International Jazz Banjo Newsletter

The Red Hot Jazz Peabody website on Eddie Peabody is outstanding (www.redhotjazz.com/peabody.html) . I'm amazed at the quality of sound that was drawn from these old 78 rpm records. These early recordings should serve as a primer for beginning plectrum banjo players as well as advanced players wanting to review the basic elements of syncopated chord melody playing. These recordings also illustrate the genius of Peabody in developing variations in building banjo solos through the unique strokes that he originated. The problem for banjoists has often been: When you've played the tune through once, what do you do the next time around for variety. In addition to his jazzy variations, Peabody also drew on the verse in many cases, something you seldom hear from banjoists nowadays. He also sang in his so-so stage voice for the same purpose. Peabody was definitely a first in laying the groundwork in modern plectrum banjo playing. Early plectrum banjo players before him, such as Banjo Bill Bowen and Alfred Farland, came from a tradition of classic five-string banjo and tried to adapt that idiom, not as successfully, to playing with a pick. Peabody did not have that background and came out with a style that was pure plectrum banjo. He did this in a relatively short time between his discharge from; the United States Navy after World War One until leaving his career as a dance band banjoist in the mid-1920s to become a banjo headliner in vaudeville. Working unamplified in theaters and often unaccompanied in the recording studio, he developed a full chord melody technique for maximum power and fullness of sound that didn't leave much room for thinner single string acrobatics. This was a boon for companies for which he recorded in the early years because they only had to pay one musician, or at the most two if another vocalist was used, for a very saleable record. How many of today's banjoists would have the courage to go into a recording session with only a banjo and no backup musicians?
Peabody is sometimes compared unfairly to Harry Reser. The two had completely different approaches to banjo playing which cannot be considered on a competitive basis. Each had a niche of his own. Peabody was the supreme show banjoist and Reser was the supreme recording studio and orchestral banjoist. Each adapted his style to the idiom in which he was making a living. Peabody once told me during a jam session in his later years that when he was on stage he was not playing for banjo players but for the audience.That philosophy gave him a career with his banjo for half of a century. He showed what he could really do in those sessions with other banjoists. Professional banjoists of more recent times have developed their own styles, but if you listen closely, you can almost always hear Peabody in the background. This is certainly the case with Buddy Wachter, a modern day genius of the banjo who has gone on from there to where no banjoist has gone before.
When I finish production of my "The Banjo Entertainers: Roots to Ragtime" banjo history book, I'll check out my collection of Peabody recordings to see if I can help activate some of the listed titles that do not yet have sound. If I have any of better sound quality, I'll also make a note of those. On listening to this collection, I'm of the opinion that Peabody's best 78 rpm recordings were made in 1931 in London where he had excellent backup. That left him free to concentrate on really playing without filling all the holes himself. I also think highly of the 1938 London Decca recordings. My favorite is "Lambeth Walk." Unfortunately these examples have suffered from too many generations of dubbing, as you're aware. I hope your newsletter readership can track down better or original copies of the 1938 recordings. However, I realize the bombings of World War II were tough on fragile 78s, and a low quality listen to these are still better than none at all.

Best Wishes,
Lowell Schreyer

Dear friends, my dream of securing a professional web page dedicated to preserving the musical legacy and memory of “The King of the banjo”, Eddie Peabody is now a reality. Eddie has now taken his rightful place amongst some of the great “jazz age” musicians of the 1920’s and 30’s on the fabulous Red Hot Jazz .com musical archive. There is also a direct link to the Eddie Peabody page from my website via www.seanmoyses.com. We are now searching for some films to be added to the video section to complete this page and if you can help they need to be in DVD format please . For the banjo newcomer who does not know about Mr. Peabody, here is what Mr. Eugene Chadbourn of the “All Music Guide” so eloquently wrote….

