Ekonting – Real Banjo Roots Music!

Happy Banjo Friday!  & a real treat today, I believe.

When I decided to expand Banjo Friday to a regular weekly feature, I decided I’d like to study not just great banjo songs, but also the historical, social & cultural aspects of an instrument that seems both quintessentially American & fundamentally African.  Today I’d like to write a bit about an instrument that’s considered one of the banjos closest relatives & that may well be a prototype for the original instrument brought over by slaves to the Americas.  This is the ekonting or akonting, an instrument found in the West African Jola culture.

There are some striking similarities between the banjo & the ekonting.  Perhaps the most notable one is that both instruments have a short drone string (the 5th string on a banjo, the 3rd string on the ekonting).  In addition, the playing styles are very similar if we’re talking about the old style of banjo playing called frailing or clawhammer.  When frailing a banjo, the player strikes melody notes with the index of either his/her index finger or middle finger, while the thumb concentrates on the drone string.  The thumb also “drops” from time to time to the other strings in frailing (a reason why it is also sometimes called “drop thumbing,” but that’s misleading since the thumb dropping onto those strings happens in other playing styles as well, both old-time & more modern). 

Now if you watch master ekonting player Sana Ndiaye in the video below, you’ll notice that this is precisely how he plays.  He uses the index fingernail for most of the melody, while the thumb usually plays the drone, but occasionally “drops” onto the second string.  Some ekonting players (as is the case with the banjo) use the middle fingernail instead.
 

Of course, the banjo has undergone many transformations.  Except in historical replicas, the gourd head has been completely replaced by skin or plastic & by wooden or metal tone rings &, in some cases, resonators.  Still, it’s well-established that early banjos in both the United States & the Caribbean were constructed with gourd heads.  The late 18th century watercolor entitled “The Old Plantation” shows just such an instrument (image above).  It’s also fairly well established that the older instruments didn’t have five strings (tho it’s also accepted that one of the strings they did have was a short drone string.)  It’s often postulated that the lowest sounding string (which would be a D on today’s banjos in standard tuning, but was usually a B on 18th century instruments) was added during the period that Euro-Americans started co-opting the instrument for blackface mistrel shows.

There’s an interesting discussion of the banjo’s “creolization” on the MySpace ekonting blog.  Shlomo Pestcoe & Greg C. Adams state the following:

the early gourd banjo, while fundamentally West African in its design, was not an exact replica of any known African instrument. Rather, it embodied a synthesis of structural features from several West African traditions with a few innovations most likely inspired by Spanish and Portuguese plucked lutes encountered in the Caribbean, such as the vihuela de mano, guitar, tiple, and cavaquinho.

The song I chose is Sana Ndiaye is a bit long, but very beautiful & the sound is high quality.  There are some other ekonting videos on YouTube, including ones by the Jatta family (with whom Béla Fleck played during the latter’s Throw Down Your Heart filming)—for instance, here, here & here.  Hope you enjoy this remarkable music!





The image of the ekonting leading off the post is by Shlomo Pestcoe & is licensed under both the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License & the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Adams County Makes the News - Adams County Leader #33

The Adams County Leader        Published Weekly On Friday
Wm. Lemon Editor and Manager
Member State Editorial Association 
Member National Editorial Association
Official Paper of Adams County Price $2.00 Strictly in Advance

December 14, 1928
BURTENSHAW HAD INTERESTING CASE

Attorney L. L. Burtenshaw had an interesting case at Cascade last week when court convened over there.  He was defending a case of Dr. Jones, who was being sued for damages for having killed a so-called tame fox that belonged to Mrs. Mille Kealer.  She had brought suit for $500 damages against the doctor who shot the fox because it was making raids on his chicken pens, he being a neighbor of the plaintiff.  The case went to the jury Tuesday, as reported in the Cascade News, and the verdict was for Mrs. Kealer for $250 and costs, which made it a rather expensive fox for the doctor, and he didn’t get the hide either. 

And this leads the Leader editor to ponder as follows: last summer we read of a farmer who shot a lad that was trespassing in the farmer’s watermelon patch, somewhere over in Oregon—in the Nyssa neighborhood, as we recall.  In the trial that followed, the farmer was exonerated.  In other words, it seems all right to shoot a boy that steals your watermelons, but you must not shoot a fox that steals your chickens.  Of course, we understand there may be different circumstances connected with the two cases but we do not know what they are.

December 14, 1928
HOLIDAY GREETING CARDS
 
Our holiday greeting cards, 18 assorted, with tissue-lined envelopes, are last minute life-savers for those who waited—only 75 cents.  Leader Office.

PICKED UP ABOUT TOWN 1928

“That’s the guy I’m laying for,” said the hen as F. L. Scholl came home Sunday evening.

The invention this county most needs,” says Ernest Winkler, “is a four wheel brake for quick tempers.”

“It’s the little things of life that bother us,” asserts Norman Johnson, “you can sit on a mountain in comfort, but not on a tack.”

