Adam Hurt Transcript
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Adam Hurt:
None of this repertoire must go a certain way. It's never been transcribed in a specific way. Everyone who plays it has their own personal take on it. All of the icons of this music, newer ones and older ones, have become that way because they have such identifiable personal styles. They don't sound like everybody else.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. Adam Hurt is an acclaimed clawhammer banjo player and one of my favorite performers in any style. And I was absolutely delighted that he agreed not only to speak to me at length about his life and teaching of traditional music, but also perform for this episode some of my favorite music.
His albums of gourd banjo music, Earth Tones and Back to the Earth are beloved by a wide range of listeners. I think partly because the sound color of the instrument is much more mellow than other banjos. You'll hear him play and talk about the fascinating history, both his gourd banjo and one of his favorite antique instruments. He's also a fine old time fiddler, and although he grew up with classical musician parents; his father a violinist with the Minnesota Orchestra, Adam's life-changing musical moment was a wonderful and dedicated school teacher.
Adam, thank you so much for joining me.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you for having me, Leah. It's a real treat.
Leah Roseman:
I think it took us maybe eight months or something to get our schedules lined up, so I'm glad we could make this work.
Adam Hurt:
It did. Thank you. We've been in touch about this for a while, and our last attempt got foiled by construction work next door, but the neighborhood is rather quiet at the moment, so hopefully this will work out.
Leah Roseman:
So I think, like some of your listeners, I discovered your music through your album Earth Tones, the gourd banjo music, which was a complete revelation to me, but that's not what you're holding right now. Which banjo are you holding?
Adam Hurt:
It's not what I'm holding now, but it's lurking just over here beside me. This is my favorite banjo and the one that I play the most really, even though a lot of people have come to be aware of me in my music because of the gourd banjo work that I've done.
This is a banjo by Henry Dobson, a New York maker and player and innovator in the 1880s. And the patent date on this one is 1881. It was probably made in just the very few years thereafter. And it's a pretty early banjo for a modern clawhammer player to use. There are various late 19th century banjos out there in circulation being played, but not many of them stand up well to steel strings, which most of us need in the old time music world to be heard over other instruments and to access the keys that fiddlers are playing the repertoire in as well.
And a lot of those instruments, no matter how they're strung, just have kind of intimate sounds. And this banjo was designed for performance before amplification entered the mix. So even though by modern standards, it's still on the quiet side, it's still kind of a dark sounding instrument, in the 1880s, it was the loudest and brightest thing available in the banjo world. And I heard similar instruments being used by other clawhammer players when I was still pretty new to the instrument. And the moment I heard the sort of tone that these Dobson banjos produce, Henry Dobson, Silver Bell Banjos, they're called, I knew that's what I wanted. And I mounted a search for one and found this through the banjo collector community almost 20 years ago now. And it's been my near constant musical companion ever since.
Leah Roseman:
And you've had some restoration work done on it as well?
Adam Hurt:
I have, I have. It was in quite good shape when I got it, and yet I didn't have much to compare it against besides some more modern instruments that I had played up until that time. And over the years, I sort of got used to the way that it played and behaved without recognizing that over its very long life, it had deteriorated a bit. So one of my pandemic time projects was working with a marvelous luthier from Vermont, Will Seeders Mosheim who makes incredible banjos of his own, but also restores instruments. On a proper restoration of this instrument to make it play the very best that it could, to bring out the fullness of its sound that some of which had sort of gotten lost along the way.
And to keep it in good shape for a long time to come. The neck had pulled forward over many years. I'm not sure how much more it had pulled forward in the time that I owned it, but it was designed for gut strings. And even though it does well with light gauge steel, that's still a bit of a strain on a neck of this age.
So the action had gotten rather high even though I was using a fairly low bridge on it. So that was one thing that Will addressed. He reset the neck very carefully so that the action is nice again for my left hand, but so that I can use a taller bridge for plenty of right-hand clearance and more volume and clarity as well. So that made a colossal difference. It's the banjo that I always love, but it's so much nicer to play and it sounds even bigger and better than it already did.
The couple of years before Will and I started this project together, I hadn't been playing this banjo very much. I have some modern instruments as well, and I had just gotten more comfortable with the way they behaved, even though I always love the sound of this one the best. So it was in storage for some time not being played and not even being handled. And over that time, a bit of oxidation that had already begun to occur on the metal parts became more widespread since I wasn't handling it and keeping that from spreading. So Will hand cleaned without polishing, important difference, all of the metal parts. He completely disassembled it to remove that damage without removing the plating or what's left of the plating. I really wanted him to maintain as much of this 1880s patina as was realistic. And I think he achieved it marvelously. It looks beautiful. It doesn't look like a new instrument, but it doesn't have any corrosion present. And hopefully now that I'm playing it all the time and handling it all the time, there won't be a chance for things to oxidize again.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. It's wonderful to have these craftspeople available.
Adam Hurt:
Isn't it? And I feel like in many ways we're living in a golden era of luthiery. Really.
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to play something on the banjo since you're holding it?
Adam Hurt:
I'd be delighted to, if you're ready. Sure. All right. I'll start with a tune that you suggested, which I appreciated so much. I had a bit of a list I was working on of possibilities to share with your audience, but a couple spots on that list were flexible, so this filled one of them really nicely. This is a tune called Fortune, which I guess you know from that Earth Tones gourd banjo album. But I enjoy playing it on all manner of banjos. It comes from the Round Peak community of Northwest North Carolina. I feel like I've been playing this tune for a lifetime, and I just keep loving it and getting to know it better and better all the time. So I hope you'll enjoy it, too. This is Fortune.
Leah Roseman:
Fantastic. Thank you so much.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you. A treat to play that for you.
Leah Roseman:
I find it so interesting. I was thinking this morning, there's so many of my guests that I've interviewed, and it's not any plan of mine, but I discover that the music they have formed their lives around is not music that was in their community or that was part of their family or anything. And it's also true for you.
Adam Hurt:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm living now in southern Virginia, not far from the epicenter of Appalachian old time music, but I didn't grow up anywhere near here, and I didn't grow up with this music in my life in an organic way.
I'm from St. Paul, Minnesota, and I grew up in a family of classical musicians. My mother has always been a serious amateur pianist, and my father made his living as a violinist for the Minnesota Orchestra. He played for them for nearly 40 years, his whole career, really. And he taught private violin lessons at home, too. So classical music was the background of my growing up. And their interests in classical music, my parents, were so strong that that's really all the music we listened to as well.
And so it seemed normal for me as a young child to get involved with classical music. Why not? They both started playing when they were quite young as well. So they put me in piano lessons, for reasons that I don't completely recall, starting around age five. And I didn't know any other music. So I guess you could say I liked classical music fine. I didn't have any preference for other music. I liked the piano well enough, although in retrospect, I sort of wish I had gotten going on the violin since now I'm into old time fiddle. Might have given me a little bit of a technical headstart.
