I
started fooling around with the banjo in the 1960s, as a junior high school
student in Brooklyn, New York. I was lucky
enough to get an old, beat up a long neck banjo -- a Baker Belmont -- as a
graduation gift from my parents. In
retrospect, the banjo was not necessarily as wise a choice as trying out for
the football team in terms of striking on a formula for becoming popular.
After
college, I spent 30 years in working Southeast Asian defense and security
issues for the CIA and the Department of Defense. We lived in Bangkok, Thailand, in the
mid-1980s. During the period from 1988
to 2008, I travelled in and out of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, 5 or 6
times a year for work.
My
two interests –Asia, and banjo – intersected more than I ever thought they
would.
In
my spare time while in the region, I’d hunt down local musicians, players of indigenous
instruments as well as those more inclined to Western string instrument
influences.
I
amassed a collection of Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian stringed instruments
that were, in their way, banjo-like.
During
my visits to Hanoi, I would spend spare time in various music stores, talking
to local builders. Those were really
rudimentary workshops, dirt floors, hand made carving knives, salvaged wood and
metal – in the late 1980s I once saw some locally built guitars whose strings,
I swear, looked as though they were made from the internal wiring systems
salvaged from downed U.S. aircraft. I
once convinced a small musical instrument storeowner to attempt to build banjo
necks from specs I offered. The end
product was an intriguing combination of ingenuity and confusion, a work in
teak that twisted quickly over time, but that ended up being re-milled by me into
some sweet little tailpieces for gut strung banjos.
I
was, for a variety of reasons, immersed in Vietnam wartime documents such as memoirs
and policy records, in Vietnamese. I was
equally interested in the wartime records, and post-war English language
histories, by both experts and veterans.
In
the course of 30 years of monitoring such publications, I managed to stumble
across a bunch of references in post-war publications by U.S. veterans that
described personal experiences in southern Vietnam, and occasionally spoke to
rear area R and R between operations. In
some cases, I read references to pick-up bands of U.S. service personnel that
deployed guitars and banjos and other American instruments hauled across the
ocean by GIs sent to the war zone. In
one or two U.S.-published memoirs, I came across some photos of banjo players
in rear area gatherings in and around Saigon, and secretly always hoped I’d
stumble across a Gibson left behind after 1973 during my visits to southern Vietnam.
At
some point, during the heyday of BANJO-L, I made the acquaintance of Robert
Stuart "Stu" Jamieson, who recorded Rufus Crisp and
was actively involved in performing old time music until his death in
2006. Jamieson was born in 1922 in
Kansu, in the Tibetan-Chinese border country, to a missionary family. We exchanged emails in Chinese, talked about
my travels in China in the mid-1990s, and mused about the spirits that drove us
to Sinic language and culture and, at the same time, to banjo-focused music.
As the
Director for Southeast Asia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during my
last seven years in government, I had certain representational responsibilities
including hosting “social” events for visiting delegations. Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodians – and Asians in
general – were curious about Americans and their family lives, and intrigued by
American “culture.” The banjo and old
time music was a great party trick, a fine way of leveling the playing field,
introducing a measure of informality into a “diplomatic” after-hours event, and
getting visitors to talk about their own folk cultures. Southeast Asians sing. They sing at parties. They sing to break the ice. They sing to create camaraderie in all manner
of gatherings. They warmed immediately
to chances to trade old time tunes for their own music.
I
recently stumbled across a small group of avid banjo practitioners in Asia, and
we’ve tried to sustain connections and be mutually helpful. I ship my issues of Banjo Newsletter to
Guangzhou Province after I’ve read them.
I send used DVDs to these Asian friends, and rely on email and other
internet-driven mechanisms to trade tunes and helpful practice hints. I’ve managed to establish an arrangement
whereby I get interesting Chinese-language books in return for banjo-focused
media. My Vietnamese friends know of,
and remain curious about, my interest in archaic American tunes, and try to
help me grasp some of the rich and historically complex traditions of
indigenous music from their country.
It’s like
trading baseball cards with your “pen pals” – anyone remember what those were?
Anyway,
southern Chinese refer to clawhammer as
抓奏, Zhua Zou, meaning to Grab, Seize, Clutch, and
to
Play
Music.
Sounds
about right.
Play
hard,
Lew
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