FROM THE BANJO HANGOUT ARTICLE PAGE:
“Dwight Diller’s Early Old Time Music: Field Recordings from
the 1970s,” Banjo Hangout, December 2016, http://www.banjohangout.org/articles/detail.asp?preview=true&aid=47
DWIGHT DILLER’S EARLY OLD
TIME MUSIC:
FIELD RECORDINGS FROM THE
1970S
By Lew Stern
Introduction
In August 2014, an old
friend, Dwight Diller, a West Virginian old time banjo and fiddle player whose
fine music is widely know, phoned me, reminded me of a discussion we had ten or
more years ago, and told me that now is the time for me to resume work on his
biography, a project I proposed during a visit by Dwight to my home in northern
Virginia in the early 2000s.
That book took shape
between August 2014 and September 2015, and was published by McFarland
Publishers of North Carolina in April 2016, bearing the title:
Dwight
Diller: West Virginia Mountain Musician, Number 39, “Contributions to
Southern Appalachian Studies.”
In the
course of my research and writing, many people – including Bill Talley, Len
Reiss, Bob Thornburg, Kilby Spencer, Rock Garton – provided me with tape
cassettes of Dwight’s music captured at jams and gatherings, in banjo
workshops, band practice sessions and elsewhere, as early as 1970, over a
decade before Dwight began recording his music – making many of these tapes the
earliest examples of his banjo, and fiddle, playing.
During
the tail end of the book project, I introduced Dwight to Gene Bowlen. Gene
runs Bearcade Recording and Sound, owns and operates a studio in Port Republic,
VA, and provides sound work for local festivals and recording for musicians in
his home studio. He is also an old time banjo player with his own performing
band and an avid, deep love for the old music.
Gene
organized a recording session for Dwight and Terry Richardson in his studio at
his home in Port Republic, and set up the afternoon house concert for Dwight
and Terry. That took place on 1 November 2015.
In subsequent
discussions I conducted with Gene, it became clear that some of the original
tapes, especially the earliest ones made at the festivals in Independence and
Hillsboro, VA, in the summer of 1970s, and in Morgantown in 1973, could be
harvested in Gene’s studio, salvaged, cleaned up and made
CD-worthy. Gene and I share the view that there would be an interest
in a CD that featured Dwight’s early playing. Gene set to work to bring
some of those tunes together. What
follows represent my notes on the field recordings that were so very generously
placed in my hands during the project.
The Music
The tapes represent
Dwight’s playing from 1970 to 1976, from the point at which he became a banjo
player to the point at which he moved gradually to playing and teaching banjo
and fiddle full time in various settings – retreats at his home, workshops around
Pocahontas County, jams and gatherings featuring the Hammons family musicians,
and at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, West Virginia.
Gene drew the music for
this special CD that captures Dwight’s music before he began recording
commercially from these field recordings that I collected while researching my
book from numerous musicians who were “present at creation” during 1970 – 1980:
1970
Kilby Spencer, originally from Whitetop, Virginia,
made available to me recordings of the banjo contest taped at the 4th
Annual Old Time Fiddlers and Bluegrass Convention in Hillsville, Virginia, in
June 1970. Kilby learned old-time music from his
parents, Thornton and Emily, who have been in the Whitetop Mountain Band for
over 40 years.
He collects and digitizes rare local recordings, and serves on
the board of the Field Recorder’s Collective whose mission is to preserve and
release rare field and home recordings of old time music. Dwight was amazed that his first contest
tunes from June 1970 had survived, and was deeply grateful for the chance to
hear himself playing so soon after he had solidified what became his signature
banjo sound.
In
1970, Dwight went to work as a “Nutritional Aide” for the West Virginia 4-H
Club, an organization focused on teaching farm children basic agricultural
management skills and animal husbandry and undertaking such projects as
teaching women to can groundhog meat in Cass, West Virginia. Sometime that year, he and his friend Paul Haggard
went to an old time music festival near Hillsville, Virginia. Dwight had met Haggard, an assistant forest
ranger, in the summer of 1969. Haggard
was from the north, an “outsider” as Dwight put it. They met when Haggard, on behalf of the
National Forest, was trying to get Sherman Hammons to agree to build a fence to
keep his sheep from grazing on federal land.
Sherman was adamant in his position: “If you want to build a fence,
that’s just fine,” Dwight remembered Sherman telling Haggard, “But I’ll not
build a fence.” Haggard got to know
Sherman, they became friends, and that led to the link with Dwight. Haggard played guitar and on the basis of
their common interest in old time music Haggard invited Dwight to accompany him
to the 4th Annual Old Time Fiddlers and Bluegrass Convention in Hillsville,
Virginia, in June 1970.
That
festival was Dwight’s first exposure to the burgeoning “old time scene.” The festival opened up a new world for him,
brought him into contact with peers his age, and introduced him to a
concentration of old time music talent.
