Clawhammer Style Banjo: A Complete Guide for Beginning and Advanced Banjo Players

Clawhammer or frailing, as it is sometimes called, is the one purely American style of playing what is probably the one truly American instrument. Developed by southern blacks in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, clawhammer was already a staple of southern plantation music at the time of the American Revolution. By 1800 clawhammer style was featured prominently in minstrel shows. "Clawhammer-Style Banjo" is a just-about complete guide to clawhammer-banjo playing. It presents, in one unified format, an approach that combines elements of the old minstrel-show style, the surviving traditional southern solo style and the more contemporary "melodic" style. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 "Getting Started" introduces you to the banjo, basic left and right-hand positions, simple chords, fundamental clawhammer techniques and contains nearly thirty payable tunes that help you assimilate techniques. Part 2 "Playin' the Banjo" introduces double-thumbing and covers such areas as quick slides, fretted pull-offs, alternate string pull-offs, triplets, syncopation, M-arpeggio and T-crossover. The techniques in part 2 are illustrated by over fifty tunes and pieces.