Dock Boggs - Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years 1963-1968

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Free Music Notes for Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years 1963-1968

Free Music Review: Blues Old Timey Blues Old Timey, banjo, banjo, banjo
Hit: 5 Stars

In many ways he is more like the Skip James of old time banjo than the Robert Johnson, particularly if you listen to the haunted original recordings James made in the 1930s. In fact in the 1960s when he joined the folk revival and performed along with a lot of the old blues musicians who had similarly been "rediscovered" Dock Boggs said if he had to do it all over again, he would have learned to play guitar and sing the way Mississippi John Hurt played and sang!

The bluesiness of this all may be more pronounced in Boggs' work, but it was really typical of the white Southern banjo players of his era. They are playing an African instrument, transmitted into their area by African Americans, their repetoire ranges into blues, their musical styles on the instruments even in non-blues are influenced by blues music. They lived in a society where the formal racial separation of Jim Crow Segregation and Lynch law existed because of the actual integration of the lives and cultures of white and black workers and farmers and above all musicians was greater than what we have today.

Dock Boggs was quite explicit. He recalled the names of the black banjo players he saw in childhood who played banjo finger style, rather than in the claw hammer style that his brothers played. From childhood he wanted to play like them. Many of the tunes he recorded he said he got from listening to Black blues records. Anyone who cares to read the many interviews with Boggs that have been published or listen to the cds and lps of his memories can learn about this.

Bogg's skills as a singer, as a banjo player, and, above all, as a performer who throws himself entirely into his songs,are unique. But the mixture of African and European American music he represents is hardly unique.

He may collide with the rather false, sometime boring, washed white fantasies about old time white country music nourished by folkies and post folkies and with what white racists who cling to as something purely "white," but Boggs' bluesyness is part of being real old time and not a suburban 60-90s fantasy of old time life.

What about the other great finger picking discovery of old-time banjo playing, Roscoe Holcomb. When he was rediscovered though Holcomb's repetoire included all kinds of music played on banjo, guitar, harmonic, and fiddle, he said he was a blues singer and one of the better ones around his area of Kentucky!

The mixture is real. If you go back and listen to say the Carter family (whose guitar style came from a black man Leslie Riddle who performed on several of their cuts) or to Bill Monroe (who along with fellow western Kentuckian Merle Travis learned much of his music from Black bluesman Arnold Schultz) they sound so much blusier, so much more black influences, than the Allison Krauses and Nickel Creeks reared in suburbia and not the world of racial cultural mix that Dock Boggs comes from.

Just a point of fact, Bogg's banjo style is closer to bluegrass than most other banjo players of his time. Most of Boggs contemporaries were frailers of various kinds, whereas Boggs was a finger picker for the most part. Bluegrass banjo involves precisely adding in the bluesier licks and sounds to the music in an systematic fashion. It is a finger style with just the kind of synchopation that Boggs was a master at.

Particularly the initial bluegrass recordings of Bill Monroe at the end of WWII are obviously a reaction to the rhythmns of Swing. The setup of the tunes, playing the melody first and then opening for improvisational solos by virtuosi musicians, comes from the combo swing and bop then prevelant and has nothing to do with how old time music functioned. As the greatest Bluegrass Fiddler Kenny Baker said, to play Bluegrass Fiddle you need to think like playing Jazz.

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