Bob Black: Transcript

Bluegrass banjo player
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My name is Bob Black and I grew up in Shenandoah, Iowa. I now live in Eastern Iowa near the Iowa City area, near a town called North English.

I got started playing banjo in the mid-60s, mid-1960s, when a friend of mine purchased some records. One of the records was by a group called the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers. (Music) We got to listening to it. And we just went crazy over it because it had all these bluegrass standards, bluegrass favorites, and we loved it. And so I decided to learn how to play the banjo, mainly from that album. (Music)

I was a middle-class kid from Des Moines, Iowa, and had never really heard bluegrass before. And I just got really fired up on it. I had had some music lessons before. I had taken violin lessons for a couple years. And my mother played the piano a little bit. But aside from that, I didn't really have much musical background before that. (Music)

I started playing kind of Pete Seeger style, and then, later on, I learned the three-finger style. (Music) Really, there are two major styles of banjo playing for five-string banjo, which is the folk instrument: what they call frailing, or the—another common term for that is clawhammer style. And they arrive at that term because your thumb is kind of coming down and hitting the fifth string on the banjo, and it's plucking it upwards. And it's sort of—it's reminiscent of a clawhammer. I guess that's how they arrived at that name.

But you have that style, and then you have the finger style, which involves either two-finger, which would be thumb and index finger, or three-finger, which is thumb and your first two fingers. And the finger style banjo has been around just as long as the clawhammer or frailing style banjo. But during the 1960s, Earl Scruggs sort of popularized the three-finger style. That's the style that you hear most these days is the Earl Scruggs three-finger style. And that's the style I play. And there are different offshoots of that style, too. (Music)

I moved to Nashville in the mid-70s and joined Bill Monroe's band, the Bluegrass Boys. And I played with Bill for two years and traveled all over the world. (Music)

Here in Iowa, I have a real life. In Nashville, there's a lot of musicians that live in Nashville who just play with whoever they can get a job with at the time, and they stay for a while. They have to always be available, and it's kind of a dog-eat-dog town. And it's like you don't really have a life down there. I suppose some people do, but that wasn't me in those days, anyway. So I was glad to come back up to Iowa.

Living in Iowa, I find myself able to play more of my own original material. If I—you know, if I had stayed in Nashville, I'd probably be working as a side man in lots of different groups. And I'd never get a chance to do my own material. This is sort of like a home base for me. And I can play in other groups, such as—there's this one group I play in called Perfect Strangers. We are from all over the country. And we always—we fly in and play our shows and fly back home again. And so that gives me a chance to—so I still get to travel all over the country playing with that group. So I'm sort of having the best of both worlds here, because I can have a real life here in Iowa, and yet, at the same time, I can still travel all over the country.