Americana

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Though the machine gun ring of the Banjo is the signature sound of Mountain Music, it could not have more paculiur origins.

Musicologists trace its roots to ancient Africa and instruments using a gourd for the body and a neck with a string attached. The name Banjo may be derivative of Mbanza, from the Kimbunto language. Thomas Jefferson wrote of a slave instrument called the Banjar.

In a four-string configuration, it was a staple of music throughout and after the Civil War. But as such, it was sowing the seeds of its own demise.

During reconstruction, minstrel show stereotypes were soundly rejected by the emerging black middle class. The Banjo all but disappeared and the Guitar took its place.

But another strain of American music adopted the Banjo, now with five strings. Called at turns “Hillbilly” and “Old-Timey,” it was the music of the high and lonesome eastern mountains. And when the legendary Earl Scruggs found a unique rapid-fire way to pick the strings, it recreated the style that came to be called “Bluegrass.”

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American music has its landmarks. New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz and the blues took root in the Mississippi delta. Bluegrass came down from the Appalachian Mountains and Cajun music and Zydeco swirled out of the bayous of Louisiana. Latino drifted in from Mexico and the Caribbean.

There was jazz, swing, and big band jump in the dance halls of St. Louis and Kansas City. Chicago became home to the urban blues, while rhythm-and-blues and rockabilly met in Memphis. Motown was soul, and Nashville, country. So …where is our grandest metropolis, our Gotham, on this musical map? New York wrote the songs.

West 28th street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue was called “tin pan alley” after a reporter noted that when the song writers were pounding away on their pianos, it sounded like the crashing of tin pans.

From the mid-1880s until the depression, this musical row accounted for most of the popular songs of the day. When the phonograph and radio replaced the parlor piano, Tin Pan Alley drifted into silence. But within a decade, a new Broadway address would take its place. And that’s another story.

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There’s a highway - or what’s left of one - that runs over 1600 miles, from New Orleans to Canada, mostly following the Mississippi river. Three hundred years ago, it was a path used by local indians, part of the Natchez Trace.

By the 1930s, as Highway 61, it was an escape route from the grim poverty of the South to the cities and jobs in the industrial North.

Men and women who made music and a million others traveled the two-lane, and over the years, it garnered more stories than any road in America.

The tale of Robert Johnson selling his soul in exchange for his musical genius at a crossroads on Highway 61 has become folk legend.

in the early 1960s, a teenager named Bob Zimmerman hitched-hiked down the highway to Duluth, Minnesota, where he launched his career. As Bob Dylan, he named his fifth album “Highway 61 Revisited.”

Though there’s not much left of Highway 61, the shadows of the souls and the echoes of the music that traveled that long, lonesome road road remain to this day.

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The wail of Johnny Winter sliding up the neck of his guitar is distinctly American and traces back over a hundred years.

At the turn of the century, guitarists loved the way they could make their instruments cry by sweeping a straight razor, a bottleneck, or a piece of pipe along strings, creating tones that hearkened to the blue notes of african scales. They said it sounded like a heart breaking.

Beginning in the 1930s, delta bluesmen like Son House, Charley Patton, and Fred Mcdowell spread the gospel of slide from Mississippi to the Carolinas and beyond.

When guitars went electric, so did slides. The first electric slide masters were Elmore James and Muddy Waters, who in turn inspired a slew of young white players like Mike Bloomfield and Duane Allman.

And now, a new wave of players — Derek Trucks and Sonny Ladreth to name two — have caught the bug and took up the sword - or, rather, the slide - as a way to capture the sound of heart breaking.

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The names Fender, Paul, and Rickenbacker have appeared on the headstocks of millions of electric guitars, though none of them invented the instrument.

That honor goes to George Beauchamp, a Californian who, in the early 1920s, built the first true electric, dubbing it the “frying pan.” A friend, Adolph Rickenbacker, formed a company to build more. It was a modest start for a revolution.

Leo Fender’s hometown radio shop led him to repairing local musicians’ electrics. Intrigued by the possibilities, he closed the shop to start his own guitar company.

Les Paul was a musician and tinkerer from Wisconsin who puzzled over amplifying his acoustic guitar.

All did well and their instruments became icons for a generation. The three men brought thousands of guitarists out of the background and to the forefront, where they could play loud. And that’s just what they’ve done ever since.

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Eddie Cochran and gene Vincent were bright lights in rock and roll’s golden age. Though Neither one of them got to shine for long.

At nineteen, Cochran was writing and singing penny bright sides like “Summertime Blues” and “Twenty Flight Rock.” Vincent, melding country and urban styles sang hits like the slinky “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and the boogie-woogie tinged “Lotta Lovin.”

