[00:00:21] Speaker A: You are listening to KFAI 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected] this is Write On Radio, the show where we talk to local, national and international authors about craft, creativity and the ideas behind their writing.
Today, Liz Olds will be talking to Craig R. Evans about his book Old Time Finding Health, Happiness and Community Through Traditional Music. Craig R. Evans is a banjo and fiddle playing traditional music community documentarian with films saved for posterity at Smithsonian Folkways. He is also the author of four books. Craig lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a closet full of old instruments that he rotates into a weekly play on a regular basis.
Let's get right into the interview.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: We're talking tonight with Craig R. Evans. Welcome to the show, Craig, and thank you for coming out on such a cold night and bringing your instruments with you. I know they don't like cold nights either, especially banjos.
[00:01:40] Speaker C: They're particular.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Yeah. They're hard to keep in tune in that weather.
So why don't you start with talking about your. You've probably heard this before. Early life in Early Iowa.
[00:01:51] Speaker C: Oh yeah. First off, I want to say thanks, Liz, and thanks, Eric, for having me here. It's a pleasure to be at kfai Early Iowa, crossroads of the nation. The town has been around since roughly 1882, and I'm very pleased. I grew up in an environment like that because I really got to know a farming community, how it operates and basically how communities serve each other. And my mother was at the head of that because she was a church organist in the early Iowa Methodist Church for 55 years. And my dad would joke nobody could get married or buried without checking her schedule.
And my house was probably the most active house in town. People were coming and going all the time to practice for churches and anniversaries and birthdays and funerals and other parties. And music was a part of my life from as early as I can remember.
[00:02:46] Speaker B: Talk a little bit more about your mom. She really inspired your love of music and also love of community.
[00:02:54] Speaker C: Yeah. She grew up in a somewhat impoverished family. My grandfather's family on my mother's side didn't have a whole lot of money. He worked pretty hard. He actually died at his desk when he was 60 of a heart attack. It was on a Saturday and unfortunately he smoked and he was a bookkeeper, so that kind of did him in all that stress. But my grandmother was a very proper British woman, so when she raised my mom, she knew all the proper things to do to be able to get along with People. And she had an affinity toward music, which came from my grandfather. And so my mother started early on playing piano and she played in churches and she learned how to sing.
And when she met my dad, she was this beautiful 20 year old teacher in Cherokee, Iowa. She actually met my father through my father's sister, my aunt Shirley, because they were teachers together in Cherokee, Iowa. And my mom was teaching first through third grades. And my dad was fresh out of the service, a very handsome man from the Coast Guard. And when they were married, they moved to early Iowa so my dad could work for my father. And my mother, being a woman of the 40s and 50s, decided to be a housekeeper and find ways to keep herself busy in the small town. So she brought her gift of music and started to play at the early Methodist church. And that began her 55 year career behind the organ.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Now most kids go for the guitar. What prompted you to go for the banjo?
[00:04:32] Speaker C: I actually started with the ukulele.
I was up in my grandmother's attic. My grandmother Evans, my dad's mom, she always had a bunch of things worth exploring. And I could find a coonskin cat up there or, excuse me, a coonskin hat.
My uncle's college vest from Carlton. And my uncle also played ukulele. And I found this small instrument that looked like a guitar. It had one string on it. I brought it downstairs, I showed it to my grandma and I said, can I have this? She said, what have you got, child?
And I said, I'm not exactly certain what it is. And I think it's a small guitar. And she goes, oh, that's your uncle Bill's ukulele.
And I said, can I have it?
I didn't know why, I just knew there was some magic to it. And she said, yes, I don't think Uncle Bill would mind.
So I had a music store up in Storm Lake, Iowa, which of course was the capital of commerce in northwest Iowa at that time. Not a whole lot of commerce. I bought four strings, I strung it up, I learned who Arthur Godfrey was. Do you remember that?
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Yes, I do.
[00:05:39] Speaker C: And I listened to him play as baritone juke. I tuned mine incorrectly to his tuning, but I could play along with him. I had, thanks to my mom and my mom's genetics. I think I'm coded with music. So C O D E D coded.
And in listening her to play all the time, I don't have perfect pitch, but I have relative pitch. So I was able to listen to tunings early. I was probably five or six and I could Play along with Arthur Godfrey on tv. I could pick up a tune pretty quick from him. The banjo came along a little later. The first time I heard it was listening to the new Christie Minstrels. Remember that group?
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:06:23] Speaker C: They came to Buena Vista College in Storm Lake, Iowa. And my dad, because my mom was busy that evening, took me up there and sat me in probably the ninth or the 10th row. And when they came on stage, it literally changed my world. It rocked my world.