But the problem that I had, and I didn't even really realize that it was a problem for some time, was with the idea of learning music off of a printed page. And yet, this is what I saw my father do all the time. This is what I saw my mother do all the time. This is what I saw my piano teacher do all the time. And it was what I was being taught to do, so shouldn't I just do it? But I really struggled with it. And I was largely learning piano, classical piano, by ear without realizing that was what I was doing and without knowing that that's a legitimate way to learn other kinds of music. I kind of conned my piano teacher into playing for me, whatever it was that we were working on. Sometimes the whole piece, sometimes smaller excerpts, whatever I thought I needed to hear to be able to piece things together so that I could just look at the page when I couldn't quite remember a detail or otherwise work it out.
And even after many years of piano lessons, that's still the way we were operating. And to this day, I'm a lousy music reader. When I have occasion to look at a transcription, I'm still counting lines to figure out pitches, and it shouldn't be that way. But clearly that wasn't a natural way for me to learn to make music. And yet it lasted me for a number of years until I very randomly and fortuitously encountered traditional old time music in that unlikely milieu, the Upper Midwest. And the rest is sort of history. I can tell you more of that story or if you know the high points, feel free to share those with your listeners.
Leah Roseman:
Yes. Well, my listeners know I love to research my guests, so I found, yeah, so Don Payden, right? Your fourth grade teacher.
Adam Hurt:
Well done. That's when everything changed. I was in a public school in St. Paul, kindergarten through 12th grade. I went all the way through, that was called an open school. And part of that philosophy is that students are encouraged, as long as they're meeting state standards, to develop their own educational path, focusing on whatever they're interested in. And it also encourages the teachers to bring in interests of their own that may not line up with all of the subjects being taught to expose the students to something new and different that they otherwise wouldn't have encountered.
And that's exactly what Don did. He was also not from the southeast. I'm not sure how he came to play traditional music, old time and bluegrass both, but he was quite passionate about it, and he played all of the instruments and would bring them into the classroom to play for his students during break periods. And the moment I heard those sounds, I was really hooked. The music just spoke to me in a way that classical music hadn't done, and I wasn't listening to music broadly enough for any other kind of music to have reached me. And the icing on the cake was that he was making this very compelling music without having to look at a single sheet of paper.
And suddenly it all kind of clicked. Well, this is the way I've been learning music. This is the way Don is making music. Why can't I somehow connect the two? And in the process of doing so, the piano got eliminated from the mix, but I guess that's for the best. Don worked with me during recess periods at school on the mandolin. That was his favorite instrument to play. And he had a classroom mandolin that he left there all the time.
So we would sit together and pass it back and forth, and he would teach me little old time fiddle tunes by ear. By ear. That was the only way to do it, he felt. And I didn't question it. And I developed a small repertoire over the first few months of fourth grade. And then when spring break came along, he invited me to take that classroom mandolin home with me for a week to keep having fun with it, and also to show my parents what I had been working on.
I had told them about it, but they hadn't had an opportunity to hear anything. And they were kind of taken with it, much to my surprise and delight. So my father bought me a little mandolin, and with Don's blessing, he sought out instruction for me from a local mandolin player who worked with a lot of young people particularly, and seemed a good fit for who I was and where I was.
That man's name was Brian Wicklund. He's more of a bluegrass musician than an old time musician. But we had mandolin lessons together weekly, I think, for a couple of years. Couple of years. And meanwhile, I stayed at open school. Don remained in my life there. He was my primary teacher, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. So he was able to kind of monitor my growing interest in the music that he loved so much, and we enjoyed sharing that connection and deepening it together. We would still play music together during break periods. I would bring my mandolin in rather than having to borrow his. He would sometimes play other instruments too.
Now, Don did play the banjo, but he didn't own a banjo at the time that I was in his classroom, so I didn't encounter the banjo through him. My parents had taken me to some local bluegrass festivals, and I had seen the banjo played in that milieu, and it didn't really do anything for me. I was just thinking, "Well, that's the banjo. I like the mandolin. I'll keep playing the mandolin." They took me to some jam sessions as well, which were still bluegrass oriented. So I continued to play the mandolin and not be bothered by the banjo or anything else.
But then one day I came to my mandolin lesson with Brian Wicklund and noticed a banjo sitting on his music stand, and I didn't think he played the banjo, so I just asked him about that. And he said, "Yeah, I've been working on the banjo and I've been learning this other style called clawhammer." I thought that sounded interesting. So he played a little bit for me, demonstrated. We jammed on a tune together and I was captivated. I was just captivated.
For me, the mandolin was an imperfect sort of standalone musical experience, at least the way that I was learning to play it. I was learning tune melodies and they had a very linear sound and feel. And I was learning chordal accompaniment as well. But I couldn't really do anything with that unless I had someone else to play against. The clawhammer banjo, as I was hearing it for the first time in Brian Wicklund's hands was a really interesting merging of lead and accompanying elements. It was a more complete musical experience all in the one instrument.
And I continue to feel that way about the clawhammer banjo style. And I describe it that way to people who may be more familiar with bluegrass banjo or may not be familiar with banjo at all. I like to imagine that if one were listening to a good clawhammer player with eyes closed, one might think, one, "We're hearing two instruments. A lead banjo over here, and a supportive banjo over here." And I don't feel like there are too many stringed instruments or styles of playing them that work that way, that create that feeling.
I feel like certain styles of finger style guitar, like blues finger style guitar, kind of have that quality with the thumb doing kind of a constant accompaniment and the fingers picking out melody meanwhile. And the auto harp kind of does that if it's played in a melodic way. If it's not just strumming chords. Mike Seager had a wonderful style on the auto harp in which he played melody and chordal accompaniment all at the same time.
But that's kind of it, at least in my experience of the stringed instrument world. Piano is different of course. And I just thought this sounded so interesting and looked like something I could have a lot more fun playing by myself since after all, at this point, I was 11 years old and I wasn't able to get out there to jam sessions or festivals to play with other people unless my parents took me. And it's not like there were many of those opportunities in Minnesota anyway. So I was mostly making music on my own at home, learning every tune I could get my hand on through Brian or otherwise, and still feeling like I had something incomplete to show for my efforts on the mandolin.
So I asked Brian whether he might be willing to show me a little bit of clawhammer banjo just for fun. And he said, "Well, no." He's learning this instrument and style from scratch himself, and he just doesn't feel like he has enough of a handle on it to be helpful to me. But he could recommend to my parents and me a local instructor, one of very few people at the time who played clawhammer banjo in the Twin Cities.
So sure enough, he referred us to a woman named Mary Ann Kovach, who remains a good friend of mine to this day. And we signed up for banjo lessons and my parents got me a little plastic banjo to start learning on. So I was still taking piano lessons, I was still taking mandolin lessons. I added clawhammer banjo lessons to the mix. I think everything was a weekly lesson. I'm not quite sure how I did it. And I guess I should be grateful to the open school philosophy for not burdening me with a lot of other schoolwork and giving me plenty of time to pursue music my own way.
So Mary Ann taught me the fundamentals of the style over about a year of lessons. The melodies we worked on were largely familiar. Either I already knew the tunes from the mandolin from Brian, or I knew enough of the format of the tunes to anticipate where they were going next. So learning the melodies was not very hard for me. Learning the somewhat different way that the banjo dealt with them compared to the mandolin took a little bit of getting used to, but that wasn't hard for me. Mary Ann was more focused though on giving me a solid grounding in the mechanics of playing clawhammer banjo, which are very different from playing flat picked mandolin or playing a bowed instrument. Obviously very different from a keyboard instrument.