An old movie is flickering across a television screen late at night. Mickey Rooney is cuddling up to Judy Garland, a banjo on his knee. He strums the opening to "Swanee," hitting a few fancy licks. Certainly that can't be Rooney playing the banjo? Who is it, really? None other than Eddie Peabody, one of the few on this instrument who can make a serious claim to being the most famous banjo player of all time. No, that would be Earl Scruggs! Some listeners who like to wallow in bluegrass might object, or Bela Fleck, younger banjo fans would argue. It is surely true that the finger picking style of five-string bluegrass banjo playing has taken hold as the dominant approach to this instrument, the sound involved in every breakout mainstream hit using banjo, especially film soundtracks such as Bonnie and Clyde or Deliverance. But there was a time when the four-string banjo style was hitting big on the music scene and Peabody was considered the king of this particular style as well as one of the main developers of so many banjo techniques and styles associated with the plectrum (that's a pick that the player holds between his fingers, as opposed to the bluegrass method of playing with fingerpicks tightly wrapped around one's fingers, or the old Appalachian style of playing with bare fingers, knuckles, etc.)
Peabody's career stretched over two world wars. He developed much of his stagecraft during the heyday of vaudeville and was able to keep working with his banjo during the economically severe days of the Great Depression of the 30‘s. His mother, who noticed the rowdy little boy would keep quiet if he was allowed to fiddle with the strings of a mandolin, first thrust a musical instrument into his hands. He began playing professionally upon his release from the Navy at the end of World War I. At this time he was quite the multi-instrumentalist, playing up to 30 different stringed instruments in his stage show, but always noticing that when he played the banjo the audience would tend to go wild. No fool he, Peabody kept fattening up the banjo's share of the proceedings until all he was carrying around was the banjo case. Showmanship was a big part of the act as well as musicality. One of his early triumphs was basically stealing the show from one of the era's biggest stars, Rudy Vallee at a packed-out show in San Francisco. Peabody entered the stage by sliding down a giant prop of a banjo neck, wearing an eye-boggling blazer and pants large enough for a medium-sized giraffe. During this period his act became more and more extravagant and he had plenty of opportunities to fiddle with it (or more accurately pick at it) because bookings were coming in 52 weeks of the year. He not only was playing all the top vaudeville houses, the banjoist was doing command performances for the likes of the Duke of Windsor, King Gustav of Sweden, King George of England, and Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.
Instrument inventing was also a hobby during the odd spare hour. A forgotten curiosity that Peabody came up with was the banjoline, which was kind of a combination of a banjo and a lap steel or Hawaiian guitar. The neck of this instrument was fashioned after a banjo. There was also a unique sound design involving the doubling of the third and fourth strings, one set in unison and the other an octave apart, while the first and second strings were not doubled. The instrument was available briefly from both the Rickenbacker and Fender guitar kingdoms. Peabody's use of a pick to play the fiddle was definitely unusual, however, and country fiddlers that use this gimmick tend to credit the idea to Peabody. His playing itself made it onto many radio and television broadcasts as well as films, starting with some of the very first sound pictures in 1926. The medium was a natural for exploiting routines he had established in his stage act. In the 1937 movie Hula Heaven, Peabody performs the chestnut "I'm an Old Cowhand" with a line of hula girls passing off different instruments to him. He begins the song on harp guitar and then switches to both mandolin and the mandola before winding up the number on banjo. He began recording for the Dot label in 1954 and made a series of sides including two albums exclusively featuring the banjoline. Some of the best sellers were Eddie Peabody Plays and When You're Smiling. Although he recorded literally hundreds of songs, some of his favourite numbers include "Hello Sandy," "Whoopee," and "Here Comes Charlie." His concert appearances took him all over the world and he frequently performed for servicemen at military bases. There are several different memoirs written by soldiers stationed overseas in World War II that describe just such Peabody performances.
He was known for his dedication to the banjo and for taking time out of his schedule to visit banjo students at music academies. Part of this might have been a mercenary interest on his part, because yet another of his tricks was to play a couple of numbers on several different banjos during the course of a show, then sell the instruments offstage for a fat profit at the end of the night to pickers eager to own an instrument that "Eddie Peabody had played." He collapsed onstage at a nightclub in Kentucky in November of 1970, and died of a stroke only eight hours later. Banjoist Lowell Schreyer published a biography, The Eddie Peabody Story. Peabody himself would no doubt enjoy the fact that one of the most enduring legends about him is a famous “blooper” that came out of the mouth of a radio announcer one evening in the 1930s: "Ladies and gentlemen...Now Eddie Playbody will pee for you."
Eugene Chadbourne

Several of us Eddie Peabody fans connected with the National Four-String Banjo Hall of Fame Museum in Guthrie, Oklahoma, USA, have been attempting to restore the three early Vitaphone film shorts that Eddie made with his partner Jimmy Maisel in the 1920's before they completely deteriorate with old age. We have already done with his film "Banjo Land", made in 1928. These were made with the picture on film and the sound on a large phonograph disc which was synchronized with it when played. Our group of about half a dozen Peabody fans had put together the $4500 to have the restoration done at the film library of the University of California in Los Angeles. We had been told that the Library of Congress had the film and a private collector had the disc. They were to be combined at the lab onto new film with the sound cleaned up digitally. However, when the disc box labeled "Banjomania" was opened, it had the disc of "Syncopating Sensation," the third short for which the film has not been found yet. Efforts over here to find the correct disc have so far proved futile and as a last resort we are trying overseas because we know it originally had a world-wide circulation. The banjo discography book which was started by Brian Rust and subsequently finished by Uli Heier and Rainer Lotz, lists the disc with so much detail (on page 342) that I theorize that the compiler or a co-operating collector must have seen it. While the disc is originally on Vitaphone, the entry after listing the tunes says "on cover of Lindstrom 2103 ...synchronized disc for a film short entitled "Banjomania." That sounds very Swedish to me! The tunes listed were:- Sad n' Blue, Me and My Shadow and You Don't Like It , Not Much!. A later film short that Peabody made was also called "Banjomania", but it is not the same one. Anything anybody can do in helping would be appreciated. I am especially interested in this project because I knew both Eddie and Jimmy in their later years and even got to jam with Eddie a couple of times when he performed in Minnesota.