There's two words that describe euphoria. One is called delight, and the other one is called awe. Delight is when you can say, oh, I feel good, but you can talk. Awe is when you cannot speak. You're catatonic, because something has taken over your body and your brain.
And that's what the new Christie Minstrels did for me. These handsome young people stormed the stage and they were singing mostly minstrel music at the time, but they were singing these beautiful, powerful numbers. And the banjo player rocked my world a second time. And it's like, I don't know what the instrument is, but I'm going to learn how to play it. And I ended up getting a very cheap one with terrible action that was so high it cut my fingers. But I didn't care. I thought that was part of paying the price to learn how to pay a banjo. Play a banjo. And I was playing bluegrass because that's what the new Christie Minstrels played. And then I tuned into like Everybody else did, Flatten Scruggs with the Beverly Hillbillies, and I started buying record albums for $2.25 at Flood Music Store up in Sioux City, Iowa. And I slowed all the LPs down to 16 from 33 and a third. And I could figure out what Earl played. So I had bought some picks and I listened to it slow enough that I taught myself how to play bluegrass banjo.
And I would try to play it up to speed. I got reasonably good at it. I was an okay bluegrass player, but it didn't really trip my trigger like old Time Dan. And I realize I'm jumping ahead here, but to finish the story of the 14 year old that heard the new Christie Minstrels, that turned me on to banjo. And all that pretty much ended when I had a conversation with my father, who, as a man of the 50s, I hold him no ill will, but we were driving in a car at one point and he said, what do you want to be when you grow up? And we were talking and I said, you know, I really like what mom does. I Like how busy mom is. I like music being everywhere. And as a man of the 50s, he was very responsible. He said, well, that's good, son, and your mom is good at that. But what's your day job?
And John Lennon always said, everybody is an artist till they're told they're not an artist. And at that point I decided perhaps I wasn't the artist I thought I was. And perhaps I should get a day job. So I set my mind to other things. It doesn't mean I didn't play during that period of time. Because now we're transitioning from high school to college. And when I went to college, I played in jug bands. But music was, say, a side interest as opposed to a primary interest.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Why don't you tell us a little bit about Clawhammer and then give us a claw hammer tune?
[00:09:45] Speaker C: Clawhammer is old.
Nobody knows exactly how old because it appeared in the minstrel era, which is roughly 1810 to actually up to 1980, if you can believe it, actually went into the 80s. There were some British minstrel shows called the Black and White Minstrels. But they were playing old.
The tunes were played on a large.
What would almost pass for a snare drum. And they were big. They were sometimes anywhere up to like 13 or 14 inches. They didn't have metal tone rings. They had gut strings on them. And to play them in an auditorium, you would have to beat the thing really hard to be able to be heard.
The style itself was most likely adopted from enslaved Africans.
Did somebody actually invent it? No, it's traveled through the course of folklore.
It's been modified many times. We have no idea what it might have sounded like.
Back along the Gambia river and other places in Africa. There are people that play it today. And there are several performers that play in the style as best. They've learned it in Africa. But claw hammer today has been adapted and changed in the past 50 or 60 years. There's many people that play it well today.
I learned it. My teacher was Dwight Diller, and Dwight Diller was his title, I believe, was the keeper of the old time tradition. The West Virginia keeper of old time traditions. So what I'll play for you is a tune called East Tennessee Blues in the style he taught me. SA.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Very nice. Very nice.
[00:12:36] Speaker C: That's an arrangement by Bob Flesher, which is Banjo Builder, that passed away a few years ago.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: We'll talk some about that. And. Well, you know, as an aside. This is totally an aside, but where do these titles come from?
[00:12:50] Speaker C: Oh, the names of the tunes yes. Oh, that's half of the mystery. We don't necessarily know. Sometimes they're silly, sometimes they're thought provoking, sometimes they're up for debate, and sometimes they're really not meant to be figured out. The fun is sitting down with a group of strangers and having a conversation about it, listening to their interpretation of the tune, their interpretation of the title, because all that plays into the tradition. Strangers coming together to make music as one.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: The last tune that I wrote, I called it Jackson Flanking the feds Jackson.
Stonewall Jackson.
[00:13:30] Speaker C: Oh, gosh. Okay, that sounds like a good one.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's from Chancellorsville Battle.
But anyway, so you started playing bluegrass, and then you found clawhammer. Old time. And I was wondering if you might be willing to tell us your interpretation of what the difference between bluegrass and clawhammer is. I know when I tell people that I play the banjo or they see my tattoo, they say, well, do you play dueling banjos? And I'm like, well, sets my hair on fire.
So in your time, what's the difference?