And she did a wonderful job. I thought she was a fabulous teacher. All three of these people were fabulous teachers, and I feel so grateful to have run into them very circumstantially. And after that year or so of lessons Mary Ann made for me, this was in the nineties, she made for me a cassette tape. And the cassette tape was a mix tape of clawhammer banjo in a variety of contexts from her own listening library. Some old recordings, some newer recordings, some solo recordings, some fiddle banjo duets, some banjo in string band ensembles, a real cross-section.
And she encouraged me to listen to that tape. And any player whose music I really liked, try to chase down more of that player's music. And she also encouraged me to get out there to the extent that I could at age 12 by now, with my parents' help and make music with as many old time fiddlers as I could find. Not that there were so many in Minnesota, but there were a few. And she said, "It's not so much a matter of learning a whole bunch of tunes and regurgitating them, it's more a matter of ..."
Adam Hurt:
... and regurgitating them. It's more a matter of learning how to pick up tunes on the fly and learning how to support the fiddle in the clawhammer banjo's traditional role. So I followed her advice, I listened to that mixtape so much. I chased down a bunch of recordings by some of my favorite musicians on that mixtape. I begged my parents to take me to more jams and more festivals, and thank goodness they were willing. And quickly the clawhammer banjo and its music became the focus of my life, and it has remained very much that way more than 25 years later.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that I know you've done a lot of workshops on tone production. What kind of things do you address in terms of clarity, and resonance, and all the things and how it's produced?
Adam Hurt:
I mostly address the relationship between the body and the instrument. And this is something that I observed my father doing a bit with his violin students, and it's something that I associate with the classical music teaching world generally, and something that I have not seen done a lot in traditional music, and certainly not in the banjo community. A lot of banjo learners, whether they're my students or people I encounter elsewhere, come to me complaining that they're just not happy with the tone they're producing. And they've tried different banjos, and they've tried different string gauges, and they've tried natural skin versus synthetic heads, and they just can't make it work. And that seems to be the go-to solution in the banjo community for sonic issues. Change the instrument or change the setup, but don't necessarily think about how you're playing and how you're interfacing with the instrument.
So we look at different ways of holding the banjo and how those ways affect tone, and they really do, especially if we're playing open-back banjos, which are pretty traditional for clawhammer playing. If the banjo is in the center of your lap, regardless of your physique, you're blocking a certain amount of sound from escaping, you're going to have to work correspondingly harder here. And the resulting sound isn't going to be that great, it's going to sound like you're working hard. Whereas if you move the banjo over here, more sound can escape out the back, you're not going to have to work as hard to get that sound out, and it's all going to come together better. The clawhammer style is done with a combination of fingernails and thumb flesh. And the thumb flesh kind of contacts the strings just wherever it happens to do.
I don't really put that under the microscope a lot unless people are having precision problems, but I don't look at it with tone in mind. I really look at the finger striking with tone in mind though, because the finger strikes drive more of the melody than the thumb does. And there's a world of difference in tone depending on which section of a given nail is contacting the strings. And I wasn't taught to do this by Maryanne or anyone else, my early mentors sort of showed me the position in which they held their hand and I tried to make my hand look like theirs and that was it. And as I got into listening to more clawhammer players, again, the one whose sound I liked, I tried to resemble in any way that I could.
But when I started teaching people to play banjo from scratch, I did the same thing. I showed them my basic hand position and the basic mechanics, and some of them would come back having practiced hard and looking good and sounding good too, and others would've come back having practiced hard looking also good, but not sounding very good. So I had to figure out the reason why, and that's what led me to this notion of striking position having such a big impact on the sound that any banjo played by any banjo player produces. So I've really enjoyed focusing on that in my one-on-one instruction, my private teaching practice, and even more at these big banjo camps where I'm frequently invited to teach because it's a different thing from what other instructors seem to be offering. And I think it's really important, and I think it adds incredibly to one's enjoyment of playing the instrument. Who wants to play if we're not producing a pleasing sound?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So for the people listening to the podcast and they can't see you, you've stuffed the back of your banjo with a cloth. This is traditional?
Adam Hurt:
This is, at least I've been led to believe that it is. Not everyone does it, but what this does is help me control the overtones that are kind of inherent to the banjo. And I've been thinking about this a little bit differently over the past few years. When I started teaching and talking about tone production, this entered that conversation and various people taking those workshops complained to me that, "You shouldn't need that cloth, you should be able to control the response of the instrument through playing technique alone. Isn't that what you're advocating anyway?" And I got to thinking about it. I tried adjusting my stuffing and taking it out all together, and I just wasn't happy with the sound so I've left it in. But then I started listening to bluegrass banjo players.
See, the issue with these overtones is that no matter how carefully I'm playing, the sustain from one note carries over into the next note that I'm playing and the whole instrument rings ambiently, even strings that I'm not playing speak to a certain extent, and I can hear them echoing in there. If I played in a more spacious style, fewer eighth notes, I could probably get away with an instrument that rang more, but I play in a pretty dense style most of the time and a lot of my peers do as well, and that just sounds like a muddy mess to me with no stuffing. But here's where the bluegrass banjo comparison became interesting and instructive.
The bluegrass banjo style is much more dense than any clawhammer banjo style. And they play closed-back instruments that are very loud, and those backs amplify whatever is going on in the body of the instrument. So this overtone problem should be much bigger for the bluegrass people. And yet I don't hear any muddiness from the great players in that community, and I've never known any of them to stuff their banjos with fabric. So what have they figured out that we haven't figured out? The difference is bluegrass players play with fingers posted on the head like that and other fingers picking the strings. And the fingers posted on the head do just what the stuffing does.
And I believe that if bluegrass banjo players were able to play with floating hands the way clawhammer players do, every last one of them would be stuffing way more than we ever do. And I also believe that if I could clawhammer with fingers somehow making constant contact with the head, I wouldn't feel the need to stuff with fabric. So that's what it does and why I think it is a pretty good idea and kind of necessary, really.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah, interesting. Speaking of bluegrass, so on your last album, Ricky Skaggs actually made an appearance.
Adam Hurt:
That was a huge honor. Yes.
Leah Roseman:
So he played mandolin and-
Adam Hurt:
He played mandolin on one track, yes. He's been a musical hero of mine for a long, long time, even though I don't play bluegrass music really anymore, I've long left the mandolin behind, I listen to a lot of bluegrass. And I like his take on the music in part because I hear a real old-time influence in there. And learning more about Ricky's musical life, I've understood that he did a lot of learning when he was quite young from old time fiddlers in eastern Kentucky where he grew up. So just by chance, he and I wound up having some very similar musical interests and backgrounds, even though we've taken very different directions since. So we became friendly through the current banjo player in Ricky's band, Kentucky Thunder. That banjo player is Russ Carson, who also plays great clawhammer banjo and whose father plays old-time fiddle and builds wonderful open-back banjos.