Dwight met the Fuzzy Mountain String Band members and made the acquaintance of several banjo
players with whom he became lifelong friends, and from whom he learned some
banjo playing skills. Three men in
particular befriended Dwight: Bob Thren, an avid caver and banjo player who
moved to Lexington, Virginia, in 1975; Len Reiss, an accomplished banjo builder
and clawhammer player originally from New Jersey; and Alex Varela, a lawyer by
training who showed Dwight how to play Henry Reed’s version of “Frosty Morn”
and “Angeline” in an impromptu ten or fifteen minute lesson at the Hillsville
festival. That brief lesson helped
Dwight consolidate what he had picked up from Dick Kimmel in Morgantown, and
what he had absorbed from close observation of Hamp Carpenter, Lee Hammons, and
Sherman and Burl Hammons and Maggie Hammons Parker. Thren, Reiss and Varela had come to listen to the likes of Tommy
Jarrell, who played fiddle at the festival.
At
Hillsville, Dwight also met Tommy Thompson who was born in St. Albans near
Charleston, West Virginia, and whose banjo playing caught Dwight’s attention.
Thompson was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of North
Carolina in 1965; by 1970, he was teaching college philosophy courses. Thompson held a number of appointments over
several years at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he taught from
the fall of 1971 to 1972, and at North Carolina State in Raleigh, where he
began teaching in 1972. Thompson
established the Hollow Rock String Band that recorded their first album in
1967. Dwight was drawn to Thompson’s playing, and to his big personality.
Dwight
did not remember exactly how, but he ended up registered as a participant in
the festival’s banjo contest. Someone
might have entered his name, or he might have been cajoled into signing up
himself; his memory is vague on this point.
A fellow with the name of Mutt Worrell
took first place. Worrell and his sister, old time banjo player Matokie
Slaughter, were from Pulaski, Virginia. Dwight remembered that Mutt played two tunes:
“Long Tongued Woman,” and “Monkey on a String,” two tunes he was not
familiar with then and has not encountered since that time. However, a tape of the contest showed that
one of Mutt’s tunes was “John Henry,” and that another contestant by the name
of Russell Worrell (contestant number 4) played “Monkey on a String.”
Dwight took second
place at the Hillsville competition. He played two tunes, and while he
remembered playing “Arkansas Traveller” in that contest, the audio tape
that identified him as contestant number nine from Sally Holler, West Virginia,
showed that he played “Old Folks Comin’ Down the Road” and “Soldier’s Joy.”
At a later point in the audio tape, Dwight – mistakenly identified as Dwight
“Deley” – played “Sixteen Horses Was My Team,” though the tune was identical to
what he had played earlier on the tape, identified as “Old Folks Comin’ Down
The Road.” Tommy Thompson, identified by the announcer as contestant number
eight from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, played “Devil on a Stump.”
The two tunes harvested
from Kilby Spencer’s field recordings of this contest:
Ø
“Old Folks Comin’
Down the Road” and
Ø
“Soldier’s Joy.”
1972
According
to fiddler Mark Campbell, during 1971-1972, when he was playing in Armin
Barnett’s “The Yellow Mountain String Band,” there
was an annual gathering of banjo and fiddle players who were keen on recording
the music of the elders in Appalachia that met outside of Charlottesville,
Virginia, near the base of the Blue Ridge, called “The Alternative Galax.” Among those who attended were Carl Baron,
Bill Hicks, Alan Jabbour, Gerry Milnes, Peter Hoover, Mark Gunther, Dave
Milefski, and Dwight Diller. Armin Barnett hosted two such gatherings
before he left Virginia. Dwight attended
one of these and music he played with Armin Barnett itself survived as on
several field recordings made by attendees of one of these gatherings.
In
Bill Hicks’ memory, the event was referred to the Alternate Galax largely
because it coincided with the “real” Galax festival. He also recollected that musicians from
outside of the area were frustrated that at Galax, the contests were always won
by insiders, people from the host region:
“You couldn't go to Galax and play some other regional style and expect
to win anything much, no matter how well you played,” so the designation
“Alternative Galax” served to underscore this sentiment.
The event took place
at a farm that Barnett was renting, and was attended by Dwight, Barnett, Carl
Baron, Len Reiss, Bob Thren, Odell McGuire, and possibly Mark Campbell,
according to Talley. Members of the Fuzzy Mountain String Band were
there, too, but they mostly stayed at the house with Barnett while a clutch of
other musicians including Dwight and Barnett played up on a hill. A total of 26 of the tunes played by Barnett
and Dwight were recorded.