[00:14:11] Speaker C: One is by the community, and it serves the tune, and in the other one, the tune serves the player. And that's easy to define because bluegrass players today are known for speed and accuracy and a lot of power. They stand up on stage, and they're all a bunch of gunslingers. There's a mandolin player that, when the break comes around on the tune, says, look what I can do on my mandolin with this tune. And they perform astonishingly well. Then the banjo player's up next, and they show what they're capable of doing with the tune. But the tune actually helps highlight the ability of the player.
In old time, the tune is the most important thing. So as anywhere from four to six to 10 people come together, each brings something to the table.
So how do you make the tune the best the tune can be? If I'm playing banjo, I'm playing in such a way that I can certainly hear what the guitar is doing, because I want to make sure that I'm playing the rhythm correctly. I want to make sure that the fiddle is dancing on top of all of us. Because the fiddle is primarily playing the melody. The mandolin player can play what the mandolin wants, but all of us are listening and serving the tune. We're holding it up to its maximum standard. And it's this rare combination in a fleeting moment of time where we all come together just to see what we can do with this piece of art. And when you really listen and when you really play it together, sometimes, not always, but Sometimes you experience what's called the transcendent moment when you feel like you're all one.
Now, I've been playing this music in earnest for about 15 years, maybe closer to 17, and I've probably had two or three of those moments. That's how rare they are. But they're timeless. Time stops. And I use the phrase time stops, joy starts, because it's almost like awe. But you sit in that moment of just brilliance. It feels so good to be able to do that. You and another human being are something like dancing, but it's just so intimate because it's within this language of music, which most people can't articulate only through an instrument.
So it's. Yeah, it's addictive. I'll play in jams anywhere, anytime, in hopes that I can sit down next to a group of people and we just kind of wander on that. I'm sorry it's that rare. But if you go into a jam with people with the intent of saying, I know there's a bunch of good musicians here, I can't wait to hear what we sound like, your odds are a lot higher of reaching it. And clifftop is the place where a lot of this happens. It's much, much greater than the general average, because when people come there, their goal is to play the best music they can with the best people they can to honor the tunes.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: I have found that the transcendent moment comes pretty often in the middle of the night at a festival. We're at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning and all of a sudden, wee.
[00:17:22] Speaker C: Sometimes it's facilitated by a little alcohol or whatever.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Yes, or whatever. Or whatever.
You have interviewed a lot of banjo player builders and that's in your book. And I'm wondering, first off, how did you come to the idea of interviewing banjo builders?
[00:17:42] Speaker C: I was turning 60 and artist wife, who's a wonderful human being, knows me very well, said, what do you want for your 60th birthday?
And I'm really not into things. I like good instruments, but I really like stories.
And I said what I'd like to do is I'd been a marketer most of my career and I used to hire people to come in and film for me or record for me. And I always thought that looked like fun. And I said, I'd like to get a couple of cameras, take a few documentary courses, because to me, the idea of sitting down and asking somebody some questions to elicit some stories sounds like fun. And I'll travel across the United States, maybe Talk to half a dozen people that build banjos. Because why would anybody want to build a banjo, especially an open back claw hammer? It's this weird combination of art, science, history and religion and mysticism, and there's no money in it. Why would they do that? And my wife looked at me and she said, I think that's a wonderful idea. So that's what I did for my 60th birthday. And I'm compulsive by nature, so I couldn't just do one or two. I lined up 11 interviews in 19 days. And I drove about 4,000 miles and I cranked them off. But I realized at the third interview, this is not about how to build a better banjo. That's the common topic. But this is about the human being I'm talking to. They're artists. They're John Lennon artists. And maybe they were told at one point in life they're not artists, but they knew they were, so they stuck with it. Because what I was talking to, who I was talking to was a human being that by and large was so excited to talk about this. Look what I can make, look what I can do. Just like promoting the tune. But in this particular case, they're talking about the woods, they're talking about the art, artistry, and they're talking about the fact that they are perceived as somebody by the community. Now, I didn't know any of this at the time. I'm just listening to this, trying to figure out what is it about these artists that makes them so freaking happy? Why are they fulfilled? Why are they at peace? Why are they so joyful? Because I'd come off a successful business career, but I'd never seen anything like this. This was not about money. This was. This was something way deeper, way more inspiring.
And I couldn't stop. But when I came back after 19 days, I should have been exhausted. But I couldn't wait to start editing. And then as I'm editing, it's like I got all excited and wound up around wrapped around the axle again. I couldn't just stop with these 11.
In fact, I went on the road for about four years, and I went all across the United states, well over 60,000 miles, recording these stories. And it was the greatest honor in my life. I mean, if somebody tells you their story and you're genuinely listening, they're honoring you with their story, and you're honoring them by paying attention.
