Banjo on the Mountain: Wade Mainer's First Hundred Years

Wade Mainer’s Banjo Playing

27 Wade Mainer’s Banjo Playing “Nobody ever showed me anything on the banjo. I just stuck to what I got and I hung on to it.”1 At age 102, Wade Mainer speaks with candor about his sprawling musical past. Though he insists that “I don’t have that much banjo learning,” and judges his self-taught skills a product of tenacity more than talent, he has bequeathed to bluegrass an enduring repertory. He names a few of his contributions: “Little Maggie,” “Dream of the Miner’s Child,” “Little Pal,” “Uncloudy Day,” and “Have a Little Talk with Jesus.” In another conversation he brings up still more: “Maple on the Hill,” “Take Me in the Lifeboat,” and “Wreck on the Highway”—and this list can be much expanded.2 Wade has served a pivotal role in their dissemination. For professionals and amateurs alike, his influence begins with the dark shellac records he made as a young man playing in a high-energy string band over the radio airwaves and reaches to the flatbed stages of today’s outdoor festivals and the parking-lot sessions that run late into the night. Wade’s two-finger banjo playing figures both literally and emblematically in that continuity. For all its propulsive charm—“it is kind of a catchy tune,” he says of the whole style—he also calls it “obsolete” and “old-fashioned.”3 He recognizes that few, if any, still play as he does. Nevertheless, his distinctive technique epitomizes a shift from an older string band sound to the bluegrass that succeeded it. In the 1930s he thrived as one of the only professional country musicians to perform with the five-string banjo on radio and recordings. If this choice of instrument seemed inherently archaic at that time, when country music had begun turning from its string band past toward a songwriter’s craft, centered around a lead vocalist, his resonator banjo wade mainer’s banjo playing 28 and the picks that he placed on his forefinger and thumb gave signs of a corresponding modernity. Like many youngsters playing the banjo in western North Carolina where he grew up, he initially learned the down-picking method. Sometimes called “frailing,” “clawhammer” (Wade uses both terms), “rapping,” or “knocking,” the right hand produces notes with the fist loosely clenched, the nail of the index finger striking down on the string. The hand—outwardly shaped like the clawhammer part of a hammer—falls, while the thumb rests or else sounds the short fifth string. However, in the “drop-thumb” technique, the thumb alternates with the index finger, plucking down on another of the melody strings. This percussive style, long used in Wade’s community, well suited the dance pieces and ballads that he and his neighbors enjoyed. But Wade, who learned to frail from family member Will Banks, found that the approach did not suit him. “It just seemed like the tunes didn’t come out with that type of playing,” Wade recalls. “I wanted to make the banjo understood, the tunes understood a little better.”4 He gravitated to other types of banjo picking that gave a more precise effect: “Sometimes when I’m playing a breakdown, I’ll lead with my forefinger, and Tablature of 1984 instrumental “Blue Mountain Bells,” reprinted with permission of Ron Smolka 29 wade mainer’s banjo playing when I’m playing a ballad or a slow song, you know, sometimes I’ll use my thumb. . . . The music had to fit the story being told.”5 In the forefinger style, the index finger darts from melody to accompaniment, setting up a rapid flow of notes, while the thumb lead is better able to control and shape a slower sequence. Wade’s choice of fingering extends an old idea of a specific tuning forming an environment for a single tune. As he says, the music has to fit the story being told. “It has a plunky, crisp sound,” writes banjoist and collector Art Rosenbaum of the forefinger-lead method that Wade and his fellow North Carolinians Bascom Lunsford and Doc Watson so often employed. He adds that this style is used “to good advantage accompanying songs and ballads; but it can be made to sound hard and driving enough to work for dance tunes, particularly with other instruments. In brief, this is the idea: with the right hand braced on...