William
Talley, of West Chester, Pennsylvania, who began
playing clawhammer back in the mid-1960's, tapped his memory and his audio
library to come up with absolutely essential recordings of Dwight playing at
the vaunted “Alternative Galax” hosted by Armin Barnett in Charlottesville,
Virginia, in 1972. The following tunes
were harvested from Mr. Talley’s field recordings:
Ø
Angeline the Baker
Ø
Quince Dillon’s High D
Ø
Jaybird
Ø
Fine Times at Our House (two cuts)
Ø
Locklaven Castle
Ø
Sally Ann
Ø
Frosty Morn
Ø
The Route
Ø
Boatin Up Sandy
Ø
Greasy Coat
Ø
Falls of Richmond
Ø
Sugar Grove Blues (two cuts)
Ø
Old Mother Flannigan
Ø
All Christmas Morn
Ø
Camp Chase (two cuts, Burl’s version and Emmet Bailey’s
version)
Ø
Three Forks of Cheat
Ø
Washington’s March
Ø
Pigeon on a Gate
Ø
Miller’s Reel
Ø
Rocky Mountain Goat
Ø
Forked Deer
Ø
Paddy on the Turnpike (two cuts, one in the key of D)
Ø
Sally Johnson
Ø
Cuffy
Ø
Miss McLeod’s Reel
1973
Tom Mylet provided
three tape cassettes dating from around 1972:
Ø
Dave Milesky and Amin
Barnett, and Bill Hicks, Armin Barnett, Dwight Diller, and the Hammons, no
date. Audio cassette provided by Tom Mylet.
Ø
Ken Segal, Buell
Kazee, J.P. Fraley, Lee Triplett, Wilson Douglas, Franklin Davies, taped at
Mountain Heritage Festival, Carter Cove, Kentucky, May 1972. Audio
cassette provided by Tom Mylet.
Ø
Armin Barnett and
Dwight Diller, August 1972, taped in Charlottesville, Virginia. Two audio
cassettes provided by Tom Mylet.
The first two of these
tapes appear to have been made at one of the two “Alternative Galax” events
hosted by Armin Barnett. Several tunes
were harvested from these cassettes.
* * *
In the fall of 1972,
while he was still living in Morgantown, Dwight began teaching old time music,
especially banjo, in his rented apartment in Morgantown. West Virginian fiddler Rock Garton joined
this informal class:
It must [have] been fate or God
that connected me to Dwight Diller. I was a junior in college in 1972 and trying
to learn to play a tune on the fiddle with little success. Being a
recreation major I enjoyed fun classes, so I took a fencing class to Mrs.
Pearse. Dwight Diller was a grad student instructor helping Mrs. Pearse. At the
end of the first class Dwight made an announcement that he was starting a
string band, was going to teach banjo and fiddle and knowing how to play was
not a requirement. Sounded like fun so I grabbed my fiddle and went to Dwight's
apartment one night per week for the rest of that year.
Several
other musicians joined these sessions at Dwight’s apartment including Jack
Ramsey, Jackie Horvath, Andy and Becky Williams from Virginia, and Ron
Mullennex from West Virginia. Garton recalled:
Andy
and I played fiddle, Becky, Ron and Jack played banjo. There were no guitars
nor other instruments, just fiddle and banjo.
Dwight taught us by ear with no written music, one tune at a
time. He would start with one instrument,
get them started on a phrase of a tune, and while they were working on that he
would go to the other group with their instrument and get them started on the
same phrase that the first was working on. Normally each two-part tune could be
taught in four phrases or less. We must have learned a dozen tunes that
first year.
Jackie
Horvath remembered studying old time banjo with Dwight in 1972 in
Morgantown. She met him at Ivydale in
1971, but did not get started with banjo lessons until a year later. Dwight taught at the Mountain Lair, the
student union building at West Virginia University’s Morgantown campus. He would meet students for an hour with
members of the band, the A.A. Cutters.
Band
members Jack Ramsey and Ron Mullennex would pair with a student. Horvath recalls focusing exclusively on two
tunes, “Liza Jane” and “Jimmy Johnson,” for the better part of a year: “I was only allowed to play these tunes for a
year, and I was not allowed to drop thumb.”
The second hour of the banjo lessons
at the Mountain Lair were devoted to listening to Dwight’s band. Dwight occasionally taught banjo at Horvath’s
home. They would sit outside on the
porch. He would play a tune and then
hand the banjo to her. Horvath recalled
that Dwight stressed the importance of listening closely to the old music.
Rock Garton provided
several tapes from around 1973, capturing the music of Dwight’s “practice
band,” the ensemble cobbled together from banjo and fiddle students of his
during 1973, and called “The A.A. Cutters.”
There are some photographs, taken by Carl Fleischhauer, showing the band
in a jam or practice session in a church basement in Morgantown, West Virginia,
in April 1973, depicting the musicians Andy Williams, Ron Mullennex, Becky
Williams, and Elizabeth Weil, joining Dwight in a session. The four tapes from which some of Dwight’s
music was harvested, contributed by Rock Garton:
Ø
Andy Williams fiddling, Leather Britches; A.A. Cutters, no
date (possibly 1973), audio cassette provided by Rock Garton.