But I was just this one person driving in a car, and my head was exploding as I'm driving down the road. I finished the DVDs. I'd gone on Banjo Hangout. And I said, this is early in this adventure.
I said, I'm thinking of going on the road to record these stories. If anybody has an interest in DVDs, I'm going to make these films and I'll sell them as DVDs. Well, I had an arbitrary number in my head that if 50 people decided they wanted a CD or a DVD, I'd have to make them. Well, I had way more than 50 orders, so it's like, heck, now I got to make this work.
But I was so compulsive, and I was so addicted to doing what I was doing, I got pretty darn good pretty fast. It's not that I didn't make errors. I got better as I went.
But I got a phone call from Smithsonian Folkways. Daniel Shahey, who was the director at that time. He's director emeritus now. And he said, what are you doing? And I said, I think I'm recording history. Why are you calling me? And he said, did you record the history on purpose? And I said, yes. I want to save this for posterity. I did it as a lark for me. But then once I got into it, I realized I had discovered a group of people. There's a tribe of people here that are happy. I don't know why they're happy. I'd like to find that out. It took me 13 years later until I finally did, but he said, well, if you'd like, we'd be happy to take these into our archive and save them for posterity.
And I said, that's exactly my intent. It never was about money. I gave them my films because I want other people to see these films. I want other people to know these people.
Ultimately, I want people to know how music can change your life.
That's one of the things I learned along the way. It's so freaking good for you. And once you start playing with complete strangers, it opens the door. In this language called music, it's easier to make friends.
And at a time when America is so divided, this is a balm. And I'm hoping more people discover music.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Why don't you tell us one story? We got three minutes before we got to do our calendar. So tell us one story about one of the banjo builders that you have met.
[00:23:24] Speaker C: All right. I've met probably close to 70, but I have a lot of favorites. It's hard to. It's like trying to choose your favorite child. You just can't.
[00:23:33] Speaker B: Right?
[00:23:33] Speaker C: Bart Rider.
Bart Rider was amazing. And Bart Rider is still alive. He made 5012 banjos.
And I held the very first banjo he built. And I've never known an artist that's been able to create something out of whole cloth. Phoenix formed the first time out of the gate. The banjo that he built, the very first one was so similar to the one I was comparing it to, which was number 3000 or it was in the 3000s. He just had this methodology about him. He made 30 banjos a month. And over the course of his career, he kept cranking them out and cranking them out. And another thing he did is he was a community builder because there were so few banjo builders back then. If he found out a new one was coming on board, he'd call them up. He called up Kevin Enoch, he called up Chuck Lee, he called up Mike Ramsey and said, I've got a list of vendors here. You can buy wood from them, you can buy metal parts from them. I'll send it to you because there's enough business out here for all of us. So let's just be friends in this. There was no competition between them. That's an amazing thing. It really is. He was working on guitars and building guitars until a guy said, well, why don't you build something people want to buy? We can't keep banjos on the wall. And he went, whoa. Ok.
That's how he got started. Bart's amazing.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: That's great. It's time for us to do the calendar. And then why don't get ready to play a tune when we come out of the calendar?
[00:25:04] Speaker C: That sounds good.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Okay, Craig, why don't you give us a tune?
[00:25:28] Speaker C: This is a tune that was written by Chris Silver. And I know we're going to be talking about Chris in a minute. This is called March to the Kinney. Banjos are generally associated with happy tunes, but they can also express deeper emotions. This is an example.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: Wonderful, wonderful.
Talk about another banjo builder that you found very interesting and enjoyable to talk to.
[00:27:31] Speaker C: They run the gamut. They were the machines like Bart, that could just crank them out. And then there were the specialists, the craftsmen. The craftsmen that generally made like one or two at a time because each one was so beautiful and just required their attention. And there were several of those builders. Kevin Enoch was one.
Another one that I'm probably going to choose to talk about is Will Fielding. Will passed away quite a while ago, but Will had this sixth sense about wood.
He just revered wood. And so what he would do is he would find pieces that satisfied his aesthetic. Look what he was after. And he would craft complete banjos out of single trees, single pieces of wood, if he could.
