Is Beyoncé Spearheading a New "O Brother" Moment? [UNLOCKED]

Old-time banjo and modern country show up in the mainstream--naturally enough.

In a Super Bowl ad, Beyoncé announced the release of an upcoming album, and the pre-release track I’ve heard, “Texas Hold Em,” opens on Rhiannon Giddens’s picking what sounds to me like a fretless five-string banjo with a gourd pot and gut strings: pretty much the original American instrument, out of west Africa. Thereon hangs a tale of the origins of all of American vernacular music, a tale some of you may know well and others not so much, far too twisty and complicated to re-tell in detail today, although it’s come up on BAD HISTORY before and will come up below and in other posts, because to me it’s the most important story ever told.

Giddens’s role in the new album’s sound is evidently not limited to her playing banjo on one pre-release track: Beyoncé’s Twitter account seems to suggest that Giddens plays banjo and fiddle on a lot of the tracks. And “Texas Hold Em” doesn’t take a deep dive into the folk roots; it immediately starts building on them. Over that gutty banjo riff, produced via the down-stroking technique known as clawhammer, come layers of danceable pop. Maybe that’s the long, twisty story in a nutshell. Is this thing a c&w line dance, an r&b dancefloor groove, hiphop, an old-time banjo-fiddle “hoedown” (a term Beyonce uses in the lyrics)? You start to get the feeling that a piece can be all of those things at once and it doesn’t matter so much what you call it.

Kinda the point. (Some artists’ work, along with being art, has points.) This album will be the second entry in Beyoncé’s projected “Renaissance” trilogy. The first was at times a dance album and at times a collage about dance music, as well as about race, sex, womanhood, fandom, queerness, defiance, and other things—which is to say about music history and the history of the country. Except unlike this thing of writing about history, which I do, you can move to it.

And I do mean you. I’m not so much in the the target audience. And yet so much of the music I most care about so often turns out to be dance music. Even if sometimes it’s dancing, as Ornette Coleman put it, in your head.

The last time old-school country music found its way into the cultural mainstream in a way that attracted the obsessive, repetitive attention of music writers and editors, who for a while couldn’t talk about much else, was in the early ‘00’s, when the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou” unexpectedly became a massive cultural event.

That was a collection mainly of covers of and tracks inspired by 1930’s 78-rpm “hillbilly” and “race” recordings and related brand-sponsored radio programming. The album’s breakout began a weird period for those of us who had long been subculturally immersed in that kind of music.

The film itself was the broadest kind of parody. The way race politics got involved in the musical presentations would take a lifetime to sort out (the heinous scene where Ralph Stanley sings “O Death” in Klan getup is seared on my brain). There were almost no actual 78 recordings on the soundtrack, so the geekball community found it annoying to see everybody acting as if they’d just discovered a trove of little-known ancient music. The soundtrack did spark new interest in such esoterica as the Harry Smith archive. It also boosted the late-stage performing career of Ralph Stanley himself, newly lionized as an authoritative living link to a bygone past, a walking relic.

There was a museum-piece aspect to that whole thing that really bugged me. I never thought Ralph Stanley was so great anyway. He was just still around.

If “Texas Hold Em” is driving and being driven by a new moment for both slick country and “roots” music—Lana del Rey has a country album coming out in the fall; there are other crosscurrents—I think it’s going to be a very different moment this time around.

So let's listen back to the banjo on the Beyoncé track. In her larger career, and maybe on the Beyoncé album too, Rhiannon Giddens doesn’t exclusively play that immediately African-derived, gourd-pot-gut-(sounding)-string example that we hear underlying the recording; she plays later developments of the instrument too, which of course also descend from the original one. And she plays using the technique I mentioned above: clawhammer.

Which is to say, in banjo terms, that Giddens doesn’t play bluegrass. Which I’d like to put more aggressively, like “she doesn’t play any damn bluegrass.”

Argument about the proper use of the term “bluegrass” has gone on and on and maybe always will. Loose application has become so common that maybe there’s nothing to be done: usage determines what words mean, and maybe it’s fait accompli that “bluegrass” now means nothing more specific than “countryish music that sounds kind of old.” I won’t revive the banjo-fiddle scenester wars of the last century, where “old-time” revivalists disdained the modernity reflected in bluegrass, a form that emerged as a slick, loud, post-WWII development of the old “hillbilly” stringband sound in commercial country music. All that seems pretty quaint now.

But when it comes to the five-string banjo—I mean how the banjo is played, technically—there remains a stark difference between what was once called old-time and what was once called bluegrass. The form called bluegrass was chiefly distinguished early on by loudly chiming high-speed banjo pyrotechnics, produced via a technique largely invented by Earl Scruggs in the 1940’s and involving three-finger up-picking (thumb plus two). And yes, there are two-and-three-finger up-picking banjo techniques in pre-bluegrass music too, but Giddens is mainly a clawhammer player, meaning she uses forefinger and thumb, and sometimes other fingers, in a downward stroke, also sometimes known as frailing.

Some players are adept in both techniques. That’s amazing to me, because they're so fundamentally different in physical execution.

What difference does this difference make to me?