Ø
Dwight Diller, no date (possibly 1973), audio cassette
provided by Rock Garton.
Ø
Jack Ramsey on banjo, no date (possible 1973), audio
cassette provided by Rock Garton.
Ø
A.A. Cutters, Dwight Diller and Andy Williams fiddle and
banjo, no date (possibly 1973), audio cassette provided by Rock Garton.
1976
Bob Thornburg provided me with one cassette that captured
some of Dwight’s earliest music: Dwight Diller, Parking lot jam at a
festival (NFI), May 1976. Bob told me:
“A few days after attending one of the Diller
camps down on the shores of the Greenbrier River (1990 or 1991), I visited Ben
Carr at his home in Wiltsie, West Virginia. Ben was another one of the
students at that camp. He dug that tape out thinking that it might be of
interest to me to see how much Dwight's playing had changed over the years. I'm
pretty sure that he dubbed a copy of his tape and gave it to me. I'm thinking
that he may have been the one who actually recorded the jam.”
Dwight’s Own Sound
The
central features of Dwight’s playing emerged in the earliest years of his banjo
work, and became the bedrock on which he built his playing up across the later
periods. Beyond a growing sense of the need to modulate the speed that began to
emerge in the latter part of this first developmental period, Dwight’s style
and technique began to crystallize, and he began to think more systematically
about the mechanics necessary to produce the sound he wanted. In later years, in the 1990s and 2000s,
Dwight’s playing style has been characterized as sparse, cleanly paced, a
combination of rhythm and melody that captures tunes simply and accurately,
without sacrificing the intricacies that make the old music interesting.[1] Those same characterizations apply to the
style and technique that was emerging in the first development stage. His playing technique came to be centered on
a rhythmic right hand approach to striking the strings and the head, achieving
a consistent syncopated percussiveness.[2]
Dwight’s playing came to
be driven by an efficient right hand that snaps onto the strings in the
downward arc, and a thumb that drives
behind 5th string on every downstroke in a fashion that is often
described as double thumbing; though constant, the thumb string is not always
audible – meaning that his playing does not produce that nagging and often
dissonant fifth string ring. Dwight occasionally
deploys a brushstroke that becomes a “chuck” on 1st and 2nd
strings. The rhythmic pattern, the clawhammer cycle
so to speak, “sometimes omits repeated notes or plays them almost inaudibly,”
and achieves the pronounced syncopation by the “slight prolongation of the
first and third beats of a four beat measure --- pa pa pa pa becomes paa pa paa pa.”[3]
His recipe for this rhythmic clawhammer playing has remained essentially
stable, though he has not been inflexible about accommodating to aging limbs,
finding new ways of driving students toward the posture and practices he
identified as essential to the capacity to get at the rhythmic character of his
playing style.
Another element of his
learning curve involved teaching old time banjo, and sustained attention to
continued efforts to record and preserve the banjo and fiddle playing of the
Hammons family musicians and other local elders. At the same time, he was sorting through the
lessons he learned, attempting to make sense of the background music in his
life, and thinking systematically about the music and musicians that influenced
his playing.
There are two additional variables that need to be taken
into account in an effort to describe and characterize Dwight’s playing, and
account for the evolution of his as banjo playing style.
The first is Dwight's capacity to play in other regional
styles, such as Round Peak banjo style.
Though he did not often depart from the style and approach of banjo
playing most frequently described as West Virginia banjo playing – percussive,
not overly melodic, simple and sparse, usually solo or in a pairing with a
fiddle (and only rarely with a guitar) – in his earliest period of playing
(public performances, festival jamming, banjo teaching) some Round Peak, and
perhaps elements of Galax (such as the opening lick in Walking in the Parlor) might have figured in his approach to old
time tunes.
The second is the fact that periodically he loses interest
in a tune and it gets sloughed off his tune list for at least a while, perhaps
going somewhere in the recesses of his musical brain where it reposes until it
returns, rejuvenated, to his active performance repertoire. Thus, over time, but perhaps more especially
in his later playing years, from the late 1990s through the first decade of the
2000s, Dwight would set aside certain tunes that had been “overplayed,” in his
view. In some instances, this meant that
they had become “too popular,” and were played incessantly at old time
festivals to the point that repetition and widespread currency, and perhaps their
usage at dances, tended to take the edge off the tunes, round them out, boil
them down to a lowest common denominator – essentially robbing those tunes of
their crooked archaic flavor. That
signaled to Dwight the need to retire them for a while. In other instances, after years and years of
playing his repertoire, certain tunes receded of their own accord into his
memory and were harder to find on the banjo, were more difficult to recall,
especially since so many of these tunes had similar structures, and common and
familiar chords, to the point that some melded together and were not easily
disaggregated and successfully summoned when reaching for them with banjo in
hand.
