Jerron Paxton
Appearances
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Yeah, this banjo I brought with me here is one I've been playing for a while. It's an 1848 model banjo, a stickter model banjo, as they call it. They don't know how popular these things got, but I like the way they're constructed. They tend to produce a mighty sound.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
I don't play a banjo with steel strings. All my banjo have gut or nylon strings. Even the fretted banjo I played have gut or nylon strings. Just produce a better sound. I think it was only the Gibson Banjo Company that produced... banjos that left the factory with steel strings. I think every other company had gut strings on their banjos until the post-war time.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
I think it's very true, especially on the modern banjo. You know, most Gibson-based banjos only have one color to paint with. And it's a mighty beautiful color, especially with bluegrass music. But I feel that the nylon strength gives you so much more control of color that you can paint with the banjo that it ends up being a lot more expressive.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
All right. The stroke style is what they called in books published at the time is I guess what they call claw hammer banjo now or frailing or whatever. And I think most of those words can be traced back to none other than the great New Yorker Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger had a big influence on banjo culture, much bigger than he's given credit for.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
given credit for, which I think includes finding those words and making them ubiquitous among banjo players. But the stroke style is you stroke the string with the tops of your fingers rather than picking it like that with each individual finger. You hit it with the top. And you can hear the difference between picking and
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Each one of those stroke notes have a little bit punchier sound and you combine that with the way you play with your thumb and you get a nice cross-cultural reference here. Ah, that's called brand new shoes.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Oh, yes. Well, I did, and I think I practiced the stuff I'm the most comfortable with, you know, the stuff I could talk over and play for you. I think most of that stuff and stuff in that vein, I learned... Through muscle memory, there's a certain point where you have to sit down and really study.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
You've got to be focused for about 45 minutes and figure out all the funny turns and twists as to what you have to do and how to position your hand, all these things that go into being a great musician.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
One thing that people tend to overlook that I found the most valuable was after I had done that, I would put on The Simpsons or King of the Hill and for an hour or two, you know, after supper, just rap on my banjo and play the guitar and things like that and watch these programs. And, you know, my folks would say, how are you going to play music and watch TV at the same time? I say, well.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Oh, I got to, you know, if I'm going to get these two things I really enjoy out the way, playing music and watching TV.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Exactly. And it also makes the music become a part of you, you know, because if I get to a point where everything stays groovy while playing, the active listening part of my brain is focused somewhere else. Well, the music is an actual part of me. It's like my heartbeat. It's like my breath. It's something that can just happen without me... Willing it, absolutely.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And when that starts to happen, then you get an opportunity to be real inventive with what's in you.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Man, when I came up, all the 78s had been pilfered out of my neighborhood. And I'd love to imagine a world where, you know, there are these $10,000 country blues records just floating around the hood. And all my neighbors, oh, yeah, I've got all my Lemon Jeffersons and Mama's, you know, Mama's Blues records sitting back here. You know, that has happened before, but it's not frequent.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
You know, I really wish I could have learned from a stack of extremely valuable 78s. That's not the case. Poor people didn't really have the Internet until I'd say around—in my area, they didn't have the Internet until around 2004, 2005. and I was about 15 to 16 then, so I had a bit more access to it back then.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
But, you know, I remember going to the local swap meets and just asked for what CDs they had of the blues, and I'd look and see if there was any names I'd recognize, and if there were, like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee or Big Bill Brunzi or something like that, I'd take them home with me. And also, I'd say one of the biggest...