June 7, 1929
LISTEN TO THIS

No matter how important the task in hand, we want every one of our readers to drop everything and listen.  A dispatch to the daily press from Washington City says the Department of Commerce has turned its attention to the standardizing of men’s pajamas.  We’ve got standardized bed slats, bird cages, fence posts, and tombstones, and now our happiness is to be complete—we’re going to have standardized nighties for men!  From now on there should be less complaint about crime problems and prohibition problems.  We may have sharp pains in our stomach from eating food that costs us more than we like to pay for it; we may have pains in the head from smoking too many 15 cent cigars; we may worry because carbon gets into our 8-cylinder car worse than it did in the old two-lunger—but let’s forget all that and start living in a new paradise.  Isn’t our government going to make it possible for us to sleep in standardized nighties?

June 7, 1929
WHY WASTE MONEY?

A U. S. Senator has offered a bill providing for broadcasting the proceedings of the Senate, and it strikes us as being just about the most unnecessary measure ever to be introduced.  If any senator thinks the owners of radio sets would like to listen to his speeches, he does not know the people.  When even the senators themselves do not listen to each other half the time, what excuse have they for thinking the general public would do so?  The newspapers give the public all that is worthwhile of the speeches made in congress, and we don’t believe one in a hundred read that much any too closely.

April 26, 1929
HOW TO STOP WAR

Our national pocketbook being mightier than our national conscience, Ralph Hayes, a New York banker, speaking to a group of bankers, made a plea for peace purely on a dollars-and-cents basis.  “With nearly $10,000,000,000 worth of foreign trade each year,” he said, “and with more than $25,000,000,000 of U.S. money invested abroad, every shot our artillery fired would hit a debtor and every bomb our airplanes dropped would kill a customer.  Call that cold-blooded calculation if you want to; the conquest of war is not to be achieved in terms of sweetness and light.”

If cold, materialistic bankers and industrialists can rid us of war, then let’s get rid of it that way.  Most great reforms in history have come through men stopping to count the cost in dollars and cents.  If we can stop war by deciding that it is too expensive, then let’s get together and reach that decision without further delay.

June 7, 1929
FRUITGROWERS, ATTENTION!

How about that Calyx spray.  If you haven’t it on, you had better hurry.  We have been making record catches of Coddling Moths the last few days.  Owing to cool weather, they were slow starting to hatch out, but since the warm weather they have been making up for lost time.

It appears from our record of moths in the “hootch” pots that the peak of the moth brood was on May 21, which would make the peak of the hatch about May 30th to 31st.  Our record for one trap on the 21st was 224, and the average for 16 traps was 83 moths.

compiled by Eberle Umbach

"WHOSE IDEA IT WAS"

[Oh my, I do love L.E. Leone’s latest poem!  Hope you do too!]

WHOSE IDEA IT WAS

 
We rode our bikes on a country road. Mine
had a sissy bar, of which I was proud.

When a car came from behind, we'd pretend

to lose control, my California cousin and me

swerving into the ditch, flying and tumbling
because we could. No one got hurt.

We got poison ivy. Who knows what
the drivers thought. None honked or stopped.

We laughed as we flew, the joke on them. Now

my cousin is gone. Now I live in California, have a long
distance lover. Our love, exactly like this.

L.E. Leone
© 2011

10 Essential Delta Blues Songs – Baby Please Don’t Go

Hey folks, it’s Monday Morning Blues time!  & this week we’re back to the 10 Essential Delta Blues Songs series!

A couple of “notes” before we move on to a great song: first, a reminder: the list is not intended as “the 10 essential Delta Blues songs,” but simply one of many such lists that could be created.  Second: the list was advertised as being in alphabetical order—but if you’ve been following along, you can see today’s song kind of bollixes that up.  I could plead the fact that Big Joe Williams released the song both as “Baby Please Don’t Go” & “Please Don’t Go,” & that I’m simply splitting the difference; but the fact is that for awhile I was thinking of doing a different Big Joe Williams song.

Because I couldn’t conceive of doing this sort of list without including Big Joe Williams, who is an absolutely fascinating figure & a great, if highly idiosyncratic musician.  Williams played a modified Harmony guitar (for those who don’t know, Harmony—“the people’s guitar”—is not high end; they were sold by Sears & Roebuck!); the guitar was modified from six strings to nine, with the added three strings being unison strings on the 1st, 2nd & 4th strings; his guitar was usually tuned to an open G chord.  Although this description of his playing by his biographer Barry Lee Pearson dates from a time after either of today’s recordings, I think it gives some insight into Big Joe Williams’ approach to music:

When I saw him playing at Mike Bloomfield's "blues night" at the Fickle Pickle, Williams was playing an electric nine-string guitar through a small ramshackle amp with a pie plate nailed to it and a beer can dangling against that. When he played, everything rattled but Big Joe himself. The total effect of this incredible apparatus produced the most buzzing, sizzling, African-sounding music I have ever heard.

from the Allmusic site (see link above)    

“Baby Please Don’t Go” is a great song, one that’s been covered from everybody from Lightnin’ Hopkins to AC/DC.  But for my money, nobody has done it much better than Big Joe himself.  Interestingly, Williams recorded two very different versions within the course of six years.  The first, from 1935, shows a side of Delta music that may seem unfamiliar—Big Joe Williams backed by a one-string fiddle & a washboard!  What a sound!  The second, from 1941, has a more recognizable “deep blues” sound, as it contains masterful call & response between Big Joe Williams & Sonny Boy Williamson on harp (that’s harmonica, folks!)  What would a list of blues songs be without at least one appearance by Sonny Boy Williamson!