Interpreting Dwight’s
music through these prisms -- context, influences and developmental stages --
is made more complex by the extent to which his music, especially his banjo
music, is entirely his own sound, his own style. That is, though the influences weighed
heavily on him, shaped his thinking about what the music should be and how it
should sound, in the end Dwight contoured his banjo playing in a manner of his
own making. He devised his own
techniques for getting at the rhythms he sought to incorporate in his sound, in
a manner that reflected the music he heard and the elements of mountain culture
that were crucially important to him, but in a fashion that allowed his unique
musical gift to sculpt these sounds and styles into a musical structure that
belonged to him.
Dwight emphasized
that his banjoing did not sound like the playing he heard at the homes of
Hammons family members. Since he had not heard any contemporary old
time banjo players when he started trying to learn to play clawhammer in late
1968 and early 1969, Dwight reasoned that he was not influenced in his playing
approach by anyone from the old time scene – at least at that early point. He heard the banjo and fiddle playing of Hamp
Carpenter, but his visits to that household were spent more in conversation
than in playing music. Later, in
mid-1970, he would meet Tommy Thompson and be significantly impressed with the
banjo work of this West Virginian-born musician who was then firmly ensconced
in the Chapel Hill old time scene, and more than surprised at how close his own
banjo playing sounded to Thompson’s rhythmic, percussive, spirited banjo
style. Dwight recalls those intensive
early efforts to get the clawhammer playing down, from November 1968 to May
1969, and remembers the point at which things jelled for him, and he began to
have the sense that he had grasped the fundamentals and had something he could
build on. He associates that point, that
May 1969 date, with a jarring moment when, after a football game at Morgantown
during his turbulent college years he had managed to become rowdily drunk on
whiskey, been hauled off to jail by the police after the Saturday game. He was released on Sunday, and recalls that
jailing as a critical moment, a most important event “because that kind of
thing will stop your world.”
He stopped
drinking. He never, in his memory, drank
to excess, but when he did it produced a horrible mixture that often ended
badly, combining alcohol with the rage he remembers carrying around with him
those years, and the two things interacted to produce an extremely unpleasant
chemistry. That time, that May 1969
episode, coincided with the point at which he was able to bring together the
old music, find the right way of banging the banjo, and locate for himself the
rhythmic equation that became his signature sound. The next benchmark moment for Dwight was the
first encounters with festival music in 1970, and his first meetings with three
men who became lifelong friends – Len Reiss, Bob Thren, and Alex Varella who
showed Dwight “Frosty Morn” from Henry Reed, and “Angeline.” Maggie Hammons called that second tune
“Sixteen Horses Were My Team,” and Dwight remembers mixing “Angeline” with
“Sixteen Horses,” and producing the tune that brought him to second place at
the Hillsville competition.
Almost 45 years after
he placed in his banjo contest at Hillsville, I played a recording of three
tunes of Dwight doing “Soldier’s Joy” and “Angeline” at that 1970 festival
contest, recordings that Kilby Spencer, a fiddler from Whitetop, Virginia,
generously made available to me. Dwight was amazed that his contest tunes had
survived, greeting them as though they were a singular archeological find. He was deeply grateful to hear himself
playing back then, so soon after he had solidified what became his signature
banjo sound. He heard in those tapes the
core rhythmic pattern that became the central, defining character of his banjo
playing, and thought back to those early musical steps. Nobody in his area of central West Virginia
played that rhythmic clawhammer style, he said, and so it could not have come
from what little he had heard visiting Hamp Carpenter. And it probably did not derive from the banjo
tunes he heard during his weekend visits to the Hammons – because by May 1969
he had only been calling on them for about three months and had not been
studying the music so much as just enjoying their company, absorbing the
stories they told, and listening gratefully to any music they’d make. His rhythmic core did not spring from the
single lesson he had from Dick Kimmel all those years ago, though that gave him
a starting point. And his energetically
percussive banjoing did not derive from, though it was clearly motivated by,
the likes of Grandpa Jones, whose playing stimulated Dwight and fed his hunger
for the old music but did not inform his own clawhammering.
Dwight’s idea is that
the sound he came to play on the banjo derived from who he was, not what he
learned. It sprang from the sum total of
the sounds that had penetrated his life from his young days, and the cultural
background music, so to speak, that infused his everyday life. There’s a mystical element to this
explanation. It is not as though he is
minimizing the impact of individual musicians on his thinking and playing – he
gives pounds and pounds of credit to the Morris Brothers, and he clearly
cherished and respected the creaky old music that Burl, Sherman and Maggie
coaxed from their instruments for him, and taped at his urging to make sure
those sounds survived. However, Dwight
remembers that he learned banjoing in isolation, in a very solitary time: “Nobody showed me, nobody taught me, I didn’t
have anyone else to play music with,” he recalls, thinking of the point when
things came together for him in mid-1969.