They were nipping at Elvis Presley’s heels with the great songs and smoldering stage postures that might have earned them a piece of the king’s crown. They never got the chance.

On the way to a show in England their cab crashed. Cochran was taken to the hospital where he died two days later. Vincent was crippled for life and ended his career wracked with pain and in the grip of alcoholism. He passed away in 1971.

But like so many others who were gone too soon, they rock on.

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From world war two on, the Brill building in New York was a beehive of American songwriting.

Beginning in the late fifties, the writers who worked for the building at 1619 Broadway created the top 40 for the better part of a decade.

The names - Mann and Weil. Sedaka and Greenfield, Goffin and King, Greenwich and Barry, Shuman and Pomus, Bacharach and David, and Phil Spector — are right next door to legendary. Their hits would fill a book.

But the sixties scene bloomed and with a social revolution underway, turgid mini-operas of teen romance began to sound frivolous. One by one, the writers drifted away.

The building is still there, of course, and like the part of Manhattan they once called “tin pan alley,” it’s a musical monument.

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What’s in a name? When it comes to music, more than meets the eye - or the ear.

At the turn of the century, polite society and proper church folk were appalled by the wild, noisy music that was played by brass bands up and down New Orleans’ Rampart Street.

One newspaper writer dismissed it as “chatter,” using the French verb jaser, and before long, everyone knew what it meant when a band went to jassing a tune. It took another ten years for jass to become jazz.

The first notation of “blue” to describe melancholy comes from Europe over five hundred years ago.

Finally, there has been much speculation about who created the term “rock-and-roll,” and when and why. No one knows for sure.

One thing we do know is when it first appeared in print. In June of 1946, Billboard Magazine stated that the latest record by Joe Liggins’ Honeydrippers was, quote: “right rhythmic rock-and-roll music.”

Insiders understood. Ten years later, the whole world knew what it meant.

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“The Unfortunate Rake” was first heard in Ireland in the 1700s.

The ballad soon became a busker’s favorite throughout Britain. Within a few years, the setting was moved to St. James Hospital in London and the occupation and then the gender of the main character changed to suit the singer.

It reached America in the 1800s and split into two traditions. One was adopted and nurtured by the black community east of the Mississippi; the other carried by whites into the west.

In the East, a jazz version became popular in New Orleans under the title “The St. James Infirmary.” It branched off into a half-dozen blues songs as well, including “Gambler’s Blues” and “The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues.”

Out west, the song featured a cowboy as the dying narrator. A bit of the lyric of “The Streets of Laredo” became the title of a Broadway play and later a movie: “Bang the Drum Slowly.”

Other relatives of the song have been discovered in mountain music and even in the Bahamas.

It all tracks back to the poor rake of centuries ago and the most enduring song in folk music history.

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He came out of uptown New Orleans, blazed for a few years, and then disappeared into silence.

Born Charles Bolden in 1873, he was one among the army of musicians who played the rounds of dances, concerts, parades, and funerals.

But there was something special about him; something that turned him from a run-of-the-mill horn player into a wild man who set the nights ablaze in the bloody Rampart Street saloons and music halls, blowing his heart out through the bell of his silver cornet, playing sounds that no one had ever heard before. People said he and his music were crazy.

They started calling him “Kid Bolden,” then “King Bolden,” and he really was the king of New Orleans, as he led a band of rebels in a siege of the fortress of proper music.

Then he began to come apart. No one is sure whether it was the drinking, the drugs, or just random insanity, but he stumbled out of control.

When he died, alone and forgotten, his body was placed in an unmarked grave.

Buddy Bolden was American music’s original genius. And its first casualty.

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American music has a long tradition of murder ballads. These songs, whether blues, hillbilly, bluegrass, Cajun, Norteno, or any other genre, have one thing in common: each was inspired by an actual murder.

“Tom Dooley” is the best known. The song tells the tale of Dula, a young man from North Carolina who was hanged in 1865 for the murder of his fiancé.

“Stagger Lee” is another song that has survived the ages. It’s based on an incident one winter night in a St. Louis saloon when Stack Lee shot Billy Lyons dead.

The narratives behind “Ella Speed” and “Little Delia” are supported by news accounts as well as court and police records. The murder that inspired “Betty and Dupree” was splashed across the front pages of Atlanta newspapers for the better part of two months.

The bluegrass standard “Pretty Polly” may have the strangest history of all. Researchers have discovered a link suggesting that this Polly might have been Jack the Ripper’s first victim.

Murder ballads are history lessons combined with morality plays. And they make the grade as good music, the best of the lot sung to the most moving melodies, bloody murder and all.