So I kind of knew their family through the old time music community. I knew Russ played good bluegrass banjo as well, but I didn't really know the level that he was at until he got the gig with Ricky. So he shared the Earth Tone CD with Ricky. And next thing I know, I'm getting a Facebook message from Ricky Skaggs asking me to tell him more about that gourd banjo, because he's been listening to the CD in their tour bus and he really likes the sound. Ricky plays clawhammer banjo too, and he wanted to get a gourd Banjo. So we just started conversing about gourd banjo and about our old time fiddle influences. And he told me that if I ever had a need for something he did musically, to please let him know. So I took him at his word and invited him to play a Kentucky fiddle tune with me, thinking that that might connect with those early influences we both shared.
And he graciously agreed to do it. He took so much time with me that day in the studio, I couldn't believe it. He really wanted to get everything just so, and it was kind of a dream to play a duet with Ricky Skaggs.
Leah Roseman:
So, many people listening to this have never heard of gourd banjo. Maybe this would be a good time to break it out.
Adam Hurt:
I'd be delighted to play some gourd banjo. Absolutely.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster who does all the many jobs required to produce the series, and there are a lot of costs I bear as well. Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip or becoming a monthly supporter, starting at $3 Canadian, which is close to $2 US or €2, and getting access to unique perks. The link is in the description. Now, back to the episode.
Hey Adam, good to see you again. It's worth mentioning to those people watching the video that, yes, we recorded this on separate days, we had to reschedule due to some unforeseen technical complications, but I'm so glad we can do this again and finish our conversation.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you. I'm delighted, Leah.
Leah Roseman:
So shall we reprise with the gourd banjo and talk about that, or do you want to go somewhere else?
Adam Hurt:
Absolutely. No, that's a great place to go. I'd gladly stay there all day. So the gourd banjo is the way that my music has become known by more people than anything else I play or do, for better or for worse, I used this gourd banjo to record a solo album in 2010, Earth Tones. And that album seems to have really spoken to people, even people who weren't really connected to the banjo or part of the banjo community. I've sort of tongue in cheek described the album to people as banjo music for those who may not like the sound of the banjo because the gourd banjo doesn't really have a stereotypical banjo sound. I've heard people liken it to classical guitar, I've heard people liken it to lute.
I mean, the repertoire and the style is familiar if you know clawhammer banjo or if you know old time music, but the particular timbre of this instrument just isn't, really. And I love it too, but the audiences for that project loved it so much that I've reprinted it a bunch of times in physical form. It's all relative, this is traditional music on a small scale, but still I've reprinted it more than I have any other of my recorded projects and it continues to sell quite well 13 years now after the fact. And people told me over and over again, and they still tell me, that they were moved by the sound of this instrument enough that I felt inspired to use it again for a second studio project, Back to the Earth, which I tracked just before everything stopped in early 2020. And the mixing had to be done remotely, which was a little bit cumbersome, but I had a wonderful engineer and I didn't have a hard-and-fast deadline, so we just kind of took our time mixing via Zoom and FaceTime and things like that.
And that project has now been out in the world a little over two years and is doing very well indeed. People seem thrilled to get to hear the unique voice of this instrument. Again, in a somewhat different context, that album is a mixture of solos and collaborations, but I love sharing this instrument with people and I'm excited to share it with your followers as well. I thought I'd play a tune from that earlier gourd banjo album. This is called Josie-O. It was played by a variety of historical fiddlers, mainly in the Kentucky and Tennessee areas, but I learned it from the playing of Art Stamper specifically, wonderful old time fiddler from Eastern Kentucky. That's Josie-O and the gourd banjo.
Leah Roseman:
Thanks so much, Adam. I'm a big fan of both Back to the Earth and Earth Tones, but Earth Tones is one of those albums I've always returned to, especially when I've just been feeling low or anxious and it's just very therapeutic, actually.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you, I'm delighted to hear that from you. It's a therapeutic experience even playing this instrument and hearing its warm tones up close. I just love everything about it.
Leah Roseman:
For those people listening who can't see, if you could describe, especially its unique, the shape, the way it was grown and all that.
Adam Hurt:
It is and I can talk a little bit about the gourd banjo in general too for those who aren't familiar with this style of instruments. This particular one was built in 2003 by luthier David Hyatt from Arkansas. And it's kind of a reimagining of the very earliest American five-string banjos and also of the West African ancestors of the modern banjo, which are still made in manners a little bit like this. So the body is made from an actual gourd grown from right out of the ground, and then a simple fretless neck is attached. This particular gourd is unusual in that it was grown for this very purpose, to become a musical instrument, not a bird feeder or something like that, birdhouse, between two boards, so the back stayed nice and flat and the overall depth could only become whatever, three inches, I guess.
So very shallow, very flat, nice to hold onto, doesn't roll around in the lap the way that the big round, pumpkin-like gourd banjos always do for me and possessing an uncommonly clear sound because the chamber is so shallow. I just thought that was the cleverest idea on the part of David to use a gourd build this way. And it's really kind of a high-performance version of the type of instrument that it is. We might hear about gourd banjos or see a gourd banjo and think, "Well, that's sort of primitive. How useful can it be as a musical tool?" But this one sounds so articulate and plays so easily, its only challenge for me as a player is one of intonation, and that would be true of any fretless instrument that one plays, and it has a long-ish scale compared to something like the violin without frets. So over the years of getting familiar with this particular banjo, my fingers have learned where to fall for things to come out nice and in tune, but that's not the most automatic experience, I will say.
I just love this instrument and I'm very, very lucky to have it. David made it originally, not for me, and not to be sold either, but to help spread his love for this style of banjo. He had a program in the early to mid 2000 through his website. I don't even think his website is still online, unfortunately. And the program has been long gone, but it was hilarious. He called it board-a-gourd, board-a-gourd. And he would send this very gourd banjo around North America in a special styrofoam container and you could sign up through his website to get on the list. And it worked kind of like a chain letter. So it went to the first person on the list, that person got to enjoy it for a couple weeks, I think, and then packed it up and didn't send it back to David, but sent it onward to the next person on the list.
And that was my first encounter with this banjo. I got in the mailing list and got to experience it in the comfort of my own home. But at one stage, some years into board-a-gourd, either it was improperly packed or it was manhandled by the carriers and it cracked. So David took it out of the program, he mended the crack in actually quite an artful way as if the gourd were made of wood, he put some inlaid bow ties along the crack. I love the way that it looks. It's probably stronger than it was before, but he did retire it from the program. And it wasn't until some years after my first experience with this banjo and its having been retired from the program that the opportunity to make this Earth Tones project came about.
And my co-producer for the project, Paul Roberts, wonderful banjo player himself, was familiar with this instrument. I had used it to make some casual sound samples for David's website. Paul had found those sound samples, so he reached out to David to see whether the banjo might be available for my further use and David very graciously allowed it to come out again for that recording project and sort of stayed here with me ever since. David said that as long as I share it with others regularly, he's happy for it to stay here, so I do that as often as I possibly can because I just love it so much.
Leah Roseman:
What a wonderful story.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Now, you had mentioned the African origins of the banjo, especially the fifth drone string. I think we should really talk about a little bit how the Black musicians in the '20s and '30s weren't recorded playing this old time music because of racism, they were playing and they were teaching the white players. And then it became associated with white players because there wasn't an awareness of these players who were so important, right?