On another matter, I am in the final stages of a banjo history book that I have written called "The Banjo Entertainers: Roots to Ragtime." It is the result of many years of in-depth research. Sufficient evidence of the appearance of banjo-like instruments in the New World beginning with 17th Century slave trade from West Africa has been presented in previous writing on banjo history to make it unnecessary to recap it in detail here. This includes the report of a "banza" at a slave dance in Martinique in 1678, Sir Hans Sloane's descriptions of banjo-like stringed instruments with gourd bodies played by African slaves when he was in Jamaica in 1687, mention of a "banjer" in a 1754 Maryland newspaper article about a runaway slave and the instrument's debut under its modern day name of "banjo" in 1774 in the journal of Philip V. Fithian in Virginia, also in the journal of Nicholas Creswell in Maryland. In efforts to trace the African origins of the banjo, the five-stringed halam (or xhalam), as played by griots of West Africa, has been favored as one of the African instruments that could be considered an ancestor. An African lute, similar to the halam is the "bania", has a body usually made from a gourd. More recently, a lesser-known African musical instrument has been identified as having even greater similarities in structure and playing style to its American cousin. It is the "akonting" (also spelled ekonting), a gourd body stringed instrument of the Jola tribe of Gambia. Like the banjo of early American minstrel days, it has a drone string and is played with a down striking motion of the right hand index finger. Interestingly, the Jola word for papyrus, the material of the akonting's dowel stick neck, is "bangoe". The present-day akonting has three strings, two melody strings in addition to the drone thumb string. Earlier akontings had four strings. The harp-like Malian "ngoni", which has a combination of open and stopped strings on a gourd body, has also been suggested as a possible influence in development of the American five-string banjo.
Much information comes from presentations by Swedish banjo historian Ulf Jagfors, a leader in field research on the akonting, at the Banjo Collectors Gatherings in the United States in 2000, 2001 and 2002. His associate in this research has been Daniel Jatta, a member of the Jola ethnic group, who plays the akonting and now resides in Sweden. I am trying to do this book as accurately and fully documented as possible, something that has not always been case in earlier writings on banjo history. I had hoped to have the book out by this gathering in December but it looks now like it won't make it until early next year. If you are interested in placing a reservation for a copy of this book, please contact schreyer@aol.com
Best Regards, Lowell Schreyer

It has been quite a busy time for my wife (Sally Logan) and myself, which I’m glad to say! We have being doing a lot of theatre shows and concerts and although our act is mainly Scottish, I always try and give the banjo an airing with a Scott Joplin rag or two and recently at one show, I included a tribute to Lonnie Donegan with a ‘Skiffle medley’. It went down so well that Sally said, ”We must keep that in!" It’s amazing how many people seem to know most of the words!
Away from the theatre shows, it was great to play the Edinburgh International Jazz Festival for the fourth time with my “Joe Gordon's Ragtime Banjos!” set up. It was a bit of a worry, because my old banjo…a “BITSA”… (It has ‘bitsa this and bitsa that!’) but it has a wonderful action and a surprisingly good sound. Unfortunately the head broke just a few days before the gig and a replacement head did not sound too good. Also, somehow several frets sprung up and the neck developed a ‘kink’, so I did not have the greatest confidence in the action and sound for Ragtime solos! However, I bumped up the sound a bit, (I use a little Microvox condensor micrphone which attaches by Velcro to the banjo) and I had the monitor close to me for the banjo solos. My wife was in the audience and said it sounded “Fine”!
Speaking of the audience, we had a big crowd again at the Royal Overseas League, in Princes Street and they were very friendly and warm. I had the help of fine musicians, with Eoin Millar on double bass, Bob Busby on clarinet and sax, Robert White on trumpet and Jock Westwater on second banjo (playing one of his many banjos!) a Bacon & Day Silver Bell No. 1. All the guys featured with popular solos including Jock’s special version of ‘I want to be happy!’
It was nice to discover that my mixture of banjo solos and Dixieland vocals with the guys seemed to be what was wanted. Our last two numbers went down a storm!…’Bourbon Street Parade’ and………you’ve guessed it!…the ‘Skiffle medley’…and again everyone seemed to know the words. Thanks Lonnie!
It’s back to the ‘bread and butter’ work next week. Sally and I are at the Pavillion Theatre in Glasgow. Guess what one of the numbers is going to be????!!
Oh! One more thing, I bought the Bacon and Day Silver Bell from Jock a couple of weeks ago and I’m still trying to get used to it after so many years with the ‘BITSA’!
Regards to all my banjo friends!
From Scotland,
Joe Gordon.