Rhiannon Giddens and Béla Fleck: The Banjo Summit

In February this year Beyoncé released ‘Texas Hold ’Em’, a single previewing her forthcoming Cowboy Carter album which embraced country music and the role of Black Americans in the genre. The banjo riff that begins ‘Texas Hold ’Em’ was played by Rhiannon Giddens, an artist who has done more than most to reinstate the importance of Black Americans in US folk music traditions. The success of Cowboy Carter, which made Beyoncé the first Black woman to top the US country album charts, had many accusing her of cultural appropriation. Meanwhile, the same accusation was also being fired at George Gershwin, whose ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ turned 100 in February and still faces criticism for its appropriation of African-American jazz. To mark the anniversary, Béla Fleck released Rhapsody in Blue, an album inspired by the Gershwin classic, and in tandem wrote an op-ed for WBGO (US public radio) to address the continued criticism of Gershwin.

With the banjo riding high in the charts again, and conversations about cultural ownership and appropriation still raging, it feels like the perfect time for a banjo summit featuring two of the instrument’s foremost players. “I think it’s really funny for your banjo summit that you have one who knows how to play all the notes and one who knows how to play like four notes,” says Giddens, Fleck interrupting nonchalantly with “Which one is who, though?” “You’re funny,” Giddens smirks, “I play my four notes, and I play them well, but I think it shows you how flexible the banjo is and how amazing it is as an instrument.” Fleck carries on the thought: “It also points out that quality of music is not about how complicated it is, and who can get in more notes. It goes back to who’s playing it, where’s it coming from, what are they trying to achieve, is it their truth?”

To begin, I wanted to ask about your initial reference points for the banjo.

Rhiannon: [Mine] were like what a lot of people’s reference points would have been, i.e., bluegrass, Beverly Hillbillies… My uncle was in a bluegrass band. Where it shifted for me was in my 20s when I was contra dancing, and a lot of the bands for the contra dances in North Carolina were old-time bands. It would have been round-peak style, primarily, old clawhammer banjo, heavily syncopated and just, you know, really funky, which is what I loved about it. And so I took some lessons and did some workshops. I learned a bit from Cathy Fink and a bit here and there. And then when I met Joe [Thompson, mentor for the Carolina Chocolate Drops], I was still pretty much a beginning banjo player. He was a fiddler but I listened to recordings of his brother and his cousin, and my banjo playing is completely informed by playing with him.

Béla: I heard Earl Scruggs playing on the Beverly Hillbillies television show, and I thought it was the most incredible thing I’d ever heard. I was somewhere between five and seven, we went to my grandparents’ house, and they stuck us in the bedroom and let us watch TV. And on came this show, and this sound just struck me. My brother, who’s a year older than me, was sitting with me and after the introduction to the show I said, ‘did you hear that? Can you believe that?’ And he said, ‘what?’ It had no impact on him at all. From then on, I was banjo aware, but I wasn’t connected to the tradition. This was up in New York City, in Queens, where I’d heard this sound. Whenever the banjo would show up I would get excited, but I never thought I would be able to play it because it sounded impossible for anybody to play. So I started learning to play guitar and I was kind of a half-assed guitar player. And then ‘Dueling Banjos’ hit and it became this huge, enormous worldwide hit, and banjo became a lot more mainstream for a while. And so my grandfather saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it, and when I went to visit him, the day before I started high school, there was this banjo sitting there in his house. He said, ‘I thought you might like this.’ All of a sudden it was in my lap and I just couldn’t put it down. I just picked it up and I changed from a type-B guitar player who liked the idea of being a musician, to when the banjo came into my hands, I became obsessive. It was like an alien bug bite.

In Songlines [#94] Béla, you say that the banjo was very popular throughout the 1800s, then its popularity began petering out in the 1930s. But, by the 40s, with Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs it makes a comeback…

Rhiannon: For me, [this is when] the banjo shifts. The banjo was a very, very popular instrument and it was used for a lot of different things. And it’s really during the segregation of American music at the beginning of the recording industry that a lot of things start shifting, and also technology changes, so the banjo stops becoming popular in places like jazz, because the electrified guitar takes over. Or in other genres, it kind of falls out of favour, as things do. I think its resurgence in the 40s and 50s is part of a careful narrative and a restructuring of American history through this idea of hillbillyism which is coming out of what’s going on in the late 20s and early 30s when the recording industry starts. It becomes part of that and it gets divorced from its Black origins in the mainstream.