What emerged was what he refers to as “Diller’s Rhythm,” using his
family name in a way that, for him, distances it from a claim to authorship and
makes it more an inheritance, a natural biological evolution that essentially -
in Dwight’s terms - made him the “carrier” of this music. That is a term he reaches for, preferring it
to the mantle of “Guardian” of the old music, or any of the other terms that
seem to credit him with the role of militant protector of the archaic sound
largely because that vocabulary strikes Dwight as making him the sentinel for
something that was there already, a treasure of antique banjo and fiddle
tradition that needed a shepherd to cloak and preserve it.
He “carried” this
music, and his special playing touch was the result of a genetic predisposition
to a defining rhythmic character that distinguishes this banjo playing and
makes it at once a product of his own chemistry and the unique central West
Virginian clay that made up the familial emulsion -- part Pennsylvania, and so
may other parts unknown -- from which he sprang.
And he elected to
become a bridge to the people who found their way to his home as his banjo
students, people for whom the banjo symbolized something simple, a way to get
back to a time when the world was not rushing by so fast.
That, for Dwight,
summarizes the trajectory of his musical career, his role as the carrier, and
his very cherished responsibility as a teacher conveying the music, and making
hopeful moments available to people looking to find some quiet, some respite
from the rush of everyday life.
Dwight and West Virginia’s Old Time
Music
Dwight’s explanation
of how his own sound emerged - how his music reflects the sum total of the
cultural influences and the musical background noise that he heard growing up
rather than one single banjo exemplar from among the old musicians - makes most
sense when viewed in the context of the nature of West Virginian traditional
music.
The fact of the
matter is that few of the young West Virginia banjo players from Dwight's
generation forward played anything like the old time West Virginia
banjoists. They played the West Virginia
tunes, but they integrated banjo influences from elsewhere into their inventory
of musical resources and influences.
Stylistically, as Bob Carlin has pointed out, young West Virginian banjo
players reflected a range of influences – a range illustrated by the differing
styles of Gerry Milnes; Ron Mullennex, who plays banjo in a manner profoundly
influenced by Lee Hammons; and Dave O'dell who plays a banjo style more akin to
what Grandpa Jones became famous for playing. Part of the issue is the difficulty in
ascribing a predominant musical influence to any one banjo player. As Gerry Milnes points out:
My first
old-time influences were an old black man in Pennsylvania, Bill Major, and
another old guy, Phip Cressman from there.
Beside the fact that I started out playing bluegrass banjo. But I
doubt I play like those two--who lived two miles apart and played very
differently. Like everyone else who was born after 1930 and who had access
to recorded music, and could travel to festivals, you heard everyone
in the world who played. But it was the Tygart Valley players who I listened to
the most and whose repertoire I play. I think I met Dwight
around 1970 at a festival in North Carolina, Union Grove, where he
was hanging out with the Fuzzy Mountain crowd. I was still playing bluegrass
then, but old-time players were turning my head. There were old-time banjo
players from all over the world there. To try to tie Dwight's playing to
anyone in particular, I think, is as hard as tying anyone else's style to
one mentor.
However, another part
speaks to the character of traditional West Virginian music itself, and the
broad spectrum of styles that emerged in that context.
One explanation is
that the old timers, such as the Hammons, hadn't played for such a long time
when they were "discovered" and befriended by young enthusiasts, and
encouraged to play again - especially in 1969 to 1971. So
their banjoing and fiddling was rusty, uncertain, and it took a while for them
to find a groove, re-locate tunes and get settled in their playing. This
was true of the mainstream Hammons folks (Burl and Sherman, and Lee,
too) according to some old time musicians who visited them in West
Virginia in the 1970s and 1980s, and it was also true of Hamp Carpenter. Another explanation is that there wasn't much
in the form of a West Virginian critical mass of traditional music played and
practiced in (for example) eastern central West Virginia by the time the
enthusiasts stumbled on the Old People. And yet another possible explanation is the
extent to which West Virginia has a strong fiddle tradition but the banjo
tradition is not as widespread, and fiddle with clawhammer banjo accompaniment
seems relatively rare in West Virginia compared to other places.
Moreover, if it is the case
that young West Virginian banjo players from Dwight's generation forward do not
play banjo like the old time West Virginia banjoists, then it is also the case
that the old-time
players didn’t either. Gerry Milnes
suggests: “Listen to Russell Higgins,
John Christian, Jimmy Dowdle, Sherman Hammons, Cletus Johnson, Dona Gum, Woody
Simmons, Currence Hammonds, all old-time banjo players who lived
within 50 miles of each other and not one of them played the same. You can
deduce a general regional style, but it's hard to get very specific.” Leftwich echoes this point:
Lee
and Sherman themselves had very different styles, and I remember that Maggie
and Burl sounded different than Sherman. The old-timers were themselves very
individualistic. But it could be that their influences came from a smaller
range of influences -- friends, family, and neighbors -- than was the case for
my generation. We had more to draw on, and in some cases made conscious
decisions about focusing on a particular way of playing. But it's very hard to
sound exactly like someone else, and in some ways feels like a forgery if
you're not creating a synthesis that somehow expresses your own musicality.
