Clawhammer

Clawhammer, also called frailing or rapping, is a downstroke technique for playing the five-string banjo. The player strikes the strings downward with the back of a fingernail and sounds the short fifth string with the thumb.^[1:1][2:1] It has roots in African and African American banjo playing, and Cece Conway and Scott Odell describe it as the oldest style used by both Black and white players. Rural southern musicians kept it alive long after it had faded from the stage.^[3:1][4:1] Clawhammer is closely associated with old-time music, and contrasts with the up-picking three-finger Scruggs style of bluegrass.^[2:1]

Technique

Pete Seeger's 1954 instruction record taught frailing in a few steps:

• strike down on a string with the back of the fingernail of the index or middle finger;
• with the same fingernail, brush down across the top strings;
• sound the fifth string with the thumb.

Notes fretted by the left hand with hammer-ons and pull-offs can be worked into the pattern. Seeger noted that although frailed notes might look the same on paper as picked ones, they "sound differently". He called frailing the best way to play many fast square-dance tunes, such as "Cripple Creek".^[1:1]

The modern names have older equivalents. Clawhammer, rapping and frailing share their fundamentals with the 19th-century downstroke techniques called "banjo style", "stroke style" or "thimble style". Some musicians combine downstroke playing with finger-picking.^[2:1] Clawhammer players use a variety of tunings. Rufus Crisp of Kentucky, for example, played "Walk Light Ladies" in "double C" (gCGCD).^[2:2] Conway and Odell list special tunings among the features of the old fretless, short-drone-string banjo tradition, along with its "thumping" downstroke style.^[3:1]

History

African and African American origins

Africans brought the gourd ancestor of the banjo to the Americas in the 17th century.^[3:1] The best-documented early form had a neck running through a gourd body covered with hide, and four strings: three long strings and a short "thumb string".^[2:3] Early accounts describe Black musicians playing a three- or four-string gourd banjar with a short thumb-string drone. Conway and Odell describe its playing style as similar to downstroking clawhammer, "the oldest style used by both Whites and Blacks". The banjo and the African American "knocking-on" or "thumping" style of playing began to take hold among white players by the 1830s.^[3:1]

Minstrelsy and the stroke style

The blackface minstrel show popularized the banjo in the United States from the 1840s. That popularity gave rise to banjo traditions in white and Black folk culture as well as in popular culture.^[4:1] Joel Walker Sweeney, who performed with the banjo from as early as 1836, is largely credited with the instrument's popularity in minstrelsy.^[2:3]

Minstrel players used the downstroke "stroke style". Briggs' Banjo Instructor (1855) was the first tutor to describe and show it clearly. Tom Briggs is credited with "thimble playing", a version of the stroke style using a metal pick worn over the nail, which spread widely among stage performers.^[4:2] Rural southern folk musicians went on playing the early minstrel style, now known as clawhammer or frailing, long after it had declined on the stage and in the parlor traditions of the 1880s.^[4:1]

Folk tradition and decline

According to Ralph Rinzler and Mike Seeger, rural southerners learned the old African-based "rapping" or "frailing" style both from Black musicians and from white minstrel-style performers.^[5:1] Black banjo playing began to decline in the first decade of the 20th century. Amid minstrel stereotyping, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws, many Black musicians turned to the inexpensive mail-order guitar. Few Black banjo players were recorded commercially in the 1920s and 1930s, and by the 1970s the tradition in North Carolina had nearly died out.^[3:2]

In the mid-20th century some three-finger pickers in North Carolina also played in the older rapping style. On a 1956 recording Oren Jenkins played "Cripple Creek" first in three-finger style and then briefly in rapping style. Mike Seeger noted that the ability to play both styles well had become rare among younger players.^[5:2]

Revival and later developments

Pete Seeger's 1954 instruction record, which taught frailing, was designed to accompany his self-published manual How to Play the 5-String Banjo.^[1] The manual became a highly influential primer for urban banjo players of the folk revival and after.^[2:4] In the 1970s and 1980s Ken Perlman adapted clawhammer to play melodies note for note, instead of using the banjo to accompany a fiddler, an approach called "melodic clawhammer".^[2:2]

Wikidata: Q2978696