String band traditions

American Visions, April-May, 1995 by Douglas Fulmer

The fierce, captivating music of black string bands dates back to the earliest days of this country. The African banjo was brought to the United States by slaves and later paired with the European fiddle to produce some of the most exciting dance music ever heard. No one is sure exactly when black musicians began combining these instruments, but one of the earliest references is a 1774 diary that describes a Southern plantation party where "a great number of young people met together with a fiddle and a banjo played by two Negroes."

The few printed references to rural black music before the Civil War indicate that string band music was widely popular, still often consisting of just a banjo and a fiddle. The fiddle was clearly the favorite instrument of both black and white rural musicians throughout die 1800s. The popularity of string bands continued well into this century.

When, in the early 1900s, commercial record companies scoured the South for music to record and made huge profits off black musicians, black string bands, which now more frequently included a mandolin or guitar along with the banjo and fiddle, were largely ignored. Blues thus became the only widely known and popular form of black rural music.

One of the earliest professional string bands to record was the four Armstrong Brothers, known for "Vine Street Rag" and "Knox County Stop" (Vocalion Records, 1930). Fiddler Howard Amistrong later became popular as a member of Martin, Bogan and Armstrong. Before eventually moving to Chicago, the band played anywhere they could find an audience in their native Tennessee.

"When we started out in the small town where I was born," Armstrong remembers, "we mostly played for what we called the `good white people.' We'd serenade them, and they'd pay us with money and food." Later, when the group moved to the bigger city of Knoxville, Tenn., they would play anywhere they could get paid, "even political rallies and lots of funerals and weddings, both white ones and black ones."

Leonard Bowles began playing with his uncle and a family friend in and around Martinsville, Va., in the 1930s. The Bowleses' fiddling was accompanied by banjo and usually guitar. They very seldom played for money, instead playing mostly house parties.

Most people lived in a two-room house," Bowles remembers. "We'd play every Saturday night; we'd get a party going at somebody's house and it'd go all night. They'd take the beds down and clear everything out of the front room and dance." Sometimes these parties would last the entire weekend, with a break for church on Sunday. Bowles remembers playing many classic songs, such as "Old Joe Clark," "John Henry" and "Take This Ring I Give You."

Few recordings exist to give today's generation an idea of the sound of black string bands from this era. [Two of note: Georgia Fiddle Bands (Heritage Records, HRC048) and Altamont: Black Stringband Music From the Library of Congress (Rounder Records, 238).] Music historian Charles Wolfe estimates that there are only 50 recordings of prewar string band music, as compared with 20,000 records of blues and gospel from the same era.

Without many recordings to keep it alive, the sounds of black string bands began to fade in the post-World War II era, as Americans moved away from the stigma of simple country ways, and hence from traditional forms of entertainment. Only a handful of the oldtimers--such as Howard Armstrong, now 84--continue to give live performances. Let us hope that musical scholars, who only recently have begun intensive study of the musical form's history, will provide a more complete picture of the music before the last individuals who played it are gone and this important tradition becomes a forgotten piece of history.