Lee Hammons: Very Old-Time Banjo
His banjo style was transcendent, but his fiddling taught me something else
Mr. Hammons, which is what we called him, was born May 29th in, I believe, 1884.
Mr. Lee Hammons, ca. 1973, Marlinton, West Virginia.
The reason I figure it was 1884 (rather than other cited dates 1883 or 1886) is entirely personal.
I was present at what was Lee's 88th birthday celebration. Odell & Mata McGuire and a bunch of us gathered at Lee's little house up in Marlinton, WV, bearing a sheet cake Mata had baked to mark the occasion. That was 1972.
Mr. Hammons quit playing the banjo in 1928 when he fired the person in his lumber camp who owned the banjo in the county.
And didn't take it up again for forty years.
It was Dwight Diller who after years of badgering, finally just left a banjo under Lee's bed (just for safekeeping–saying he was worried about leaving it in his house while he was out on tour and would Mr. Hammons look after it). It was a cheap little Sears banjo with a bakelite rim and a skinhead, but it was tuned and ready to go.
When Dwight got back from the tour, Mr. Hammons was playing.
The only music Mr. Hammons would have heard–the only banjo styles he would have encountered before 1928 –would have been within about a two-hour walk of where he was. Period. No electricity. No touring tent shows.
Nothing but the silence of the West Virginia mountains bounded him.
So, when he picked up the banjo again in 1968, he instantly transported us all back in time. No modern player touched a banjo like Mr. Hammons did.
Lee blew out the few candles on the cake and we chatted and talked. Some music was played.
Someone, I believe it might have been Chris Murray, asked if Mr. Hammons played the fiddle. To our surprise, he accepted the offered fiddle and tucked it under his chin.
Over the next few minutes, Mr. Hammons dragged the bow across the strings of that fiddle, testing the tuning, getting a feel for it. And then he played a tune.
And there was nothing objectively 'right' about it–the tone was abysmal; the fretted notes out of tune; the rhythm, erratic. It was clear he hadn't had a fiddle in his hands in a very long time.
But that didn't stop him.
And yet it was the most tangible music I had ever heard. It was so physically present that you could almost reach out in the air and touch it.
Here was Mr. Hammons, not trying to play the fiddle, but playing it with whatever technique he had available. He was saying his piece. It was his moment. His playing was a personal statement that carried the weight of his continuing presence on earth.
That sound–that moment–jerked me out of my musical judgments about tone, pitch, and rhythm, and astonished me. It taught me something about music, a tangible intangible: one must show up.
And so it was revealed.
I have never been the same since.
Mr. Lee Hammons, Walkin' in the Parlor, courtesy of Brad Leftwich :
I appreciate it when you’re able to share audio of the musician.
Sometimes it is more important to witness than to participate.
Cheers.