style of banjo, Cannon teaching and using all 4 finger as SS Stewart would have taught. There are many other examples of Black guitar-style banjoists, some of international repute, and at least one still getting still able to get encores at the Apollo Theater in NYC in the 1940s. Again this was the preferred popular and parlor approach to the banjo played across the English speaking world, played by Edward VII and his successor as his mother, well known as a banjo fan since the days of Sweeney, had sent both future monarchs and their sister to take banjo lessons with the Bohees. A colleague from Sweden decades ago found the receipts for the lessons in Palace records.

The limits of this interchange reflect the limitations and stereotypes of knowledge about African American and world banjo playing as well as what would have been in the air both for Earl Scruggs and Murph Gribble (he preferred "Murph" to Murphy) in their times in music. Consult my essay "The colored champion banjo pugilist of the world and the big world of the banjo", a chapter in University of Illinois Press’s prize-winning anthology Banjo roots and branches, published in 2018.

It is a bit bizarre that Stu's views and reporting is not put at the center. Stu found the band by asking his grand aunt what was the main local band where she lived. Stu recorded the band and witnessed their playing. Stu returned in 1948 or 49 to the area and was able to invite the band members to his grand aunt's house to record them again under better circumstances with Gribble actually playing Stu's very high quality banjo. Stu was a banjoist, and immediately identified the banjo approach Gribble used as his grandfather played banjo in the guitar-style like Gribble. Stu was prone to some exaggeration, but he was right on the beam on what Gribble was doing as well as some of the similarity to the Scruggs style which had become popular by time Stu wrote his invaluable field notes. Our knowledge of the banjo playing really starts with what Stu left us.