Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 11, 1994 TAG: 9411110032
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
DON'T ASK Joe Ayers about the history of banjo music in America unless you've got time.
Like maybe a week.
Really. Ayers, a 45-year-old musician based in Bremo Bluff in Fluvanna County, not only plays the banjo and most anything else with strings on it, but he's a walking library of banjo lore and pre-Civil War American music.
Ayers and his Tuckahoe Social Orchestra will perform a concert of ante-bellum American popular music Monday night at 7:30 at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Rocky Mount.
Titled ``The Essence of Old Virginny and All That Jazz,'' the program will spotlight music that Americans enjoyed around the year 1850.
Ayers, whose painstakingly authentic performances are documented on the new Rounder compact disc ``Minstrel Banjo Style,'' says the first music he played was rock 'n' roll back in the '60s.
``But I was a history major, not a music major, and when I got into rock 'n' roll I couldn't avoid trying to find out just what its roots were. And I discovered that rock leads back to rhythm and blues, which leads back to country blues, which leads back to early jazz, which leads back to ragtime, which leads back to the old minstrel shows,'' said Ayers.
``That same back beat that Chuck Berry put into his rock 'n' roll he got from rhythm and blues and early ragtime - it's all part of this African interpretation of rhythm that flows through all this music from the beginning.''
For over a decade, Ayers has been a one-man scholarship-and-performance industry. As a solo act he performs as Professor Tuckahoe, and tours with a larger mixed ensemble called the Tuckahoe Social Orchestra. All musicians in both acts appear in carefully researched 19th-century costume.
Ayers also serves frequently as a consultant on 19th- century American music for PBS, NBC Television, the National Park Service and other organizations. He was the subject of a National Geographic film six years ago and has appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine.
He has also republished some historic and nearly forgotten early banjo methods, including the ``Briggs' Banjo Instructor'' of 1855 and ``Converse's New and Complete Method for the Banjo'' of 1865. In both cases Ayers was the first person to make the books available again in this century.
His five-volume recording series, ``Early Banjo Classics'' is the most comprehensive anthology of early banjo music produced in the United States. First available on cassette, the series is now being released in CD format.
Ayers got the name for his larger group from an 1850's collection called ``Foster's Social Orchestra,'' which was a book of quadrilles, waltzes and cotillions. The instrumentation of the Tuckahoe Social Orchestra is what would typically have been heard around the administration of president Millard Fillmore: banjo, cornet, baritone horn, flute, clarinet, violin, accordion and guitar.
Most band members come from Ayers' own family, whose offspring range from 9 to 26 years of age. The group will consist of four or five players when they come to Rocky Mount Monday night.
``We'll be doing popular dance music of this period. There'll be waltzes, polkas, parlor music that's very formally sung in the style of the day, and music of the popular stage,'' said Ayers.
Years of research in dusty library stacks have convinced the musician that folklorists in the past few decades have largely overlooked a valuable resource for reconstructing what early American music sounded like.
``I have come at this in a new approach, quite different from what Mike Seeger and the folk music people have done. They've gone and tried to find live bodies in distant hollows who said, `I learned this from my grandfather.'
``That certainly has its value. But I went back and found the books that their great-grand-daddies would have learned out of,'' said Ayers.
``I'll say it right out: I favor a written tradition. We have, for example, the first banjo version of `Turkey in the Straw' ever put in print. All the others in a sense stem from that one in one way or another.''
If you've never heard authentically performed early American popular music, Ayers says you should be prepared for something that's very different - and yet strangely familiar.
``Some things you'll recognize; others will sound very strange. It's a composite of a lot of things that are going to come after it,'' said the musician.
In particular, Ayers says that the minstrel band style is ``the foundation for all the modern American genres of music,'' from bluegrass and country to ragtime, jazz and even rap music.
Ayers believes that the minstrel tradition has been misunderstood by those scholars who see it as unrelievedly racist. It does contain some racist elements, Ayers said, but it also contains frank acknowledgement of black musical genius.
``[The composer] Antonin Dvorak came here late in the 19th century and said the only true native music of value he heard was from African-Americans. But the minstrel performers realized Dvorak's truth about black music long before he did, as early as 1850. Many of these tunes constitute the first written transcription of music coming from African-Americans,'' said Ayers.
Bill Gwaltney, superintendent of Booker T. Washington National Monument, also will be present at the concert to answer questions about the folklore of the period.
Editor and writer David Bovenizer of Crozier is one person who's heard and enjoyed Ayers' music. For several years Bovenizer has hired the Tuckahoe Social Orchestra to play at a social event at his home, Willie Pie's Store, in Goochland County.
``Joe has somehow maintained historical consciousness out of which the music arises. He not only talks about the ante- bellum South, he somehow embodies the spirit of it, the frame of mind of it, and instinctively articulates the convictions of it,'' said Bovenizer.
by CNB