Traveling the High Way Home by John Wright

Most interestingly, one particular style of banjo-playing had come into being which, though musical rather than verbal, matches more closely the perfect Parryite paradigm than anything else I have found in real life. A bewildering variety of right-hand techniques had evolved (and I'm forced to use a vague term like 'evolved' because the history of all this was of course totally undocumented). They had worked out a system of some two dozen different tunings to overcome its intrinsic limitations and enable it to play a wide variety of melodies. As I was soon to learn, in a half century of relative musical isolation the people of Appalachia had cultivated the instrument to an extraordinary degree. I first heard the banjo on a phonograph record as a college undergraduate, and I became involved with playing it almost at once. I start with the banjo because, as with many other people of my background, it was the banjo that first got me involved with Appalachian music, then Appalachian songs, and finally Appalachian culture.

Just about the only people to keep it over the next couple of generations, for reasons that they never articulated, were the inhabitants of the Appalachian Mountains. Dropped by Blacks because it fed the stereotype dropped by middle class whites for no apparent reason. (For the record, the banjo player's name was Henry Cluskey.) And we know that it continued in this high regard - as a parlor instrument for the middle classes - for the next half century or so until, mysteriously, around 1910, it was dropped. In a few short years this invention of African slaves had ascended so far in the social scale as to be the instrument of choice of boys at one of the most exclusive prep schools in the United States. But the whole story says interesting things about the banjo. He never did get one, which perhaps says something about Lincoln's abysmal relationship with his oldest son. During the visit one of the other students at the prep school played a few tunes on the banjo to entertain the guests, after which Lincoln is reported to have turned to his solemn son and said, 'Robert, you ought to have one.' FEATURES The Performance of Homeric Epic Homer and Appalachian BluegrassĮ-mail: day after Abraham Lincoln delivered his Cooper Union address he went up to Phillips Exeter Academy to visit his son Robert, who was doing some makeup work there before going to Harvard.

Traveling the High Way Home by John Wright