Béla: Well, I always have to be careful about that part of it because I’m very aware of the Black origins of the banjo. And I think it’s a beautiful part. You know, that’s why the thing is so great. But [hits] like [‘Duelling Banjos’] cemented exactly what you’re talking about, the white southern part of the banjo. The banjo is so much more than that, but I also have to give it up to the musicianship of some of these people that are the reason that woke me up and hooked me about it. In other words, I have to be careful to not put down Earl Scruggs because without Earl Scruggs I wouldn’t be so connected.

Rhiannon: You’re not putting down Earl Scruggs.

Béla: No, I’m not. I always have to be very careful… I don’t want to be portrayed as a northerner who is looking down on hillbilly music because there’s so much that’s great about that too. The hard part is that there’s so much other great music that didn’t get the same opportunities.

Rhiannon: Absolutely.

Were Black Americans complicit in turning away from the banjo, especially when genres like jazz became popular?

Rhiannon: There’s always a question of, ‘why did Black people put the banjo down?’ In later generations, there’s a desire not to go back to the banjo because of minstrelsy. But I don’t think that that was the driving concern of professional musicians who were going, ‘oh, this guitar now is electrified, I’m going to learn how to play this guitar’ or ‘the banjo is a little outmoded’ or ‘it’s just what my grandfather played’, or whatever. There’s all of these things happening all at the same time, as well as, you know, leaving the South, wanting to leave negative imagery behind, but a lot of that is actively happening in the 20s with this sort of re-imagining of what American history is, whereas like 30 years before everybody would have known the banjo had Black roots, you know what I mean? There’s mythology that’s being actively written at this time that’s changing people’s perception. And you think about all the professional musicians who get caught up in this, you know, all those quote-unquote hillbilly musicians who showed up in their Sunday best and were told to go put on overalls, you know what I mean?

Béla: I had a great conversation with a banjo player named Danny Barker. He played with Louis Armstrong and others of that time. [The Flecktones] were in New Orleans and we called him up and had a long conversation about how the banjo died in jazz, because he was there. He said that in the early 30s, he had moved to New York and was playing banjo, and there was a recording that came out that kind of captured everybody’s fancy, and it featured a guitar instead of banjo. And he said almost instantly, banjo was dead, every banjo player was out of work, and that’s when they started playing those tenor guitars which was an instrument basically for banjo players. And, as Rhiannon said, the reason is because of the minstrelsy. Because if you’ve got white folks painting themselves black, singing about how great slavery was on the plantation, that’s pretty revolting. So, he switched over to guitar and he didn’t play banjo for many years.

Rhiannon: … [But] not everybody’s experience of that was the same. It is tempting to say that [minstrelsy] is the reason why Blacks put the banjo down, and it’s not, it’s one of the reasons…

Are things better or worse now, in terms of inclusivity? We still have artists like Beyoncé not being accepted into country music, but then folk festivals are more inclusive…

Béla: You’re looking for a simple answer and it doesn’t really work that way. There are good signs and there are bad signs. There’s the folk festival that’s overrun by acts that aren’t folk music at all. You have that problem in jazz as well, where the word jazz becomes a brand. But in terms of the banjo’s perception, I think a lot more people are getting it, largely because of Rhiannon and her efforts and the people she’s helped bring to people’s attention. And then people use banjo for false authenticity. It used to be that the banjo was the kiss of death because nobody wanted to hear it. But, at a certain point, it started making its way back into music. Like Keith Urban having banjo all over his records, or the Avett Brothers or this Americana world. People could put a banjo into a song and it would make the song seem more earthy and more meaningful. But it really didn’t have a connection to banjo.

Rhiannon: I just want to speak to the documentary [Throw Down Your Heart] that Béla did, you know, connecting the banjo to its Afro-ancestors, which is for a lot of people their first knowledge about the banjo being a Black instrument. So, there’s a lot of us doing this work, and it takes this kind of village to reach our people in certain ways. In terms of perceptions, we have to look at the banjo as an instrument which became commercial in the 1850s. Before the 1850s, it would have been homemade, ceremonial, then it becomes a commercial mainstream instrument from minstrelsy in the 1850s and then everybody starts playing this banjo: Black, white, brown, whatever, because it’s a great banjo. I have one. It’s fantastic. After this, you have these banjo companies making banjos for everything that [is] completely divorced from where the banjo came from. You’ve got banjo ukes, baritone banjos, cello banjos, bass banjos, soprano banjos. And then you’ve got traditional banjo playing, in the mountains, in the Piedmont… You’ve got banjo playing that’s connected to this folk music, and then commercial music, there’s always been this back and forth. So, when you’re looking at what is a folk festival, that gets hairy because who’s deciding what folk music is? Is it based on the 60s idea of what folk music is, i.e. Pete Seeger? Or is it based on the White Top Mountain Festival, i.e. no Black people exist? I see a resurgence and a lot of interest in traditional ways of playing the banjo from young people, whether it’s bluegrass, old-time, minstrel, stroke-style banjo. [But] I still got a question about Deliverance in the first minute of my Daily Show interview. Literally I was like, ‘Are we really still here?’ But I feel hopeful because of the resurgence of people interested in traditional and folk music, people are realising that it’s tied to something real, and that’s what they’re looking for, they’re looking for real.

