slate ○○○○○○○○○ DOCK BOGGS’ BANJO ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ 4 by Jesse Fox Mayshark ○○○○○○○○○○ THE VOICES OF COMO NOW ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ 14 by David Menconi ○○○○○○○○○○○○ THE ACCORDIONS OF TEXAS ○○○○○○○○○○○ 20 by Joe Nick Patoski ○○○○○○○○○ BOB MOORE’S BASS ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ 36 by Rich Kienzle ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ THE WORDS OF BOB MARTIN ○○○○○ 48 by Bill Friskics-Warren ROMAN CHO’S PHOTOGRAPHS ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○54 live, from McCabe’s Guitar Shop ○○○○○○○ CHRIS THILE’S MANDOLIN ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ 68 by Seth Mnookin ○○○○○○○○○○○ CHRIS HILLMAN’S COUNTRY-ROCK ○○○○○○○○○ 84 by Barry Mazor ○○○○○ JASON & THE NASHVILLE SCORCHERS’ COUNTRY-PUNK ○○○○○○○ 96 by Don McLeese ○○○○○○○ JEFFREY HATCHER’S SONGS OF HEALING ○○○○○○○○○○○ 110 by Lloyd Sachs ○○○○○○○○ THE WORDS OF PHIL OCHS ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ 128 by Kenneth J. Bernstein ○○○○○○○○ APPENDIX: REVIEWS ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ 136 Buddy & Julie Miller; Neko Case; Madeleine Peyroux; David Byrne & Brian Eno; Bruce Robison; A Tribute to Doug Sahm. COVER DESIGN BY JESSE MARINOFF REYES in homage to Reid Miles, repurposing photographs by Paul Cantin, John Carrico, Roman Cho, along with several uncredited promotional images INTERIOR PAGES DESIGNED BY GRANT ALDEN Copyright © 2009 by No Depression All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2009 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). ISBN 978-0-292-71929-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2008931429 This volume has been printed from camera-ready copy furnished by the author, who assumes full responsibility for its contents. the bookazine (whatever that is) #77 • spring 2009 Back when we were a bimonthly magazine, articles mostly were assigned around the release date of record albums. And then, when we were in the tired stretch of being done, often we would discover some barely visible current running through the issue: a particular supporting musician whose name cropped up, an obscure songwriter whose work seemed again to be on lips, maybe simply a mood or a worry which pervaded. With this, our second bookazine, we sought to direct that process. Sorta. We sent a note to some of our favorite writers asking that they pitch us stories for which they had no other possible home, especially in this era of print contraction. And then we allowed a theme to emerge. That we sent our note out during the last campaign season meant that, yes, change was in the air. But the change we wanted to write about was not, in the main, political. It was about the transformative power of music. Which is, more or less, what it’s always been about, in the end. Thanks for reading. — GRANT ALDEN & PETER BLACKSTOCK DOCK BOGGS BOUGHT HIS GIBSON BANJO AS A MEANS OF MUSICAL UPWARD MOBILITY. GARNARD KINCER BECAME ITS GUARDIAN FOR A QUARTER-CENTURY, KEEPING IT DOWN TO EARTH. he first notes sounded flat. Mike Seeger reached halfway up the neck to the Tfirst peg, twisting, testing the low string. It wouldn’t stay in tune. He shrugged apologetically and started playing again. His fingers worked the banjo effortlessly, even though he said he didn’t play these songs much — “Country Blues,” “Pretty Polly” — songs that were first picked on this instrument nearly 80 years ago by a Virginia coal miner named Moran Lee “Dock” Boggs. In Seeger’s hands, they still sounded natural as thunder. The strings were thick and wiry. Seeger hadn’t changed them since he bought the banjo from Sara Boggs, Dock’ s widow. “Dock used heavy gauge strings,” he said. “I don’ t play heavy gauge strings very much. But when I play that banjo, it’s remarkable. It has a tone that I really associate with Dock’s music.” He paused. “It’s deep.” This was sometime in the spring of 2000. I was in Lexington, Virginia, visiting Mike Seeger because I wanted to see Dock Boggs’ banjo. Seeger, the folklorist, music historian and indefati- gable apostle of banjo music, was crucial to the rediscovery of Boggs in the early 1960s. He has been the keeper of Boggs’ 1928 Gibson Mastertone since Boggs died in Needmore, V irginia, in 1971. It is a fine old instrument, well cared for and, as I found when Seeger passed it to me, heavy in your hands. Through its association with Boggs — and, for that matter, Seeger — it is part of an important lineage in American music. Boggs is a sort of archetypal Appalachian figure, a rugged man from a rugged place with a craggy, keening voice and a coal train percussiveness in his clawhammer playing. He was never famous, exactly, but the twelve sides