In the face of this,
musicians who wanted to learn from the example of the Old People would have a
lot of blanks to fill in.
Dwight’s musical friends
and colleagues offer interesting perspectives on this matter. As old time banjo and fiddle player Jimmy
Costa explains it, there is not one particular West Virginia sound. Traditional old time music has certain
“fiddling commonalities,” but that it is particularly difficult to assign a
character to a music that derives so much from “old, squirrelly European
tunes.” He thought that fiddlers
including French Carpenter, Ernest Carpenter and Tommy Sampson, as well as
Melvin Wine, had some of these regionally unique tunes in their repertoire,
tunes such as Yew Piney Mountain and Old Christmas. Some of that diversity in sound came from the
fact that old West Virginia banjo players such as Lee Blankenship often played
clawhammer and two finger style, and experimented with different stylistic
approaches. In the final analysis, Costa
averred, musicians just naturally have inquisitiveness. They “listen to things they do not themselves
play,” and learn things that they integrate into their playing: “A musician just has that ear. It’s hard to shut down when you’re going to
the county seat and hearing [music] played on phonographs, radio, and player
pianos. You couldn’t help but be
distracted by other sources, fascinated by these sounds.”
Ron Mullennex makes the
case that the for the most part, each of the “old folks” who played the old
music in Randolph County where he grew up had their own distinctive sounds,
their own unique ways of making music to the point that after a while, without
seeing the player, it grew easy for him to know sight unseen whether, for
example, it was Lee Hammons or Sherman or Burl playing. Mullennex was taken with Lee Hammons’ music,
and emulated that sound. However, though
he sought to imbed Lee Hammon’s sound in his music, Mullennex recalls that he
did not necessarily have as his goal duplicating Lee Hammons’ way of playing: “I wanted to play but did not necessarily
want to capture the essence of one sound.”
He acknowledges that he had more of the “Lee sound” in his music, and
believes that Dwight had more of Sherman Hammons’ sound. The difference had a lot to do with the
rhythm, in Mullennex’s estimate. He
allows that integrating what he calls Lee Hammons’ sound or Sherman Hammons
sensibility into one’s music may not be a conscious act; younger West Virginian
musicians growing up “played what we heard.”
The younger players in his generation who learned West Virginia music in
their teenage years did have “other influences” external to local traditions –
including radio music and phonograph recordings, but “were true to our
influence” in playing what they heard.
And what they heard, as
some of the now older musicians who learned the old tunes in their youthful
years recall, was as varied as it was distinctive. Much of the music, and the way the older
musicians these players emulated rendered the music, was distinctive. Each of the older musicians that people of
Mullennex’s generation listened to closely played uniquely – or at least not
consistently – from one time to the next.
Burl Hammons would switch things up, add new parts, play the high part
of a tune crooked once, and the low part crooked another time. The
old timers were extemporaneous in their playing, playful in cooking up unique
renditions, and not at all bound by formulas or beholden to the manner in which
they first heard the tune.[4] Mullennex said that the lesson of all this was that
there is no right sound: “We don’t all
have to sound alike.” To Mullennex, that
means there is not one particular West Virginia sound: “People in my generation
sounded like themselves, but the people we learned from sounded like
themselves, too.”
Everybody had a
particular sound. It was not the intent
of banjo players from my generation to sound like someone in particular. West Virginia musicians were not modeling a
technique. Round Peak players were
modeling a technique. Even in my wanting to capture Lee Hammons’
technique, I was looking for the sound I heard, and I did some things
differently, in my way [to get that sound.]
In the same way, Dwight Diller is playing to the sound, not the
technique.
Ron Mullennex goes
further in this argument, saying:
I don’t think people
tried to capture the Hammons sound. If
you went to the festivals you’d hear Round Peak. You did not hear that focus on West Virginia
when you went to fiddle conventions in Virginia [and at the festivals] in West
Virginia people were playing their own sound.
People didn’t have to play a certain sound to authenticate themselves.
To Mullenex, the
musicians John Morris, David O’Dell, Jimmy Costa
would all say “’I’m a
West Virginia’ banjo player,’ and they’d all be right. But none of us sounded alike.”
Conclusion
Dwight’s personal life
shaped his interest in pursuing banjo, and the realities of his West Virginia
existence contoured his particular interests, defined his sound, and
established the importance of local traditional old time musicians as part of
his life. He sought out old fiddlers and
banjo players, story tellers and singers in his area beginning in the late
1960s, found himself in the warm, friendly embrace of Hamp Carpenter, the
Hammons Family, and other West Virginian musicians such as Lee Triplett and
Glen Smith. He organized local
gatherings featuring these people, brought avidly interested young musicians
from Virginia and West Virginia to meet and learn from the Hammons through the
1970s, and performed on stage and at such informal local gatherings with these
older music makers.
