Martin Mull memorably quipped that he once looked up "folk music" in an encyclopedia, fervently hoping that the first music made in America "wasn't that fiddlin' banjo crap." I was really amused by it as a kid.
Decades later, I started studying up on folk music myself and found that there's a riveting, convoluted, and ultimately mysterious story to be told about fiddles and banjos — two instruments joined at the hip. I may not be the person to tell this story (quite yet), but it's clear that the fiddle and banjo have sustained a long marriage that has had its ups and downs.
Soon after this relationship first dawned on me, I attended a banjo Q&A session conducted by Mike Seeger and my own (long-suffering) banjo instructor, Rachel Nelson. I was just about to raise my hand and ask about the brotherly fellowship shared between the banjo and the fiddle, when another guy raised his hand and demanded to know why some people seem to think the banjo is nothing but the fiddle's lowly, bootlicking lackey. Seeger and Nelson looked like they might have preferred my phrasing of the question, but it made me realize I had more research left to do.
The start of this mutual tradition is unknown — folklorist Cecelia Conway is unable to trace the pairing back much further than minstrelsy, around 1840. But certain areas of Appalachia (Virginia and North Carolina, I think) have such an old, rich, complex, multi-racial tradition of fiddlin' banjo tunes that it couldn't have originated with the Northern, pop phenomenon of minstrelsy.
The banjo has sometimes been the fiddle's rhythm section. Listening to the 1920's recordings of Charlie Poole, the banjo played second fiddle to the fiddle, yet was crucial to Poole's sound. But in the case of the Skillet Lickers, the banjo is barely audible amidst sometimes three or more fiddles.
Certainly, a great solo banjo tradition was captured in 1920's recordings of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley and others. But the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music — hugely influential in the post-WWII folk revival — included a marathon of seven solo fiddle cuts, and I wonder if this spotlight on the fiddle in such a prominent document may have left some mark on the post-war relationship between the two instruments. Two of the finest living clawhammer banjo players — Ken Perlman and Mac Benford — each developed their distinctive styles by replacing the fiddle with the banjo, using the clawhammer stroke to coax out their instruments the complex melodic lines usually played by the fiddle. They clearly saw some need to give the banjo its own place in the sun, unshadowed by the fiddle.
The banjo originated in Africa, and the fiddle is the classic folk instrument of the British Isles, so their pairing is sometimes said to be a microcosm of what makes American music such an intense mixture. But at the Black Banjo Gathering, a presentation on African banjo ancestors included slides of African fiddles, constructed almost exactly the same way that early banjos were constructed, only much smaller. So perhaps the banjo and fiddle did not marry for the first time in America — perhaps it's more accurate to say that they were separated at birth.