he recorded in 1927 and 1929 have endured and been cham- pioned and romanticized for their stark, bracing clarity by successive generations of enthusi- asts. All of which is reason enough to prize his instrument, as Seeger does. But my interest in the banjo went beyond Boggs. Because, in fact, he and Seeger are only two of its three owners. For a few decades, between when Boggs quit music and when he took it up again, the Mastertone with the deep thrum was in the possession of a man named Garnard Cheldon Kincer. He made no records, performed no concerts outside the confines of the living room and front porch, and left no legacy of his proprietorship except in memories passed down by his page 4 NO DEPRESSION #77 HERE OL’ RATTLER by JESSE FOX MAYSHARK HERE Boggs was part of the first generation to see the possibilities in taking children. His claim on history is narrower than Boggs’, but in its own way is deep and rich. Boggs’ story is by now well told, most notably in Barry O’Connell’ s essay “Down A Lone- some Road,” which accompanies the Smithsonian Folkways anthology of Boggs’ later recordings. But the full narrative of his instrument, the biography of his banjo, puts the mythology of Boggs’ life in a context both broader and more specific than the haunted abstractions of his songs. If Seeger makes good on his aim of leaving the banjo in the care of the Smithsonian or some other keeper of cultural records, the legacies it carries with it will include not just one man’ s music, but the daily rituals of a place and time on the border between one age and the next. The banjo always came along. On family outings, Garnard would put the instrument in the car first, before letting any of the children climb in. When he worked for a while as a guard at an ammunition plant in Radford, Virginia, it was the only companion he took with him on his five-day sojourns. One day in the 1950s, he was working on the engine of a bus he drove for the family’s church. Pushing in the fan belt, he started the motor, which pulled in his arm and took off the last three fingers on his left hand, the fretboard hand, above the middle knuckle. “He let that heal over,” said his son, G.C. Kincer Jr., “and he still could take those stubs up there and run them stubs up and down, buddy, and he could pick that banjo as good as anybody you’ve ever heard. He was right in there with Dock Boggs.” odern banjos are direct descendants of traditional African string and drum instruments, Mbrought to the New W orld by slaves. European chroniclers noted them as early as 1678, and in 1781, Thomas Jefferson observed of plantation detainees, “The instrument proper to them is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa.” White musicians appropriated the banjo and its songs for the blackface minstrel shows that were omnipresent in the 19th century . And from there it spread widely, mixing and mingling with other contemporary forms. “The way that something that was so black becomes so white, of course, is the fascinating thing,” said Philip F. Gura, a professor of literature and culture at the University of North Caro- lina and co-author (with James F . Bollman) of America’s Instrument: The Banjo In The Nine- teenth Century. “The instrument became very popular in the minstrel shows,” he said, “and then in the post-Civil War period, certain white players began to use it for playing sort of more com- plex music, European-style music.” Soon there were banjo recitals on concert stages, banjo tunes in the parlor repertoire of the leisure class, banjo-guitar clubs on college campuses.And in more rural areas, especially the Scots-Irish communities of the Appalachian mountains, the banjo became a key component of string-band music, working comfortably alongside the fiddle and mandolin. “The mystery is how much it remained being played among black people, and there’s not a lot of evidence for that,” Gura said. “The main documentation tends to be about these white virtuosos.” He thinks the decline of black banjo playing was hastened in the early 20th century by the birth of the recording industry , which early on subdivided the marketplace into economic, page 6 NO DEPRESSION #77 his regional music beyond the boundaries of parties and porches. cultural and geographic niches. Rural white music was “hillbilly”; music by and for black audi- ences went into the broad, segregated category of “race.” “And race records meant the emergent blues and early jazz, in which you don’ t find the five-string banjo prevalent,” Gura continued. “Whereas the hillbilly stuff continued in that string- band tradition, and that’s where you get Charlie Poole, you get the Skillet Lickers, people like that, who are the white purveyors of this older style.