Adam Hurt:
That's absolutely right. And it's a shame that so much music was lost that we'll never hear. Research is being done into the early Black players who weren't recorded, but who were heard by other players who did have the opportunity to record. So at least certain aspects of these musicians legacies are now able to be celebrated, but it's true that so much is lost. And I think it is very important to recognize that even though I've heard it said that the banjo is America's folk instrument, well, I guess it is in a way. It took its current shape in this country, it could not have come into existence without its West African heritage. And I think it's tragic that the banjo or the idea of the banjo, as the case may be, was brought here unwillingly through the slave trade. But I'm endlessly grateful that the enslaved people from West Africa were able to maintain this aspect of their culture and that it was able to somehow live on through such unfortunate circumstances.
The fifth string we call it today, the drone string, it could be described as more generally as far as I understand, is unique to these West African ancestors of the modern five-string banjo. Other banjo-like instruments often made from things like gourds have been observed across various cultures, but none of them have had this short drone string on the side of the neck whose pitch is static, even as the pitch of the other strings can be dynamic through the use of the fretting hand. And I just think that's the most interesting thing. The number of full-length strings, four, became standardized in America after a banjo-like instrument made its way here, but that short-drone string is carried over from West Africa. And the clawhammer style of playing also came over from West Africa.
I've seen African musicians playing banjo-like instruments in ways that look an awful lot like the clawhammer style, and even using some tunings that are reminiscent of, I thought, Appalachian tunings that I've discovered in my research of the instrument and its repertoire. So it's amazing that not all that much has changed over the centuries, and I think it's wonderful that this history is now starting to be celebrated after it was whitewashed for so very long.
Leah Roseman:
Now, this music is mostly passed on through oral tradition and it's a vast repertoire, but some people do use tablature and I know that you were gifted from Walter Koken, some of his tablature, and there's a nice story behind that in terms of your students.
Adam Hurt:
That's right. I don't-
Leah Roseman:
Behind that in terms of your students?
Adam Hurt:
That's right. I don't tend to teach with tab. I like to think, and I tell people who attend my workshops or sign up for my private lessons that I believe anyone can learn to learn by ear. I don't think learning by ear is an automatic skill that we all possess, but I think it's something that can be learned and I think it's a nice way to learn this kind of music which wasn't traditionally transcribed and which when transcribed, I think can lose a certain amount of its essence. Now that said, when I'm working with people in a workshop setting and I have this one opportunity to connect with them, I want to make sure that they have the resources they need to learn. So we will do the in-person work together by ear, and people generally are able to keep up with me even if that's not the way they're used to learning.
But then I'll often distribute tablature at the very end or email it out afterwards. I think there's a place for tablature in the learning of this music. I think it can be a handy memory aid if one doesn't want to go to the trouble of tracking down a recording of whatever tune they once knew. Maybe handy to look at a sheet of paper and be reminded of how it went. But beyond that, I don't have a lot of use for it myself. I've never really learned from tablature. When I was first getting into the banjo in a vacuum in Minnesota, not surrounded by a lot of other players, I got a few tab books and I taught myself how to read tablature, but it was still kind of hard for me. Much as reading music in any form has never come very naturally to me, that didn't either.
And I guess I'm lucky to have a quicker ear than I have an eye for it. But I will say this gift of tablature from Walt Koken, my banjo hero was such a surprise and a delight, even if it's not my typical way of acquiring repertoire for the banjo. I consider Walt Koken the greatest living claw hammer banjo player of all. His ideas are just fascinating. And the way that he plays incredibly detailed melody on the one side against incredibly driving rhythm on the other is dazzling to me. If someone were listening and not watching Walt play, they might think they were hearing two banjos at the same time. It's incredible and I hope listeners out there will check out his music.
But anyway, he shared with me this collection of tab in response to an exchange that we had had some months prior. A couple of my students who take group lessons with me on Zoom from Winnipeg got interested in Walt Koken's music. I thought they might like what he did with the banjo. And sure enough, they looked into some of his videos and his audio recordings. They really enjoyed it and they worked out one of his original tunes, the Blue Bird Rag, which is quite a stunning piece of music. And when they were finished working it out with no help from me, they sent me a beautiful video that they had made of the tune and I took the liberty of passing it along to Walt who cracked up over it. He was delighted. I think he was pretty flattered. And he asked now how do they learn that tune? Did they have a tab of it? And I said, as far as I knew, no. I certainly didn't have a tab that I was able to provide them and I didn't teach it to them either.
So next thing I knew, I was receiving a tab of the Blue Bird Rag in the mail along with a bunch of other tabs that Walt thought I would find interesting. And his tabs are a little bit like reading piano music even though there aren't two clefs, there are sort of two systems, one which is describing the fingerings used and the other, which is actually indicating the pitches and the rhythms. And the fingerings aren't normally a part of five stream banjo tab. I don't even feel like I've seen them in bluegrass banjo tab, which is typically a lot more technical than claw hammer tab. But Walt's arrangements are so elaborate that the fingering guidance is not only useful but almost necessary. So I've been working through them a measure at a time, at a very slow pace. And maybe if I practice for 10 years, I'll sound like I can sort of play his arrangements, but what a delight to receive that from my hero.
Leah Roseman:
You had mentioned growing up in Minnesota in a vacuum, and if you could speak to your experience of first going to Clifftop, which was such, it is such an important festival and how you got there and that whole experience as a young man.
Adam Hurt:
Absolutely. Clifftop was a life-changing experience and it's still my favorite musical experience of every calendar year. It has just come back this past summer after two COVID cancellations, and it's just been the most beautiful thing to see the community come back together. I think of Clifftop as kind of a microcosm of the old time community. And it seems that when people scattered far and wide or looking for one special old time music event to attend, that is the one that most of them choose. It's just an international celebration of the music that we love so much. So I had heard about Clifftop from some music friends in Minnesota, from my first banjo teacher in Minnesota, Marianne Kovatch as an event worth experiencing, but it was a 1000 miles away and I was a kid living at home and I didn't know whether this was something I could take in anytime soon, but my parents were so supportive of my interest in this music that they made Clifftop happen.
My mother took me to Clifftop the first time in 1999. We flew down from Minnesota and rented a car in West Virginia and experienced the event for several days, and I loved it so much I couldn't wait to go back. So my father drove me to Clifftop from Minnesota the next two years, 2000 and 2001, 1000 miles down and 1000 miles back. And here he was this classical violinist who was supportive of what I did, but maybe not fully getting it, dutifully sitting in his lawn chair in front of the competition stage at Clifftop, listening to the fiddle contest, listening to the banjo contest and the string band contests. He came around with me a bit through the campground as I looked for jam sessions to join. But it was an awfully selfless thing that both of my parents did taking me there.
And I'm endlessly grateful to them for it because before those experiences, I really was mostly on my own in Minnesota learning this Appalachian music. There was a bluegrass music community in the Twin Cities that I interfaced with to a limited extent. And there was a subset of that community that was interested in old time music. And I interfaced with that to a limited extent, but I was always the youngest person in that milieu. And because I was the youngest person in that milieu, I wasn't able to fully participate. I didn't have a driver's license, I didn't have a car in those early days anyway. And so I was dependent on my parents or on others to get me to music festivals, to jam sessions, to concerts, even featuring traditional music. And I was grateful to them for enabling my participation to the extent that they could.