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
exposures I had to that good music was all those wonderful documentaries that came out on public television about the blues and things like that. You not only got to hear the people, but you got to see them. So there was a few. And then, you know, you get a list of names and, you know, found out that you were listening to something like Bucka White. I was listening to him my whole life.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Scott Dunbar I had to come up on later. But then, you know, I remember getting Charlie Patton's name and, you know,
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
writing down my list of people to look up and then going to my auntie's house who had the internet and listening to 30-second samples and say, oh, that sounds good, and asking for a bunch of records during the holidays and consuming them for the rest of the year and reading all the little pamphlets that came in the records so you know a little bit about the person's life.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And that's kind of how I got my start with delving into the artists.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Yes, sir. Johnny is a great influence. That Louisiana culture has been in Los Angeles for several generations. You could always meet people who made the big trek from Louisiana, just like my family did in the 50s. People made that transition, some of them in the teens, some of them in the 1890s, if you go back. way far back.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And Johnny was one of them that came in the 50s and came like everybody else looking for work and then ended up finding it as a musician, which is something he pretty much gave up because I got to see one of his business cards and there's nothing that mentions music. It said, Johnny St. Cyr, general workman, does general jobs.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Oh no, not a bit. She's a mud cooker. Let's see.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Well, I'd had trouble with my peripheral vision my whole life. But then I had two different eye diseases that started to mess with my central vision. And once that started to happen, the problems with my peripheral vision got to be terrible. pretty unavoidable and, you know, in some places got to be a little bit hazardous, you know.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
I don't know if you know, but people from South Central, especially during the day and time I grew up, we didn't move too much. And Los Angeles being a big driving culture, you sure didn't walk any place. You know, I left as an 18-year-old having, I think, maybe walked a mile in my neighborhood and could count the times I did that on one hand.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
So, you know, things like curbs were a bit unfamiliar to me. So, you know, imagine a pretty healthy strapping boy just kind of bumbling and falling all over the place. That's what I was up to for a little while.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
It's about the same. I still have big troubles with my peripheral vision, which stops me from driving. My central vision, I think it's better than what it was, but part of that is the technology has improved. I used to go around New York City with a little small telescope around my neck to see things like, you know, train signs and street signs and things like that now.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
But now that, you know, now that I'm an iPhone user, which I never thought I would be, you know, I could zoom in on something 10 times and that's actually a lot more handy than this little telescope I was using. So things like that and Google Maps has made the Well, I think because of your eyesight, you had to reconsider what you wanted to do for work. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
I was going to drive trains and things like that. And, you know, I'd probably have done some of the other laboring jobs that most of the folks in my family have done. But when I say not being able to drive is just about the biggest disability I have, it's really true. You know, bumping into things and not being able to recognize people and is inconvenient and things like that.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
But the one thing that kind of stopped me from doing exactly what I wanted in the world was not being able to drive. I couldn't be a plumber without a truck. I couldn't be a farmer without a truck. A lot of those jobs aren't available if you can't drive, especially in a place like Los Angeles.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
So that's one of the reasons I moved to New York City was a place where not being able to drive wasn't really a disability. And it's one of the reasons I loved this city and stayed here for so long.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Oh, yeah, I think so. As much as people who like rural music tend to get stereotypes as loving songs about trains and mama, you can't help it, I don't think. But if I find a good train song, I'll sit and listen to it for a good while.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Oh, well, my favorite is probably the Pullman Passenger Train. which I can't do here. Let's see.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Oh, yeah. It's not sounding like I'm playing two different parts.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Fair enough. Let's see. Maybe I'll start off this way. Oh, that harmonica's been set on. Hold on. Oh, that one's been set on, too.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Yeah, songwriting is a funny part of the life of a folk musician. Most of us folk musicians tend to play our culturally inherited music, which isn't quite the same as doing covers of other people's music, but... You know, you play music that's reflective of your culture. And I've mostly done that. And every once in a while something will inspire me and it'll stick around.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
In the words of Fats Waller, it's easy to do when you know how.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Hey, there's a lot of different ways to skin a cat and entertain the audience.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
You know, I got to the state to go to college in Poughkeepsie, New York, and one trip down kind of made that realization. So I didn't cross the country because I figured New York would be a good place to get along as a visually impaired person. But once I got to the other side of the country and took a trip down to New York City, it was like, oh, I didn't need a taxi cab or cell phone or anything.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
I just, you know, ooh, you remember MapQuest, I bet. So I remember looking some directions up on MapQuest about how to get to the Jalopy Theater from Poughkeepsie, New York. And after that, I was like, all right, I guess I could be independent.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
One of my heroes is Fats Waller, and even a bigger hero than him is someone who's still alive, which is Mr. Dick Hyman. I kind of got drawn to New York because I heard, oh, there's a jazz school. I later found out this wasn't true, and Mr. Dick Hyman had moved to Florida at the time, I say. But I got...