And then sometimes he would make his inlay rather than using ivory or some of the more pearl or some of the more fancy things, he would make inlays out of wood. And when I went to visit his shop, we went downstairs, and he had on the wall was a series of boxes, like, he'd find it in a mail. If you walked into UPS or, excuse me, you walked into some sort of post office, all these little boxes, these little mail slots, and in each was a small piece of wood. And it was right before we turned left to walk into his shop. And I noticed that. And I said, what are all these pieces of wood? And he goes, well, let's look at a few. He was very deliberate in how he spoke. In fact, he had kind of a character, a charisma about him that just made you want to stop and listen because you hung on all of his words. But he'd pull out a piece of wood, and the one he pulled out this time, what happened to be spalted maple, which is when a fungus or some sort of condition takes over, and it releases different colors in the wood. But it's gorgeous. And it was a small square. It was probably 6 inches by 6 inches. And I looked at it, and it kind of took my breath away. And I said, what are you going to do with that?
And he said, well, I'm going to put it in the headstock of a banjo. And I said, oh, because normally he made a model called the rooster. And he usually put in a. A small, kind of colorful piece of pearl that looked like a rooster. And he held this up, and he looked at me, and he said, I don't think I can improve upon mother nature here. This is just a beautiful piece of wood. This is what I want to put in the peghead.
And it was that reverence.
I mean, when I play an instrument, it's easy for me to play the notes, but I want to feel what the craftsman, what the builder put into the banjo.
And I generally can do that. The banjo I'm playing here tonight is a Kevin Enoch, and it was one of his early banjos. It's a little more boisterous than most of his banjos, but it's before he started to make models. And so this is kind of an amalgam of two or three things that became some of his models later on when he started to produce.
And I feel the builder, I kind of sense in my Hands.
What was going on in their hands when they were putting it together. Some builders are a little more, shall we say, fun. They'll put something else in. And I feel them when I'm playing their instruments. They're a little quirkier.
They have idiosyncrasies about them. And then when I'm playing, like this instrument, which was built by a master builder, it gives me what I'm looking for. It doesn't make me work very hard. I don't have to figure it out. Because just like the musicians serve the tune, his hands served as the craftsman to make the instrument, which gives me my voice in the language of old time on the banjo.
[00:31:31] Speaker B: Talk about Dwight Diller. I know you love him still, even though he's passed. Tell us about your relationship with him.
[00:31:39] Speaker C: If there's anybody in the audience that knows old time music. I'm sure you've heard of Dwight Diller, the purveyor of old time in West Virginia.
Dwight had a rather challenging childhood. As he said, he grew up in beer parlors. He grew up listening to Little Richard and a lot of rock and roll. And it was kind of a rough childhood. In fact, he didn't recognize that he had a mental condition. He was manic depressive until he was in the service.
And that led to him being drummed out of the service for various reasons. He went on to become a Mennonite minister. It's interesting how the creativity inside of him was always there. It kind of came out sideways. He had to learn to figure out physiologically how he could function until he finally came into his own. But just like so many people that have, we call them mental disabilities, I like to think of it as neurodiversity. When they have these challenges, it's like they have to learn how to deal with that. And when Dwight did, he recognized he had a gift for teaching. He was a tough bird, and he was tough on you.
He could sometimes berate you without. What you had to do was understand he loved you. In fact, he would tell you that. It took him a while, but he'd say, look, I don't have to like you, but I do have to love you, because my boss says I need to. His boss, of course, was God as a Mennonite minister.
So when you got past that, you recognized he also had a sense of humor. He was funny. But when he teach you, you had to do it his way. At least that's the way he started. So I was a neophyte. I came and he taught me how to throw, which is what it's called in your right hand when you play a claw hammer banjo.
And I recognized that he had this ability. There were 12 of us in the room learning how to play claw hammer banjo. And when I came in that first night, I had a bluegrass banjo with me. And he saw that and he said, what do you got thar? And I said, I got a banjo. I know you got a banjo. What kind of banjo is that? I said, it's a bluegrass banjo. I played blue. And then he interrupted me and he says, we don't play bluegrass. And I said, I know. He says, sit down. So I sat down and he swung around and he walked. He stepped back up to his seat and he swung around, looked at me again, and he says, how long did you play that bluegrass banjo? I said, about 15 years. And he says, you're gonna have trouble. Your thumb's gonna want to do something, and it can't do those things. You're gonna have trouble. Sit down. So I sat down and I realized the woman over to the left of me because I came in late, was looking back at me and she was snickering. And it's like, okay, I guess I'm going to be the class stooge. That's fine. So the next day, Dwight, actually.
Actually, he did one more thing before the next day came. I forgot about this.
He stood up again and he walked back toward me and he brought me his banjo.
Now, he had just finished a CD called Just Banjo 99. And on the COVID is a picture of him holding a cedar moun banjo made by low Gordon. And it's got a Roman numeral 11 in at the fifth fret. I didn't know what that meant. I do now, and it's got a rooster at the top of it. And he said, here, you don't play your banjo, you play this one.