But it was still a very different thing from being closer to the festival culture that's kind of all over the southeastern US and beyond now. The old time music community has grown a whole lot across the country and around the world since I first got involved in this music. But it was such a treat at Clifftop to be surrounded by so many people of like mind when I had been doing most of my learning and experiencing of this music at home with the stereo system and whatever CDs I learned about and could order. This was before YouTube, this was before much was going on on the internet. So I didn't even have those communities that so many of us now have and appreciate. And not only was I surrounded by like musical minds at Clifftop, a couple thousand of them in those days, it's even larger now, but there were old time musicians of all ages at that event and there still are.
And I no longer felt like this real outlier interested in this old music played by people older than I was. There were people my age at Clifftop playing great old time music. There were people younger than I was. And that continues to be the case. One of the many things that I love about the old time music community is its intergenerational nature. We come together because we love this music so much and other aspects of demographics don't really matter. Some of my dearest friends are of generations other than mine, and that's lovely, but we wouldn't have had the opportunity to intersect probably or not in this meaningful way had it not been for the music. And Clifftop was where I was able to see and appreciate that quality in the community for the first time. And it just continues to be such a remarkable thing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And speaking of your dad, I know he'd given you some early violin lessons, but you really took up the fiddle a bit later. So are you willing to place some fiddle for us today?
Adam Hurt:
And I would be delighted to. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a funny thing. My father passed away in 2009 and I sure wish I had taken advantage, maybe that sounds like an opportunistic way to describe it, but taken more advantage of his knowledge of the violin and of classical music specifically when I could because he made his living playing for the Minnesota Orchestra for 40 years. He taught violin at home all the time. I certainly knew what he was engaged with musically, but I was always a little bit removed from it. And that seemed fine at the time. But now that I'm interested in old time fiddle, I think of all of these aspects of playing the instrument that transcend the genre, technique issues. And I wish that I could get his take on them, but I'm still grateful for having had just a few months of violin lessons with him before I got involved with traditional music in any way.
I can't even remember what brought them on and I can't remember what brought them to a close either. I was, I think about eight years old because I was using a three quarter size violin that he happened to have around. And while we were working with that three quarter size violin, I was starting to outgrow it and we were thinking about getting full sized instrument and then that was kind of the end of it. So I never really got into playing classical music of any meaningful kind. But years later when I got interested in old time fiddle, I could remember kind of what he showed me about how to hold the bow and how to hold the instrument and how to get the two things working together to produce pleasing tone. So it didn't feel too much like I was having to learn the instrument from scratch.
I was able to jump sort of straight into learning the repertoire and the style and that was a whole lot more fun. But now I wish I had had several more years of classical violin instruction from him because I think I could have leveraged his ideas in useful ways. I hear a lot of former classical players who take up old time music but maybe haven't listened as deeply as they could. They still sound like violinists playing this other repertoire. And I think because I have been listening to old time music more than any other kind of music for so long, I probably could have separated the aesthetic of classical violin from the aesthetic of old time fiddle, but still benefited from the technique of the former. But here I am with just a little bit of elementary classical violin under both hands and playing old time fiddle the best that I can.
It's a constant struggle, but I love the instrument and learning to play the fiddle and learning the same repertoire on the fiddle that I've long loved on the banjo has given me kind of a different perspective on that repertoire. I think if I were just a banjo player, even if I were listening to old time fiddlers and trying to learn from them on that instrument, there's a certain layer of detail in melody and rhythm both that I would've missed altogether or at least glossed over. And I have to be aware of all of that now on this instrument. Makes it a lot harder to play, but makes the experience of learning each tune that much richer. So let me check my tuning if you don't mind.
Leah Roseman:
That's your open A tuning.
Adam Hurt:
This is the open A tuning. That's right. AE. AE. I play a lot of wonderful material out of this tuning, and I think it sounds particularly nice solo. I think some of the other tunings would have at least in my hands, a little bit of an incomplete sound without guitar support or banjo support or something. A lot of tunes in this tuning though occupy a fairly narrow range of the instrument, just an octave or so. And then it's very convenient to take that octave and move it over to the other register or back again without the fingering having to change and without the bowings having to change. But I was trying to think of a tune that kind of utilize the whole range of the tuning to share with your listeners so that they could more fully appreciate the sound of this open tuning. And I think I've picked a reasonable one for you.
This comes from West Virginia. It's one of the many tunes called Patty On The Pike. They're often, they're called Patty On The Turnpike, but this one is just Patty On The Pike. This one comes from historical Fiddler Wilson Douglas. But I learned it from my good friend Paul Brown, who's a fantastic old time fiddler and banjo player and bearer of a lot of wonderful musical traditions. It was already quite irregular in structure as played by Wilson Douglas, and I think Paul Brown may have made it irregular instructor in his own way. So this is Patty On The Pike from Wilson Douglas via Paul Brown through my own wacky filter. That's Patty on The Pike.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you. What a great tune. Love that.
Adam Hurt:
Thanks. I love it too.
Leah Roseman:
So much of this music is dance music, and I know that when you're a teenager, you were part of a flatfoot group for a while.
Adam Hurt:
That's right. I was. I was initially enlisted to accompany the flatfoot class on the banjo. They needed some sort of live music, and I knew a couple people who were involved with that class, so I was brought in on that basis. And then another class sort of evolved out of that one. There was a younger kids group and then a teenage group. And the teenage group was short the number of dancers that they needed for the kinds of routines that they were working on. So I ended up being enlisted there to do double duty, playing some banjo and also dancing.
And I'm not sure that I would've found my way to percussive dancing any other way, but I certainly enjoyed the experience and it gave me even a clearer sense of the relationship between these dance traditions and the old time fiddle and banjo tradition. I feel like the instruments and the dancers orient around the downbeat in very similar ways, and I feel like picturing dancers, whether flatfoot dancers doing individual things or square dancers, working as a unit with others helps me choose my tempos and also helps me orient myself around the downbeat in a certain way.
If a tempo is a little too fast or a little too slow, it's not going to work so well for the dancers. And if the music is maintaining time but has kind of a sluggish feeling to it, if I'm playing kind of on the backside of the beat, that's not going to work so well for the dancers either. So even though I haven't played for dancers regularly for a long time now, and even though I'm woefully out of practice as a flatfoot dancer myself, that experience still informs the way that I think about timekeeping in this music overall.
Leah Roseman:
I was just going to mention, I really love the album you made with your partner Beth, Fine Times At Our House.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
And first, I thought you had made it during the beginning of the pandemic, but I realized you'd made it earlier. And I understand there's a bit of an in joke with the title of the album.
Adam Hurt:
That's right. That's right. Well, we were wanting to create a certain mood with that little album, and we thought that that title captured the mood. Well, old time music isn't a performance music anyway, and we know that, but we really wanted to document some of our favorite pieces that we enjoy playing for our own enjoyment at home, that we enjoy relaxing with at home. And the project, I think did a pretty good job of capturing that intimate feeling, not only with just the two instruments going at once, but a sort of laid back collection of repertoire.