Three items, from least to most important:

1. I’m a clawhammer player and believe the technique produces music just as driving as—and a lot more nuanced and idiosyncratic, generally speaking, than—Scruggs picking.

2. Whenever five-string banjo has made it into the pop-culture spotlight in my lifetime, the technique on display has exclusively been Scruggs picking. In the 1960’s, music for both the TV show “The Beverly Hillbillies” and the movie “Bonnie and Clyde” featured Scruggs’s own playing. In the ‘70’s, the movie “Deliverance” featured Scruggs-style picking in “Dueling Banjos,” played by Eric Weissberg and known in folky scenes at the time as “Drooling” and “Grueling” banjos. Jump ahead to the “O Brother” hit “Man of Constant Sorrow,” recorded by a bluegrass band led by Dan Tyminski in an arrangement copped from the Stanley Brothers; it had the Scruggs-style banjo picking that influenced Ralph Stanley’s own playing. The Lil Nas X hit “Old-Town Road” might be seen as a perhaps somewhat thin but nevertheless compelling precursor to “Texas Hold Em” (it was barred from the country charts because the gatekeepers of segregation in music thought the artist should be required to stay over in r&b); banjo playing on that track, too, though purely atmospheric, is clearly up-picked in a Scruggs-influenced way.

3. The clawhammer technique that Giddens plays is drawn from the oldest banjo techniques, rooted, in its fraught and tangled way, in African ways of playing the original gourd-pot instruments; but also in blackface minstrel playing that made banjo a feature of racist American musical theater in the 19th Century; and in the playing of both black and white folk players in Piedmont North Carolina and the mountains of that state and of Virginia, which was recorded by collectors in the ‘60’s, ‘70’s, and ‘80’s. Clawhammer is mainly for playing dance music (you can’t dance to bluegrass [UPDATE: a crack, not a fact, obviously, since you can dance to anything you want to dance to; see the comments]), and when I was coming up as a clawhammer player, I knew only the recordings of the white mountain players whose technique was becoming revered among a subset of new players, so I thought the technique was theirs alone. While I was fully aware that the banjo had come from Africa, to me the best of black music was in blues, jazz, and soul; I assumed that the five-string form of the instrument had long since been abandoned by black players, first in favor of the hard-strummed four-string heard in early jazz, and then totally, and that clawhammer was a white invention, and I was totally wrong.

   Scholarly work by Cecelia Conway published in 1995, nearly 25 years after I started playing, proved that sounds I’d taken to be deeply lodged in the hollows of Scots-Irish mountain culture were in fact tightly interconnected—hardly surprising when you think about it!—with sounds made by black banjo players who had learned under a wide range of influences. Rhiannon Giddens has been a leader in a movement to recover the black banjo and to frame clawhammer playing in a more realistic historical context—she’s a kind of musicologist and teacher—but first and foremost she plays, sings, performs, and records many kinds of music, by no means all of it the rootsy black folk where she got her start as a famous artist (she’d studied opera singing at the Oberlin Conservatory). One thing that’s been unearthed, and “Texas Hold Em” is but one example: the rhythms fostered by clawhammer playing underlie a lot of the dance musics that came to be known as jazz, swing, Texas swing, r&b, rockabilly, EDM, and more. I’ve known that for a long time (I once actually delivered a paper subtitled “Punk Rock and Technopop in Old Time Appalachia,” believe it or not), but Giddens and others, including her former bandmates Hubby Jenkins and Dom Flemons, don't just know it but are doing it, and that makes all the difference. In 2016, when Giddens won the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, it was the first time a woman and a person of color had won the award. It was also the first time an exclusively clawhammer player had won it. To me, there’s no natural-feeling connection between Scruggs-style banjo picking—to me, in the hands of anyone but the most tasteful, like Bela Fleck and Danny Barnes, it can quickly get overbearing—and even a c&w line dance, let alone the other dance forms I just mentioned. Clawhammer banjo playing, by contrast, isn't just natural to American dance forms but original to them. The fact that an American creative and commercial force as powerful as Beyoncé hears that connection and is employing it musically is a development I never could have imagined, way back when I was a lonely, underinformed teen clawhammer player, and it warms my heart.

I have a few other banjo history stories, some not so heartwarming, which I’ll push on you here and there in months to come.

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Further Reading

Cecelia Conway’s scholarship.

In 2002, I went pretty hard at the PBS series “American Roots Music.”

Rhiannon Giddens in the first iteration of her former band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops. For one, an old-time dance tune (this is pretty unsubtle early-period playing for her, but I think it’s right on, for the number). On another, they’re covering Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style” (Dom Flemons’s banjo there is more like four-string jazz technique). We may get a sense here of why Giddens went on to a solo career.

Hubby Jenkins plays clawhammer banjo with the second CCC lineup on the first tune here. Watch the rest too. Americana unsegregated.

A classic dance set-up: no band, just clawhammer-banjo and fiddle duet. These are the white Round Peak region guys who got my obsessed attention when I was young.

Sometimes clawhammer was employed not for dance music but to back up a song. Here’s “Brother” Blurt Puptent doing an old one.