He gave me the best banjo in the room. He gave it to me. Then he turned around and walked back up front. And he says, now, you don't play any notes on that. No notes. You just put your finger across the fifth fret. I just want you working on your right hand. No notes.
But I was struck by the fact that here the teacher took the lowliest of students and gave him the best instrument in the class and then walked away. That wasn't lost on me.
So the next day comes and we're all sitting around, and he says, now, no notes. And so he's throwing me. He's showing me the throw and how to have my Thumb catch on the fifth string. And then when I lift my hand up, I pluck that. And then when I go back down, how my index finger can hit another string a little further down on the pothead, reminiscent of what might be a melody note. And he can hear me and, Craig, your thumb. You're not holding your thumb right. You're not doing that right. And I got to the point where I'm turned around so he can't see me, and I'm playing toward the wall, trying to walk away from him. Then he can still hear me. Turn around so I can see you.
But he was like that with me. He wasn't like that with most other people, but he had this harshness about him that you could easily. Mr. Put as he was just being a jerk. He wasn't being a jerk. He was very dedicated to you learning.
And if you've ever had a hard teacher, you can recognize a difference between somebody that's being a jerk and somebody that really cares. And so I became the neophyte. I listened to him and allowed him to adjust my shoulders and put my hand in the appropriate position because he really cared that I got it. Now, do you want me to continue with that story? Because there's more to it.
[00:37:05] Speaker B: Oh, excuse me. Why don't we talk about some other stuff? Because we only got about 10 minutes left.
[00:37:12] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: I know you well.
[00:37:14] Speaker C: I.
[00:37:14] Speaker B: Wonderful story.
[00:37:15] Speaker C: I also. Okay, I ultimately got it. And that was after about a day and a half. I got the throw. And this is. This is the payoff because I got up real early in the morning. I've been playing and playing and playing and playing and playing. And there it was. I had the throw. I had the rhythm. I could tell by my listening that my hand was doing what his hand was doing. So I grabbed his banjo and I ran out next to the machine shed because we'd been having this retreat in a log cabin.
And I just drilled on it for, like, over two hours. I drilled it, drilled it, drilled it until he came walking out on the clothes he'd slept in for three days. And he's pulling his suspenders up. And I went, dwight, as he's standing in the sun. And I scared him. And he goes, what?
I said, come here.
Then I started playing again. I put my head down. I'm working and working and working, and nothing happened. I looked up, and he's still standing on the porch looking at me with this incredulous look. And I said, come here. And he goes, what for?
And I said, I think I Got it? Do you?
And he kind of cocked his head back and he came sauntering over, and it was a walk. He had to go about 25ft, and I was waiting for him, and he came up and he walks up and he gets about 3 inches in front of my nose, which was way in my space and way uncomfortable.
And he looks down at my hand and goes, play.
So I started to throw, and I'm throwing and I'm throwing and I'm throwing, and it seems like five minutes. It was probably maybe 60 seconds, maybe 90 seconds. And I hear this real quiet voice, and he goes, that's remarkable.
And I stop.
And I looked up, and here he is three inches from my nose, and I'm looking right into these huge, wide, pale blue eyes with no lines, and it's almost frightening. And he goes, that's remarkable. And then he brings his finger up between the two of us and points at my nose and goes, that's the Lord speaking through you, and don't you forget it. And he turns around and walks away.
[00:39:21] Speaker B: Wow. Wow.
[00:39:21] Speaker C: I was weak at the knees. I had no idea what the heck was going on. But, yeah, that was my first experience with Dwight.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: He saw something in you, for sure.
[00:39:32] Speaker C: He cared. Yeah. And he saw it happen, and he wanted to make sure that I knew it was there, and that was his way of doing it.
[00:39:39] Speaker B: Sometimes the curmudgeons are the best teachers in the world.
[00:39:44] Speaker C: I wouldn't sign up for one if I would have known.
He did change my life, though.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
Let's talk about Dr. Brain Joe, while we're talking about Josh Turknett.
[00:39:58] Speaker C: He's another amazing human being, Josh.
He was a neurologist in Atlanta for like 12 years. He practiced, and then he got off on research for Alzheimer's. Because he's a brilliant guy and he's a very dedicated person of science. He wants to cure Alzheimer's. His parents were psychologists and physicians, and he decided to get into this research because they were studying tau particles, the tangled webs in the brain. At that point, it was still considered the cause of Alzheimer's. Now, since then, it's just a symptom, but he studied that and he did that research until they found out that it wasn't the cause and that frustrated him.
So I can't tell you exactly how the next event in his life came to pass, but his favorite instrument was a banjo. He's very musical. It's deep in his bones. And banjos in old time historically played traditional music, which is 64 bars long. Generally there's an A part and a B part. Each is 32 bars.