It was a lot of fun to put together, but the title that we chose Find Times At Our House doesn't just sum up that feeling that we were going for. It's actually the title of a fairly well known fiddle tune in the old time music tradition. It comes from West Virginia. Now the funny part about it is we chose to not record that tune on the Fine Times At Our House album, and we've had multiple people get in touch after buying the album, wondering if they were missing a bonus track or something like that. But no, we like to play that tune. We just didn't happen to like playing it by ourselves at home at the time we were preparing for the project.
Leah Roseman:
Nice. And in terms of your recordings, pretty recently you put most of them on Bandcamp, and I know you're a big fan as am I of the Bandcamp platform. If you could talk to that.
Adam Hurt:
I think Bandcamp is just a wonderful development and I guess it's been around for a number of years now, but it only really entered my frame of reference early during COVID when I was finishing up this newer gourd banjo album and looking for effective ways to market it when I wasn't going to be out and about at festivals or teaching at music camps or whatnot. And I feel like in a way, it fills the void left by CD Baby. Coincidentally, right around the start of the pandemic CD Baby shifted their business model in a way that I don't think really meets the needs of independent musicians the way that it once did. And I'm delighted that Bandcamp was there kind of waiting to pick up where CD Baby and where so many other kinds of distributors have left off and have left us hanging.
I love Bandcamp as a consumer too. Whenever I'm learning about new musicians or wanting to get to know familiar musicians better, I look there first to see if their music is available on Bandcamp. I love the listening app. It's so easy to deal with. My whole library is right there where I can find it, and I know that on both sides people are getting paid properly for their work and people aren't getting ripped off either.
When I'm buying music, I know that most of that payment is going directly to the artist and I know that the artists set the amount they're charging too. And when I'm being paid for something, likewise, I've set the price that I think is fair for my product and I'm fine with the very modest commission that Bandcamp takes from those sales. I love too this idea of Bandcamp Friday that came about during the pandemic and still continues in some form, maybe it's once a month or something like that, where Bandcamp waives its commissions on all purchases made that day and 100% of the revenue goes to the artist. That's a model that we just don't see anywhere else. But even their standard model with this modest commission beats every alternative that I'm aware of. And I've done very well on Bandcamp, only having been on there two and a half years now or so. I think it's a wonderful thing, and I hope that all of your listeners not already familiar with Bandcamp will go on there looking for old and new music to enjoy and knowing that they're obtaining it in a really sustainable way.
Leah Roseman:
I'm a big fan, and people can follow your page or my page's listeners and see what we have in our collections, and that's a very interesting way to find other music as well.
Adam Hurt:
It sure is. I love discovering new music through artists' pages on Bandcamp that I never would've encountered myself.
Leah Roseman:
Well, and listeners' pages, so people don't have to be artists, you can have a page where you publicly post or not, and you can share what you wish there, that's really cool aspect.
Adam Hurt:
It's a little bit like social media, but with music listening in mind.
Leah Roseman:
That's right. I know that you have a story, it's from a few months ago, but it's such a memorable story about a certain creature.
Adam Hurt:
Yes, goodness. This room that I'm in right now is my music room, it's my office, it's where I teach all of my lessons just over there. I have a desk and a desk chair, and that's where this computer sits when I'm doing Zoom lessons, I teach the vast majority of my lessons online. And I had a long day of lessons scheduled, this was back in the middle of October. And whenever I have many lessons stacked up, I do allow myself periodic breaks. And usually, during those breaks, I run to the post office or I run to the bank or the grocery store or have a bite to eat or whatever. But usually, I'm not home during those breaks, and this is key.
I was at home just having my lunch, the next room over, on one of these short breaks between lessons, and I heard the sound of breaking glass, not just breaking glass, shattering glass, and I thought, did a picture, a mirror or something fall off a wall. It sounded like it was close, but I couldn't quite place where it was. So I was looking around the house trying to find it, and I came back in the teaching room, and right there behind and on top of my teaching chair and all over the desk area, were millions of shards of glass and sitting on the rug, six inches behind my desk chair was the cause of this problem. Not just a bird, but a hawk, a substantial like rooster sized bird, very much alive, dazed and confused and sitting there on the floor, but looking around and probably wondering what it was doing inside this room.
It had flown through the window pane just beside where I sit. I have a very tall window there, it's six feet tall, and each pane of glass is about three feet tall, two up, two down, and one of those four panes was broken through. I had a big mess on my hands, and I also had this creature in my teaching room, and I had a lesson getting ready to start in about 15 minutes that I obviously wouldn't be able to deal with. So I was frantically communicating with anyone I could think of. I texted Beth and asked her what she thought I should do. She was at work at the time, she suggested throwing a towel over the bird to calm it down. So I thought that was a good concept generally, but this was a big bird and a towel, I don't think would've gone very far, so didn't know what else to do. I called the non-emergency police number to see if this was something animal control could help with, and they said, absolutely, they would send a bird specialist over as soon as they could get one here.
But still, here I was with the bird and the mess and a schedule of lessons ahead of me, and I didn't know what to do. So I texted my next student and let him know I have an emergency on my hands and would need to reschedule. And I described the emergency just very briefly, and he wrote back immediately and he said, "let me help, I do falconry in my spare time". What are the chances of that? So he said that Beth's advice was solid in that I needed to contain the bird, but a blanket was necessary for a bird of this size. And he told me to not just cover it up, but to weigh down the edges of the blanket so that the bird couldn't thrash about and risk injuring itself and also so that the bird couldn't see much light. He said that the bird would be drawn to go to the light anywhere it could see it.
I did that and I stood on part of the blanket and put furniture on other parts of the blanket until the bird specialist arrived about 20 minutes later. He came with his big beautiful leather gloves, and he was so slow and gentle and kind, and he got the bird out from under the blanket, and we took the bird out to my backyard, which backs up to some woods, and he opened his hands and the bird immediately took flight. And the bird hung out in those trees for the next few hours, I kept going back out to check, and then finally it was gone. And the specialist said that if the bird had stayed there until the next day, I should get back in touch and maybe it would need some rehabilitation. But I'm hopeful that all is well and that the hawk is back in the woods where it belongs.
But if I had been teaching while that had been going on, it would've been a nightmare glass all over me, all over my instruments, and probably a pretty traumatic experience for me as well as for the hawk. And if I had been out of the house, even on a little errand run, the hawk could have made an incredible mess of my music room. All of my instruments were out, the gourd banjo was out, the fiddle was sitting on the desk, my computer was sitting on the desk. It was just a very lucky series of circumstances, and hopefully it was lucky even for the hawk because we were able to get it back out fairly expeditiously. But an unforgettable moment, and if any of your listeners are connected to me on Facebook, I posted some photographs of the whole experience, including the incredibly shattered window and the aftermath of the bird taking flight.
Leah Roseman:
What an incredible circumstance, a coincidence of your student being a falconer. What are the chances of that?
Adam Hurt:
What are the chances of that? Just unbelievable. And I remind him of that every time we've met up since then, how lucky I was.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to ask you one question about teaching, and after that I was hoping you could play one more banjo tune to close out this conversation. My question is about the ... because you started teaching online before the rest of us did because you found the necessity to do that. And I know you use recordings like a fiddle tunes to help your banjo students, if you could speak to how you do that.