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
New York got on my radar because I heard there were some schools out here, some jazz schools, where they'll find somebody who plays a style you love and get them to teach you. And I was like, oh, well, if I could study with Dick Hyman, I'd be great. Because I don't know if you know Dick Hyman, but he's... He's just a master of all the great styles of jazz piano.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And, you know, I was casually listening to an Art Tatum interview, and he was talking about all the great musicians he'd sit and listen to. And he'd say, oh, have you heard this young cat called Dick Hyman? He's just a fantastic musician. Now, when Art Tatum is singing your praises. You know you the cat's pajamas, you understand.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And so I'd say even more so than Fats Waller, who is, I'd say he's pretty low on my list of my favorite stride pianos. I think the first one I noticed was Willie Lyon Smith. I think my most favorite is probably Lucky Roberts. And then right after him would be James P. Johnson because James is just a master at a piano. And, you know, Fats Waller sounds like a human version of James P. Johnson.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
So I figured if I wanted to sound like James P. Johnson and I, you know, shooting for the moon and missing, I'd land amongst Fats Waller and be able to write a handful of keys and ain't misbehaving and things like that.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Ain't that pretty good? He did better than his mentor, as a matter of fact. In certain ways, he was more famous and more known today than James P. Johnson, although I think James P. 's royalty checks outdoes anybody's.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And, you know, I like writing music based on inspiration. More so than anything. So a few of these songs, most of these songs, if not all of these songs, came from a little bit of inspiration and at least a little bit of inspiration and also at least a little bit of pushing the pencil along the page, I think, as Irving Berlin said.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Oh, yes. New York was a good town for the music I was getting into at that time, which was jazz. You know, there were some great musicians in Los Angeles, but very clearly not enough action down there for a person who, like I said, couldn't drive around town to support a livelihood. But when I got to New York City, boy, I... The culture for traditional jazz around here was absolutely amazing.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
It still exists. New York City jazz is a part of New York's folk culture. As a folk musician, you often deal with the idea that folk music is something rural. But there are innumerable folk songs that are made right here in New York City. One of my favorite songs
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
It's hauled wood piled down that, you know, people think it's some ancient Anglo sea shanty or some country song from Georgia or Florida or something like that. But it's a Broadway song written in New York City in 1887.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
But it became a southern folk song, you know, same with things like the chicken reel songs from Boston that, you know, tend to emblemize the South and folk culture of various city songs, you know. And coming here and just having this access of people that's like, oh, I play some James P. Johnstone.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Having people like Dalton Ridenour who plays that style and having Terry Waldo here that plays like a protege of Yubi Blake and just having that culture so palpable here, it was an amazing change.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
I first heard it, I think the first person to play that for me might have been Frankie Fairfield or Mike Kiefer. Mike Kiefer is a great record collector and Frankie Fairfield doesn't need much of an introduction. And I think we were sitting around listening to Vitaphone shorts playing. which Mike Kiefer collects, and I might have heard it there for the first time.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
But the first time that it really stuck with me is when Frank played it for me, and we watched it again, and he just fell in love with the song and the lady singing it, and he started playing it on guitar and singing it, and I think I picked it up from him and soon got to be one of my favorite songs.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Yeah, it was some of the early sound in theater process, I think, made by Fox Movietone way back in the 20s. And so there'd be a lot of shorts and things like that, comedic acts, and their first filming of things like Vaudeville, which later ended up killing the business.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Yes, yes. That's the preferred way of doing things, especially because composition isn't really the thing I'm most interested in. I'm most interested in the learning and studying of good music that moves me and sharing that with other people. And composing tunes of yourself and wondering if they're good is one thing, but...