Dwight began attending old
time music festivals in the early 1970s, and became a fixture at some of these
events through at least the 1990s; he resumed attending a select few festivals
in the early 2000s. At such events, he
met and learned from all manner of talented musicians from a wide variety of
places, competed in his first banjo contests, and learned tunes and techniques
in the tight, friendly circles of musicians that intersected at these
festivals. The close relationships he
formed with old time musicians in Lexington, Virginia, in the early 1970s got
him involved in gatherings at the home of Odell and Mata McGuire, exchanging
ideas with Lexington old time musicians, listening to, playing with and
teaching musicians in that community, and inviting those people to Pocahontas
County to meet and spend time with the Hammonses.
Dwight’s banjo playing
evolved across these years, through a “learning period” at the feet of the old
musicians in Pocahontas County, increased involvement in contests, gatherings
and festivals, and involvement with bands – the Morris Brothers and the Black
Mountain Bluegrass Boys in particular.
Dwight’s style and
technique began to crystallize, and he began to think more systematically about
the mechanics necessary to produce the sound he wanted. In later years, in the 1990s and 2000s,
Dwight’s playing style has been characterized as sparse, cleanly paced, a
combination of rhythm and melody that captures tunes simply and accurately,
without sacrificing the intricacies that make the old music interesting. Those same characterizations apply to the
style and technique that was emerging in the first development stage. His playing technique came to be centered on
a rhythmic right hand approach to striking the strings and the head, achieving
a consistent syncopated percussiveness.
While it appears that
Dwight is committed to an essentially stable repertoire - a core of tunes to
which he is devoted because of the depth of meaning they convey, the way they
resonate with him personally, or the intrinsic importance these tunes had for
the older musicians who were formative influences in his musical life – his
repertoire does get “refreshed” periodically as he puts aside tunes that, in
his view, have become “overplayed” at festivals or worked to death in modern
recorded old time music, and revives other tunes in his inventory of sound,
tunes he dusts off and works at reviving the energy they imparted to him in
days passed.
In recent years, because
of personal reasons – including increasingly complex health challenges – Dwight
has circled the wagons, taught fewer classes to smaller gatherings of students
in his home; refrained from attending all but the most beloved of the local
festivals (such as the Stonewall Jackson Heritage Arts & Crafts Jubilee); not done anything to
keep his CDs in circulation. However, in
the latter part of 2015, a burst of energy,
a “second wind,” so to speak, prompted him to agree to do some recording work
in Port Republic, Virginia, stage a small house concert in the same setting,
and lay down some tracks for a new CD or two in a separate project focused on
developing a “boxed set” of gospel tunes, instrumentals, and tunes for
children. He has given thought to
working on a book of his own stories; he captured the stories of the Hammons
family, but by now his own stories have "come of age." Dwight
also began thinking about putting out a CD of some of his earliest banjo and
fiddle playing, assembled from "field recordings" made by from folks
who taped contests and jam sessions in the 1970s and 1980s. Dwight has
some “unpublished” sound cuts from earlier recording sessions, and John Morris,
Dave and some other friends seem to have a stock of recordings from their live
performances that might lend themselves to this effort. Importantly, he placed all his long out of
print CDs on “bandcamp,” making them readily available again, and dedicating
the proceeds from such sales to the Yew Piney Mountain non profit organization
that he established in the early 2000s to encourage the preservation of West
Virginia song and story.
That could lead to an
entirely new stage of development, and a brand new repertoire, for Dwight
Diller.
[1] Andrew Diamond, et. al., Yew Pine Mountain: Obscure Underground Clawhammer Banjo From Mysterious
Central West Virginia, revised, produced and printed in Pocahontas County,
West Virginia, 2006.
[2] Others, including Dinah Ainsley, for
example, have pointed out that these characterizations of Dwight’s playing that
emphasize the right hand work, including Dwight’s own teaching approach that
does underscore the essential role of the right hand, neglect the style and
technique he follows with his left hand which places a primacy on economy of
movement, very deliberate combinations of hammer-ons and pull-offs, quick and
short slides among other techniques.
Some of that is clear in this video of Dwight playing “Wild Bill Jones”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjxQMq_bfhM
[3] Andrew Diamond, et. al., Yew Pine Mountain: Obscure Underground Clawhammer Banjo From Mysterious
Central West Virginia, pp. 2 – 8.
[4] Bill Hicks
said of Burl’s playing: “I witnessed
that aspect of his playing and was very struck by it. What it taught me
was that playing was an "active" ability, that one played in the
moment and could do things in the moment, and if it was a group of people who
all understood that, there could be a kind of
"conversation" going on even. I'm pretty sure I witnessed Burl
and Dwight having such a conversation as they played tunes at Burl's house one
evening during that visit I made to Burl's house in either '70 or '71.” 12 December 2015 (9:03 A.M.) email from Bill
Hicks to Lew Stern.
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