Of course I should mention this is Sonny Boy Williamson I, AKA John Lee Williamson—yes, you may not know it, but there were two great blues harp players who performed under the name of Sonny Boy Williamson—Sonny Boy Williamson II was a man named Rice Miller.  Sonny Boy Williamson II is the man who—after touring in Great Britain in the 60s—reportedly said to Robbie Robertson about the Yardbirds: “They want to play the blues so bad, & they play it so bad.”  Sonny Boy Williamson I—a brilliant musician who played not only with Big Joe Williams, but also with Sleepy John Estes & Yank Rachell, was killed during a mugging in Chicago in 1947. 

 Harsh realities—but a great song.

Photo of the Week 6/12/11

The Weiser River

south of Cambridge, Idaho

Friday 6/10/11

“Portrait”

[The next in my series of translations from Blaise Cendrars’ Deux-Neuf poèmes élastiques (19 Elastic Poems)]

Portrait

He’s sleeping
He’s awake
All of the sudden, he’s painting
He takes a church and he paints with a church
He takes a cow and he paints with a cow
With a sardine
With heads, hands, knives
He paints with a bull’s pizzle
He paints with all the filthy passions of a small Jewish village
With all the exacerbated sexuality of the Russian countryside
For France
Without sensuality
He paints with his thighs
He has eyes in his ass
And all of a sudden your portrait
It’s you reader
It’s me
It’s him
It’s his fiancee
It’s the corner grocer
The cowherd
The midwife
There are buckets of blood
The newborns are washed in them
Skies of madness
Mouths of modernity
The Tower as corkscrew
Hands
Christ
Christ that’s him
He spent his childhood on the Cross
He commits suicide every day
All of the sudden, he paints no more
He was awake
He’s sleeping now
He throttles himself with his tie
Chagall is astonished to live still

Blaise Cendrars
translation Jack Hayes
© 1990-present

“I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”

Happy Friday!  Hope you’re up for some banjo music, because that’s what we have for you today.

In fact, I want to let you know that from now on, Fridays here at Robert Frost’s Banjo will all be Banjo Fridays.  Platypuss in Boots will be moving to Saturday, where it will alternate with my translations of Cendrars' Dix-Neuf poèmes élastiques (Nineteen Elastic Poems).  To accommodate the switch, the next poem in that sequence will post tomorrow.

Today’s featured banjo song is one of my all time favorites, & one I’ve performed from time to time on both guitar & banjo—it’s Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.”  I first experienced this song (not to mention my first exposure to Clarence Ashely, Buell Kazee & Dock Boggs!) on Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, where it’s found on volume three (“Songs”) along with tunes by Ashley, Kazee & Boggs (as well as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, the Carter Family & lots more.)  In his essay on the Anthology entitled “Old Weird America,” critic Greil Marcus described the “Songs’ volume of the set as follows:

“a charnel house that bears a disturbing resemblance to everyday life: to wishes and fears, difficulties and satisfactions that are, you know, as plain as day, but also, in the voices of those who are now singing, the work of demons—demons like your neighbors, your family, your lovers, yourself.”

Lunsford’s three & a half minute piece of uncanniness is certainly as fine a piece of lyrical folk surrealism as you will find.  The mole that will “root that mountain down” apparently out of some existential despair, the railroad men who will “drink up your blood like wine” (this latter image of course purloined by Bob Dylan in his “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”), the lizard who listens to his “darling sing”—these all seem to take us to some sort of Americana dreamscape. 

& we are taken there, of course, by the power of Lunsford’s voice (John Fahey described Lunsford’s singing as sounding like “he was always about to crack up”) & by the force of his banjo playing.  Like Roscoe Holcomb in our previous Banjo Friday selection, Lunsford played “two finger style,” using only the thumb & index finger.  One difference in Lunsford’s style, however, which as I understand was common in his native North Carolina, is that the index finger also brushed up on the strings as well as plucking single notes (up meaning the finger moved up from the direction of the floor rather than down towards it.)  Both Art Rosenbaum & Pete Seeger in their writings have noted that this form of two-finger playing was a common old-time style, & possibly as prevalent as the better known frailing styles.  Rosenbaum gives a transcription of “Mole in the Ground” in his Old-Time Mountain Banjo (Oak Publications).  According to that transcription, Lunsford playing the song in the double C tuning, which from the 5th string to the 1st string is as follows: gCGCD.  I’ve also seen arrangements of this in the open C tuning, which is gCGCE.  I always worry about taking that 1st string up to E myself! (a moot point in this case, however, since I actually sing “Mole in the Ground” in A using the standard G tuning capoed up 2 frets.)

This is a truly remarkable piece of music, “born,” as Lunsford said, “out of the hilarity of mountain banjo picking”—enjoy!