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Playing tunes and performing tunes that you know are good because they have moved you before is a completely different thing. I tend to feel a little bit more confidence in the latter.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Well, I think... My approach to music in general, not just to guitar, but to all the instruments I play, is to get the most out of them I can. That's the guitar, the banjo, the harmonica, all these things.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Everything I like about those instruments, and especially the piano, is that in the style of music I was steeped in and brought up in, which is mostly the world of country blues, there was this magical thing that would happen all where one musician would sit down and create this beautiful world where nothing was missing. You didn't need basses or drums or a second musician or anything.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
They just sit down with their fingers and their instruments and their voice and create this world where nothing was missing. So that's the approach I took to all my instruments and especially the guitar because that was the world that I was surrounded by. Just having that access to that real full sound is something I want to maintain.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And I don't know, I think that's probably the biggest contribution, why I remain one of the few soloists out there. There's not too many people who can hold an audience's attention for two one-hour sets with just one person on stage and their instruments. But my audience has never seemed to be disappointed.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Oh, yeah, this is the cheapest guitar that Gibson made. It cost $4.95 when it was for sale, a little Kalamazoo. I just heard an interview by Johnny Shines where he said that he and Robert Johnson both played Kalamazoo guitars, although Robert is pictured with a much fancier version of a Gibson guitar, but apparently he... Johnny Shine said he played a Kalamazoo just like this one here.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Is it about 100 years old? I think it's from 28, 29.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
No, no. This banjo's getting close. The banjo's from 25, so it's an old Bacon Day banjo before they had the F-holes on it. Gotcha.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
All right, all right. I got you there. I got you there. All right. Well, when you want that nice full sound out of the guitar, you've got to have a nice little rhythm behind you, and that could be just about anything. Let's try this one. That's the rhythm of the song. So now you have this nice accompaniment.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
back up anything you want and then you've got your voice which you can lay on top of it which i ain't doing nothing now but talking but you also got some fingers that you can play with too and give the guitar a nice little voice
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Well, I think when I got to the point where it didn't feel like a big mystery, you know, when I got to the point where I figured out I was actually doing it and it wasn't magic, you know, I didn't have to sell my soul to the devil or, you know, spend a... ridiculous amount of money on guitar lessons and buy books and things like that.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
When I just sat down and made music for my family and they said, oh, you're starting to sound like that record you sound. Especially, you know, my mom really, she still loves my harmonica playing. And her best bit of encouragement she could give me with my harmonica playing is say, oh, you're sounding like Sonny Terry. You're sounding like little Sonny Terry in the house.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And, you know, when I figured out That it sounded good to other people just as it did to me, you know, I figured I'd have it. I'd go up to folks. I'd go up to my grandma and say, Granny, did it sound good? And, you know, she said, Oh, yeah, baby, that sounds good. And I say, No, really, dude, it sounds good because it sounds good to me, you know.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And what you learn is how to keep out of your own way. And you have to figure out what to stop doing just to allow the music to come out of you. And sometimes it's just as simple as that to get some good music out of yourself.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Oh, it was a lovely place, I'd say. I was, you know, we didn't have too much money, but I was surrounded by the one thing you couldn't get enough of, which was love, and had a big multi-generational family.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
I was in the house with my mother and my grandmother, and for the first few years, it was my grandpa, my uncle, my aunt, so it was, with me, it was six of us in there, and my great-grandmother was across the street, and You know, three of her children were around and, you know, all the cousins would come over at least once a week to visit her.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And, you know, so I grew up around lots of lovely family and, you know, big backyard that 80 percent of the food I grew up eating came out of, you know. until me and Granny made our last little harvest the year she passed away. Yeah, it was a lovely place full of music and family.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
I think I got bored there when I was living there, but now that I'm an older person and you start reminiscing, I recently reconnected with my next-door neighbor. We got to commiserating each other saying, boy, those were some of the happiest times of our lives probably.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Well, you could probably tell that just in the music I love and my aesthetic that things at certain levels of contemporary don't quite appeal. And I tend to like some people call it tradition. Some people call it old fashioned. You know, I just like things of a certain aesthetic that tend to be old. a little bit older than what we have now. And my grandmother was the same way.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
She was born in 28, and she was sort of a throwback to not her mother's age. She was born in 1906, but more her father's age, and he was born in 1886. In certain ways, she was like that, but in certain ways, she was a very modern woman. So when you've got a person who's throwing back to the 1880s, you know, you've got something there. And then her father was a bit of a throwback himself.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
And when you're a throwback and you're born in 1886—
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
You're going back a long ways. He played the throwback banjo, which is sort of kind of why I played this instrument. The instrument he didn't play didn't match his age. It more matched his parents' age. But that's the kind of person he was.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Well, the thing that spoke to me the most about the music was the tone of the instruments. And it's something, till yet, I still have a prejudice towards. I truly, in my heart of hearts, believe... acoustic instruments have more power than any other instruments around.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Even hearing the same acoustic music through a speaker or through headphones or anything like that does not compare with having an instrument in the same room as you and having the air that vibrates out of that instrument vibrate you and your eardrums. I've done it. I've experienced it as a
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
participant and as an audience member uh just the power the emotional power of being in the room with somebody playing the instrument quite well it it can't be beat and i think i could gather that at that young age through those old scratchy records not even knowing what it was having no idea you know like i said i was a seven eight year old kid um
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
who, you know, first heard John Hurt and Scott Dunbar and Bucklewhite and people like that. And I didn't know, you know, I didn't know that there was any, that there were two kind of guitars and things like that. But that just the sonic beauty of those instruments just wrapped me up and took me away.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
I started playing banjo before I played the guitar. I started playing banjo when I was about, oh, I think about 13 and a half, about 18 months after playing the fiddle and being pretty bad at that in my early days and realizing most of the fiddle I like was surrounded by banjo music.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
He played the banjo, the guitar, and the fiddle, so I've heard. But this would be my great-grandfather.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Yeah, my grandma's daddy, who was born way back in 86. But according to Granny, they had to run off a plantation when she was about six or seven or so years old. and had to leave Joe's instruments behind then, so nobody too much younger than her, which she was the oldest, which, shoot, that includes everybody.