They're very similar melodies. The first part has got certain quirks to it. The second part is kind of a mirror of that with some differentiation, but it's repeatable. And if you're an autodidact, if you can listen and learn, you can pick it up pretty quick.
So learning. Your brain is a mammalian structure. Your brain is kept to keep the Earth suit alive. That's why it's got an ego, and it tells you if you're in trouble and if it tells you all these sorts of things. But neuroplasticity is how the brain learns. When you're born, you don't know how to walk, you don't know how to drink, you don't know how to eat, you don't know how to ride a bike. Then pretty soon, you're catching a ball, you've mastered language. Neuroplasticity takes off in the early years, and in theory, it ends at a certain point. But that is wrong. That is drastically wrong. The brain is meant to keep you alive for your entire life, which means you're constantly learning when you're young. It's called fluid intelligence, because you're constantly facing new scenarios that you've never experienced before. And you learn how to structure them and you learn how to master them. By the time you're 30 or 40, more like 40 or 50, a problem occurs. You look at it and say, oh, I've seen this before. I know if I do this and this, I can solve this problem. At that point, it becomes crystalline intelligence. Fluid intelligence versus crystalline intelligence. If you don't keep learning new things after the age of 40, you'll get more crystalline, and that may contribute to Alzheimer's. So the idea is you keep your brain young by stimulating neuroplasticity. And one of the best ways you can do that is through music, specifically music and dance, because then it's neuromuscular. Dr. Josh Turknett has figured this out, and he calls it the Brain Joe technique, which is pretty clever, but because the banjo is his favorite thing, and he knows neuroplasticity can help fix people, keep them from getting Alzheimer's. He's split off now, and this is what he's doing. This neurologist is teaching people how to play banjo, and he's taking it to the masses. And I cannot think of a better thing for him to do. And frankly, that's why I wrote my book, because when I discovered this tribe of people at clifftop I recognize how it not only keeps people young, fights off Alzheimer's, but this is a balm for so much of the anxiety that's going on in the world today. So with that, I'll turn it back.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: It makes me think of that Peanuts cartoon with Linus saying everyone should be given a banjo at birth so they can learn how to play it.
[00:44:01] Speaker C: Yeah, Snoopy was onto something.
[00:44:03] Speaker B: Yes. Yes, he was.
The old time community.
We love the old time community and the old time community loves us.
[00:44:13] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:44:14] Speaker B: Talk about that.
[00:44:15] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh. I can't say enough good about the old time community.
It's my tribe now. I didn't even know it existed. There's this remote mountaintop in West Virginia called Clifftop, where once a year, up to 4,000 people from all 50 states and 17 foreign countries amassed for nine days to play this music.
Nine days. It's very neurodiverse and one of the most beautiful things about it. It doesn't have racial diversity yet. The vast majority are white people.
Traditional music is black and white. You can't say it's one or the other. It's both. They're interconnected. I'm not going to go into the detail as to why it's mostly white today. There are more blacks coming back, picking up on it. There are some masterful artists out there today. But I love to have lived in a time when blacks and whites played this together because they didn't see color, they felt the music. Okay, so this tribe is. The tribe has found itself.
It was formed by Will Carter over 30 years ago. He's a lawyer that lives in Virginia.
And he brought this group of people at this remote mountaintop which is an old 4H, which is now. It's now a state run national park called Camp Washington Carver.
But it's very rocky. Even the locals say you can't get there from here because it's so remote.
But this tribe of people comes. They are. The vast majority of them are creatives. You can be creative and still write code. You can be pragmatic. You can be linear in your approach. You can be spontaneous in your approach and intuitive. It doesn't matter. Because when you sit down to play music, it all comes together. Nobody cares if you have a college degree. Some people have written books. Some people are unemployed truck drivers. It doesn't matter. We're there to play the music and see what we can do with the music. The beautiful thing about it is if these people were told they weren't creatives initially, they have found themselves there's. Two age groups that come. There's the younger group that's probably anywhere from 14 to mid to late 30s. And then there's nobody or very few people until you get up about 50 or 55. And then there's another spike of the population. The people that don't show are the worker bees. They might have been told they weren't artists, so they're holding their day jobs. The people that are young have not yet been told whether they're artists or not. The old spike are the people that maybe were told they were not artists and had their careers and then came back to it. And there's a certain sweetness to playing with those people because they recognize how powerful this music is and what the music has done for them throughout their entire life. And I'm one of those people. I never left music.