Béla: I was just thinking about how when I was a kid and I started playing banjo, I’d walk down the street and people would go, ‘yee-haw, squeal like a pig,’ and I found it so offensive, I was like, this is a serious instrument. I love this instrument. But I did notice that by the 90s, I guess Deliverance was old enough that it wasn’t part of modern culture, I mean, the older folks would still do that, but the young kids… I’d play a college and they’d come over and ask me about the banjo. They could tell this was something rooted and old and special, and they were interested.

We must mention ‘Texas Hold ’Em’… In 2019, Rhiannon, you said: ‘The only way to be Black is to be like Beyoncé, bullshit!’

Rhiannon: Beyoncé is in an unenviable position of being representative for a lot of things. So she’s a shorthand. What I was saying there, which I stand by to this day, because it has nothing to do with Beyoncé and everything to do with perceptions of Blackness… To the mainstream Black media, it felt to me that my rooted ways of being Black, i.e. playing the banjo, which predates anything else, you know, were not perceived as being Black. And that was frustrating. I was like, we’re cutting off a whole limb because we think that’s the only way. Fast forward a year and I said also the only way to get the banjo in Black hands in a way larger than what I can do is if Beyoncé puts banjo on the track. I’ve been very clear in knowing the cultural power that she holds… So fast forward to ‘Texas Hold ’Em’ and I signed an NDA and I can’t talk about it. So…

But this is important, to have a banjo on such a big album…

Rhiannon: I won’t say anything about that specifically, but my sound is very specific. It’s a replica 1858 banjo. That sound is in Red Dead Redemption 2 [a video game Giddens provided music for]. I’ve snuck it in lots of different places, because it harkens back to an ancestral sound that is not associated with the banjo because of the technological innovation that changed it so that it could more ably play European styles of music. The banjo that I play is much more connected to the previous set of ancestral instruments that came before it. And so it would have been a skin head, gut strings, fretless and made out of wood. When people hear it, they go, ‘what the fuck is that?’ It’s trying to nuance the conversation.

Béla: I agree. It’s very different from the Earl Scruggs experience. It has an equally powerful sound; I hear it and I go, ‘yeah this is more connected to the musicians I played with in Africa playing ngonis and akontings and things like that.’

Béla, let’s talk about your recent album, Rhapsody in Blue. You wrote an op-ed defending Gershwin…

Béla: Life is complicated, nuanced, but as soon as you put up walls between creative impulses, I think you’re shooting yourself in the foot, so that was my main concern. Maybe I’m protective of white people that are blown away by music that’s not white and it changed their music, and then being wrong for that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. For instance, Charlie Parker and Coltrane loved Western classical music and took a lot of things out of that and it inspired them and when they played their jazz, it had more influences in it, and I think that’s all natural and beautiful. The problem is when you don’t reveal your sources and make believe you invented this stuff from another culture. That’s when it gets inappropriate for me. But to hear something incredible that blows you away and moves you and makes you want to create, that shouldn’t be stopped. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ did that for me, when I was a kid.

Rhiannon: Whiteness is a construct as much as Blackness, and that’s part of the problem in our culture… We can hold multiple things at once. I’ve been in Porgy and Bess. I acknowledge there’s issues with that piece, while also saying there’s something that he captured through his own religiosity that connects to Black religiosity. We too often look for the simple answer.

Final question. What more can the banjo achieve?

Béla: I don’t want to insult anybody, but the banjo is the cockroach of musical instruments, it can’t be stamped out. It keeps on coming back and people keep finding a way to use it, so I think, just allow it to continue to do that. I don’t think any of us are in control of it anyway, but the more we do stuff that we feel good about putting out there, the more that gives people music that might inspire them. But I like the person that finds a banjo that has never heard banjo and writes something, comes up with a way to play it and it’s divorced from the traditions as well.

Rhiannon: I think one of the reasons why the banjo keeps fascinating people is because it is the quintessential American instrument. It is created in the Caribbean by people of African descent and becomes American when it moves up into the United States. The banjo [was] the first American cultural export. It’s the foundation of our culture. When you think about Kristina Gaddy’s book, Well of Souls, [it shows how] the banjo was an instrument of resistance, of connection, of ceremony, of community. It’s history cannot be forgotten, and it needs to be connected to what the banjo is now. It is America, with all of its warts and with all of its amazing beautifulness, right?

This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today