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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 shared 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.
[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.
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