The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Chapter 5: Nashville Washboard Band: Something Out of Nothing

[ 129 ] 5 NashvilleWashboard Band Something Out of Nothing D uring the spring of 1942 Fisk University music professor John W. Work III welcomed a quartet of street musicians called the Nashville Washboard Band into his home. This visit marked the first of two. The second took place that July when the group, bringing along a fifth player, returned to make their sole recordings. For the professor’s son, John Work IV, that initial encounter remained vivid nearly six decades later. “These people,” he said, “were their music.”1 Then ten years old, Work IV had grown up in a musical environment. His family lived in sight of Jubilee Hall, an edifice built on the success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. His great-grandfather trained several of its founding members, his grandfather led their earliest recordings, and his father eventually directed the ensemble. Throughout his childhood, Work IV met luminaries like Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford, who dropped by the house when their travels brought them to town. Many more came, too, from gospel harmonizers to classical music students, all “who wanted Professor Work to listen to them . . . to say they were good.” Now Work IV sat beside his younger brother and watched these “homegrown technicians” who occupied the family living room. The musicians faced them in a row, seated side by side, lodged between the Works’ radio set on one end and their Steinway parlor grand on the [ 130 ] other. One band member chorded his banjo-mandolin, and another the guitar, but Work IV fixed most on the string bass that a third member of the band had cobbled together from a length of laundry wire, a broomstick, and a lard can. Exposed since childhood to ateliercrafted instruments and steeped in classical music—piano and violin lessons, Saturday opera broadcasts , the Nashville symphony—the youngster found this contraption astounding. “Here’s a guy,” he recalled , “playing a bass fiddle with a damn wire coming down from a stick attached to a tub!” If that weren’t enough, the band’s fourth member, who was blind, sat between two washboards mounted on a sawhorse and hinged in the shape of a V. He had attached to them an assemblage of frying pans, tin plates, and a metal bell, each registering different tones. Wearing sewing thimbles on his fingers, he tapped, clocked, and hammered this clattering array of stove-top resonators and corrugated surfaces. In fall 2000, John Work IV still pictured the scene, each player wrapped around his particular instrument: “He is a washboard or he is a banjo, as opposed to separate things. Like Segovia, it’s hard to separate him from his guitar. Or Duke Ellington, you couldn’t separate him from his music. They could just play on and on, and the house would reverberate.” The band’s visit served an informational as well as musical purpose. “It wasn’t just a matter,” Work IV explained, “of having them come, record, and leave.” His father received them and other folk musicians in an atmosphere of respectful inquiry. That March, when fiddler Frank Patterson and street banjoist Nathan Frazier came by and made their recordings at the Works’ home, “These men would have been called ‘Mr. Patterson’ and ‘Mr. Frazier,’ just as they would never have called my father anything other than ‘Professor Work’ or ‘Dr. Work’ or ‘Mr. Work.’” Work would bring in some chairs chapter 5 Figure 23. John Work III playing piano at home, Nashville, Tennessee. Courtesy of John Work IV. [ 131 ] from the dining room and talk with them. He didn’t take notes or grill his informants. “It was quite a conversational sort of thing,” his son recalled. “He was interested in the roots of music. He wanted to know, ‘Where did they get these things, these songs?’ He’d ask, ‘Where did you get the idea for this washboard?’ Those kind of questions.” Street musicians had long held Work III’s interest. In his 1930 master’s thesis , his earliest writing on black folksong, he discusses a washboard band he had seen on Nashville’s sidewalks. This group numbered among the “novelty bands showing the originality of the players, composed of many unorthodox instruments.”2 Along with the washboardist to provide percussion, the ensemble included a player blowing on a “hand made metal instrument . . . that approximated a clarinet in character even if not in quality.” Eight years later, during a speech...