Fresh Air
Folk Musician Jerron Paxton Transports Us To the '20s
Nobody younger than her really remembers Joe playing any instruments, but she remembers seeing a banjo on the wall and hearing the sounds of it and guitars and fiddles and things like that. I don't know how great a musician he was, but she knows he played them.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
So, you know, things like curbs were a bit unfamiliar to me. So, you know, imagine a pretty healthy strapping boy just kind of bumbling and falling all over the place. That's what I was up to for a little while.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
It's about the same. I still have big troubles with my peripheral vision, which stops me from driving. My central vision, I think it's better than what it was, but part of that is the technology has improved. I used to go around New York City with a little small telescope around my neck to see things like train signs and street signs and things like that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Now that I'm an iPhone user, which I never thought I would be, you know, I could zoom in on something 10 times. And that's actually a lot more handy than this little telescope I was using.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Yeah, yeah. I was going to drive trains and things like that. And, you know, I'd probably have done some of the other laboring jobs that most of the folks in my family have done. But when I say not being able to drive is just about the biggest disability I have, it's really true, you know.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Oh, yeah, I think so. As much as people who like rural music tend to get stereotypes as loving songs about trains and mama, you can't help it, I don't think. But if I find a good train song, I'll sit and listen to it for a good while.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Oh, well, my favorite is probably the Pullman Passenger Train, which I can't do here. Let's see if...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Oh, yeah. It's not sounding like I'm playing two different parts.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Oh, yeah, okay. Fair enough. Let's see here. Maybe I'll start off this way. Oh, that harmonica's been set on. Hold on. Ooh, that one's been set on, too.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
In the words of Fats Waller, it's easy to do when you know how.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Hey, there's a lot of different ways to skin a cat and entertain the audience.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And it's sad, baby, and it hurt me to my heart. Together so long, now we got to get apart. Some things have changed between you and me. Seems just like time can't be like they used to be. Have it done, fizzle out, don't think of change between you and me. It seems like time can't be like they used to.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And faces sure could always be found And I seem like your smile don't want me around Seems like things have changed Between you and me Seems just like time can be Like they used to be
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Most of these songs, if not all these songs, came from a little bit of inspiration and also at least a little bit of pushing the pencil along the page, I think, as Irving Berlin said.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
It's good to be here.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Yeah, songwriting is a funny part of the life of a folk musician. Most of us folk musicians tend to play our culturally inherited music, which isn't quite the same as doing covers of other people's music, but... You play music that's reflective of your culture. And I've mostly done that. And every once in a while, something will inspire me, and it'll stick around.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And I like writing music based on inspiration. more so than anything. So a few of these songs, most of these songs, if not all of these songs, came from a little bit of inspiration and at least a little bit of inspiration and also at least a little bit of pushing the pencil along the page, I think, as Irving Berlin said.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Well, I think... My approach to music in general, not just to guitar, but to all the instruments I play, is to get the most out of them I can. That's the guitar, the banjo, the harmonica, all these things.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Everything I like about those instruments, and especially the piano, is that in the style of music I was steeped in and brought up in, which is mostly the world of country blues, there was this magical thing that would happen all where one musician would sit down and create this beautiful world where nothing was missing. You didn't need basses or drums or a second musician or anything.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
They just sit down with their fingers and their instruments and their voice and create this world where nothing was missing. So that's the approach I took to all my instruments, and especially the guitar, because that was the world that I was surrounded by. Just having that access to that real full sound is something I want to maintain.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And I don't know, I think that's probably the biggest contribution, why I remain one of the few soloists out there. There's not too many people who can hold an audience's attention for, you know, two one-hour sets with just one person on stage and their instruments. But my audience has never seemed to be disappointed.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Oh, yeah, this is the cheapest guitar that Gibson made. It cost $4.95 when it was for sale, a little Kalamazoo.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Is it about 100 years old? I think it's from 28, 29.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