I left it for a while, but it never left me because when I came back to it, it was still there. And did it heal me? Absolutely. At a time I really needed healing. But the people, oh, my gosh, the majority of them are introverts. I say this anecdotally. I was a market researcher in my career, but I just know in talking to enough people and asking people if I give a presentation of 50, how many people are extroverts. There's usually four or five. And how many people are introverts? And they all look around and see everybody else snickering and ra their hands. And you can tell introverts by the way they talk. Extroverts have a way of meeting somebody and then do what's called topping, which is, oh, hey, I haven't seen you for a while. Last time I talked to you, you had just gone to this golf course. Well, I just went to this golf course, this new one, and I scored a 68. I did really good. But this was such a tough golf course. And then the other person he's talking to says, well, if you go back to that original golf course, that's the one I was telling you about, that was fabulous. And I got a 64 on that. So they just kind of topped each other. Conversation can't go anywhere. That's not how introverts talk. If you're sitting in a circle and you're sitting next to somebody you don't know, and you play a tune, you listen to them, you listen to their style, you listen to how they interpret the music. And in my case, I listen to banjos. And if I'm playing a banjo next to a banjo player, it's Very easy to ask, what kind of banjo is that? What are you playing?
And they say, oh, well, this is. It's a Will Fielding or it's somebody else's. And it's like, oh, I've heard of that person. What do you like about it? Well, I like the fact that it's got this solid bass string and it's got a 1 and 3, 8 inch nut on the top. So it's a little wider for my wider hand. Oh, so you've got hand issues.
What I'm demonstrating here is what's called a drill down. We're going back and forth between people, we're asking people questions to get to know more and more about them or about their experience either in life or experience with the instrument. Introverts do that. They drill down on each other. They don't top each other. It's not about my ego. It's like, I want to know something. Also. The vast majority of these people are astonishingly intelligent.
They just know things. And one last thing, and then I'll show it back to you, is they listen. As I'm telling the story here to you now, you're listening to me, you're absorbing this. This is a rare trait in human beings anymore, to allow me to listen, to talk to something. And you're interpreting it, you're understanding it.
I can't tell you what a joy it was. I learned that skill sitting at the feet of these people when I did these 200 interviews. I was always a listener before I grew up in a listening family. But I can't tell you what a joy it is to be associated with these people. And that's what Clifftop is about.
[00:50:13] Speaker B: We're coming close to the end, and I want to make sure to ask you, how can people reach you and how can they. Well, how can they reach you?
[00:50:22] Speaker C: I have a website called oldtimeconversations.com and at the website I've posted about 105 films.
[00:50:32] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:50:33] Speaker C: To be viewed for free.
The ones at Smithsonian Folkways are not streamed yet, but Smithsonian Folkways has that first archive of banjo builders.
The second series I did was called Performers and Teachers. These are the people, the flame keepers that pass along their tradition. And then the third series that I did is called Old Time Conversations, and that's about other builders of other instruments, other historians and people that wrote some books about music. And I haven't finished. I've done 200, but I've got at least another 12 people I'd like to interview before I hang them up. And don't film anymore because my goal was to make a snapshot of this moment in time in traditional music. And with 200 interviews, I've got some statistical significance in this. I didn't start off to to be an archivist in this regard or from that standpoint, even an ethnomusicologist. But I am a folklorist and I want to save the precious stories for posterity. The people that are living and passing along this tradition today are remarkable. And if you're lucky enough and fortunate enough to stumble on this community, it will bless you in so many ways. It's so good for you.
[00:51:53] Speaker B: It's joy.
[00:51:54] Speaker C: It's joy. Sorry, it's that those are really good words.
[00:51:59] Speaker B: What I'd like to do, actually, is play something from your new cd.
[00:52:03] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:52:03] Speaker B: It's Old Time Conversations.
[00:52:05] Speaker C: Old Timeless Conversations.
[00:52:07] Speaker B: Old Timeless Conversations with Chris Silver. With My Eyes the Way they Are, I'd like to play that. And that'll probably be the end. So I want to say we've been talking with Craig R. Evans. I have a whole nother page of questions that I could ask, but I think I'd like to play this music as we go out. This is chickypin hunting.
Sa sa.
[00:55:02] Speaker C: Sa.
[00:56:28] Speaker A: You've been listening to Right On Radio on KFAI 90.3 FM and streaming live on the web at KFAI.org I'm Eric Zimmerman. We would like to thank our special guest, Craig R. Evans, KFAI listeners and supporters and our Right On Radio listeners. Without your support and donations, KFAI would not be possible. If you've missed any shows or want to listen to this one again, you can check out all your favorite Right On Radio episodes on Spotify, itunes, Google Podcast, Apple podcasts, and anywhere you stream your podcasts. Now stay tuned for Bonjour, Minnesota.