Adam Hurt:
I do. Well, I have a lot of feelings about banjo players just listening to and learning from other banjo players. Even though I think of myself as playing in a pretty content rich way on the banjo, some might term it melodic claw hammer, I try to not categorize myself too much. There are limitations to this instrument in terms of the note sequences that it can and can't so easily render, and the fiddle doesn't have any such limitations. So when I'm learning fiddle tunes on the banjo, I'm always having to make little adjustments to suit the instrument that I'm playing. And that's fine, and that's the way that all banjo players in this style seem to have to work. But if the chain of learning keeps going from banjo to banjo, well, that next banjo player is, even though learning from the same instrument, probably going to pair down the melody a little bit more.
Next banjo player in the line pairs it down a little bit more. A few generations down the line were left with something wonderfully rhythmic, but without a whole lot of identifying detail, otherwise. And there's a little bit of a stereotype about this music that I've heard, which is, all of the tunes sound the same, didn't you just play that one? Or you know what the difference is between one old time tune and the next, the title? Those are all jokes that I've heard, and in a way I can hear where they're coming from, but I think there's so much beauty and diversity in the detail of these tunes. And I feel like it's my job to understand how they work in their purest setting, the fiddle, and maintain as much of that character on the other instruments as I possibly can.
All of this is to say that when my banjo students have achieved a certain level of facility on the instrument, when I feel like they're technical toolkits are mostly complete and we're focused more on just learning repertoire and learning more about old time styles, I start teaching them, not universally, but from time to time from the fiddle. I'll record new material that I want them to work out on that instrument and I'll ask them to be as faithful to the melody and the rhythm of that instrument as they think they can be using the other instrument. And then after they've come back with their first draft interpretation of that fiddle tune, I give them my take on what I feel has gone well and what could maybe be improved. And if they haven't been especially faithful to the fiddle tune, maybe without realizing it, I will play a little bit on the fiddle where our parts differ and see if they can match or at least mimic what I'm doing a little bit more closely.
It's great fun because it does fill them in on all of the detail in that tune, some of which would've been missing if they had learned the same tune from me on the banjo. It gets them curious about listening for such detail on their own outside of the context of a lesson. It shows them that even though the two instruments aren't the same as each other, they're each other's best musical friend. I described the old time fiddle and the claw hammer banjo as speaking different dialects of the same language, not the same language, but not totally foreign languages either. And it also gives these learners more agency over their own way of playing the banjo rather than just following what I'm doing to a T, they're having to draw their own conclusions about what they're hearing. They're having to make choices that suit the instrument that they're playing without my choices informing everything that they do.
And suddenly, these people start to sound like themselves rather than like people who are learning the banjo from me and who were learning my arrangements. It's huge fun for me, I think it's fun for them, I haven't gotten any complaints so far. I think some of them worry about whether they're up to the challenge of following an instrument that they might not know anything about. But so far, everyone has been able to do it, and it's become one of my favorite modes of teaching, really. The only thing that would make it better is if we weren't meeting for the most part online, we could play together in real time in the same space and work out the piece even a little bit more dynamically.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm. It's wonderful what you said about your students sounding like themselves and not just trying to imitate you. That's really a great goal, for any teacher.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you. I think so too, and especially in traditional music where none of this repertoire must go a certain way. It's never been transcribed in a specific way, everyone who plays it has their own personal take on it. All of the icons of this music, newer ones and older ones, have become that way because they have such identifiable personal styles, they don't sound like everybody else. And so why would any of us learning the music today just want to sound like somebody else rather than ourselves? I think it's important to study the old players. I think it's important too, and fun to study the newer players and just get windows into what all of these people are doing with the music and with their instruments. But then it is more interesting to take what we've learned from these players and let it coalesce into something that's uniquely ours.
If people familiar with old time music and with claw hammer banjo listen to some of the arrangements that I've recorded, they'd be able to pinpoint specific influences. There's something drawn from the playing of Tommy Jarrell, there's something drawn from the playing of Kyle Creed, maybe there's something drawn from the playing of Walt Koken even. But I'm never trying to play exactly as one of my influences did, not that I really could, I could maybe get the notes and the rhythms, but there would still be a difference because I'm not that person. So I think it's our jobs as instructors to encourage our students to personalize this music in appropriate ways, but just to make it one with themselves and not this remote thing that they do, but that they are not, if that makes sense, a little bit tricky to describe.
Leah Roseman:
That's beautifully expressed, Adam, thank you.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
What tune are you going to play?
Adam Hurt:
Well, you had asked in our correspondence preparing for this session whether I might play Snowdrop, this is a tune that I've included in various sessions like ours. This is a tune that I perform a lot, and yet for me, it never gets old. Hopefully, if your listeners have heard me do it before, it won't be old news for them either. I actually love it so much that I've recorded it, not once, but twice. My first CD project came out in 2002 and it went out of print before iTunes or anything like that, so it's just not available anywhere, and I'm fine with that, I put it out a little too early, I think.
But on that CD, I recorded Snowdrop, and it's a tune that I've continued to just adore 20 some years after I first encountered it. And I thought when preparing for my Artifacts CD project, which came out in 2016, it's a shame that I wasted that wonderful tune on that old CD before I was really ready to make a CD project. And before I fully appreciated how special this tune is and how here I am still enjoying playing it and getting to know it in different ways, so I decided I would record it again, why not? Hopefully, not too many people heard that early rendition. Hopefully, some people have enjoyed it on Artifacts, but it continues to grow and change under my fingers every time I play it. I don't often play it on this particular banjo, the old Dobson banjo, but this banjo has a wonderful voice for it too. And sometimes the voice of the particular instrument I'm playing inspires me to treat the piece a little bit differently.
I was just delighted that you suggested it and I'm happy to play it now. Unlike a lot of what I play, Snowdrop was a banjo tune to begin with. This is a banjo tune that was composed by Kirk McGee who played on the Grand Ole Opry in its early days. And he wrote it in an old time finger style, not bluegrass banjo, but not claw hammer either. And I don't remember having heard it played by a claw hammer player before I worked out my arrangement of it. And I worked it out following some finger style banjo recordings. But I've tried to capture a little bit of the character of that right-hand approach in my very different right-hand approach. I've heard subsequent to my first recording of it, a bunch of other really nice claw hammered versions of the piece, so I'm glad that our segment of the old time banjo community has discovered and embraced this beautiful piece. But in any case, here it is, Snowdrop.
Leah Roseman:
Gorgeous, thanks so much.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you, just a delight to play that, always is.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for sharing your joy of music, your generosity with your performances and all your stories. And I'm sure this is going to be such an interesting episode for people who've never heard old time as well as your fans.
Adam Hurt:
Thank you, Leah. I hope that it opens your listeners to a genre that has really changed my life for the better, and I look forward to hearing the finished product myself.
Leah Roseman:
If you enjoyed this episode, you may be interested in some of my episodes with other traditional musicians, including Janie Rothfield and Alex Chartrand. I continue to feature a wide variety of musicians worldwide with some nice surprises coming your way in Season Three. If you subscribe to my newsletter through my website, leahroseman.com, you'll get exclusive sneak peeks for upcoming episodes. Thanks so much for following this podcast, and have a great week.
