The Banjo as an Instrument of Liberation

When my daughter set up Tales from under Blackhill for me some time back all I knew was that after five years of not writing anything the time had come to return to the keyboard. I had no idea about what to put in a profile or how the blog would develop and so I included a mention of occasional references to the banjo. The time has come for an explanation.

Unlike so many politicians, most of whom are sadly, a long way off retirement, and probably have jobs and income which make their work fairly rewarding, I have always been a firm believer in retirement. I deliberately worked towards this end for many years and although I like to think I was pretty good at my job, I always felt there were other things I might do just as well, but would enjoy more. As my chosen time of retirement approached I was glad that I had the choice to go a bit earlier as the prospect of another five years on the educational conveyor belt was not an attractive proposition. I wonder whether all the advocates for raising the retirement age will feel the same as they approach their sixties?

Plans are always so attractive and I was quite prepared for the great retirement plan to hit the rocks at some point. The idealised image of my retired self which accompanied the concluding years of employment was that of sitting in a chair, in a bib and brace overall, with a banjo. I would like to have placed this image on a veranda on a silent, dry afternoon with just the crickets for the rhythm section, but that was going a bit too far.

Nevertheless, the new banjo already purchased, the day of liberation arrived. Sadly the number of hot dry afternoons over the past few years has not been very many and as with most of my DIY, the veranda has not got beyond the planning stage. But the banjo playing has come on a treat in so far as self amusement is concerned. When I say ‘come on a treat’, I mean that its five strings and its open back sound has accompanied me into a liberated life, which is now proving to be the true reward for what I look back on as a lifetime of obstacles, irritations and frustrations. Not from the many students that I had the privilege to teach, many of whom said thanks, but with the dunderheads who thought they knew how to run a teaching environment and were only trying to run the show because they neither liked, nor could perform, other than in a mediocre fashion, the teaching function. There were of course some notable exceptions but unfortunately they were in the minority.

So for me the banjo is my symbol of liberation which is apt, as the instrument comes to us through slavery. It is an African instrument thought to have originated in the Gambia. With the liberation of the slaves the banjo soon found its place in New Orleans Jazz. Those early jazz musicians, so close to their slave forbears, expressed their freedom in a way which I first heard in the late fifties and which continues to set my feet tapping. I later discovered white banjo music through the civil rights music of Pete Seeger and in the Britain of the sixties, the playing of Peggy Seeger which so often accompanied much of Ewan Mc Coll’s repertoire. I will never be bored with the instrument. It is rather like my public speaking, more suited to rabble rousing rather than the refined after dinner speech, and I love it for that, if nothing else. One day I will find a tutor and have a lesson but in the meantime my DIY veranda awaits and I am still waiting for that long hot summer afternoon with the crickets in rhythm section.

Dacier