All right, all right. I got you there. I got you there. All right. Well, when you want that nice full sound out of the guitar, you've got to have a nice little rhythm behind you, and that could be just about anything. Let's try this one. That's the rhythm of the song. So now you have this nice accompaniment.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
back up anything you want and then you've got your voice which you can lay on top of it which i ain't doing nothing now but talking but you also got some fingers that you can play with too and give the guitar a nice little voice
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It was a lovely place, I'd say. We didn't have too much money, but I was surrounded by the one thing you couldn't get enough of, which was love. And had a big multi-generational family. I was in the house with my mother and my grandmother. And for the first few years, it was my grandpa, my uncle, my aunt. So it was with me, it was six of us in there.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And my great grandmother was across the street. And, you know, three of her children were around. And, you know, all the cousins would come over at least once a week to visit her. And, you know, so I grew up around lots of lovely family and, you know, big backyard that 80 percent of the food I grew up eating came out of.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Well, you could probably tell that just in the music I love and my aesthetic that things at certain levels of contemporary don't quite appeal. And I tend to like, some people call it tradition, some people call it old-fashioned. I just like things of a certain aesthetic that tend to be a little bit older than what we have now. And my grandmother was the same way.
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She was born in 28, and she was sort of a... a throwback to not her mother's age, she was born in 1906, but more her father's age, and he was born in 1886. In certain ways she was like that, but in certain ways she was a very modern woman. So when you've got a person who's throwing back to the 1880s, you've got something there. And then her father was a bit of a throwback himself.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And when you're a throwback and you're born in 1886,
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
You're going back a long ways. He played a throwback banjo, which is sort of kind of why I played this instrument. The instrument he didn't play didn't match his age. It more matched his parents' age. But that's the kind of person he was.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Well, the thing that spoke to me the most about the music was the tone of the instruments. And it's something, till yet, I still have a prejudice towards. I truly, in my heart of hearts, believe... Acoustic instruments have more power than any other instruments around.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Even hearing the same acoustic music through a speaker or through headphones or anything like that does not compare with having an instrument in the same room as you and having the air that vibrates out of that instrument vibrate you and your eardrums. I've done it. I've experienced it as a participant and as an audience member.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Just the emotional power of being in the room with somebody playing the instrument quite well, it can't be beat. And I think I could gather that at that young age through those old scratchy records, not even knowing what it was or having no idea. You know, like I said, I was a seven, eight-year-old kid. Mm-hmm. who first heard John Hurt and Scott Dunbar and Bucklewhite and people like that.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And I didn't know that there were two kinds of guitars and things like that, but just the sonic beauty of those instruments just wrapped me up and took me away.
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I started playing banjo before I played the guitar. I started playing banjo when I was about, oh, I think about 13 and a half, about 18 months after playing the fiddle. And being pretty bad at that in my early days and realizing most of the fiddle I like was surrounded by banjo music.
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He played the banjo, the guitar, and the fiddle, so I've heard. But this would be my great-grandfather. Your great-grandfather. Yeah, my grandma's daddy, who was born way back in 86. But according to Granny, they had to run off a plantation when she was about six or seven or so years old.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
and had to leave Joe's instruments behind then, so nobody too much younger than her, which she was the oldest, which, shoot, that includes everybody. Nobody younger than her really remembers Joe playing any instruments, but she remembers seeing a banjo on the wall and hearing the sounds of it and guitars and fiddles and things like that.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
I don't know how great a musician he was, but she knows he played them.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
This banjo I brought with me here is one I've been playing for a while. It's an 1848 model banjo, a stickter model banjo, as they call it. They don't know how popular these things got, but I like the way they're constructed. They tend to produce a mighty sound.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
All right. The stroke style is what they called in books published at the time is I guess what they call claw hammer banjo now or frailing or whatever. And I think most of those words can be traced back to none other than the great New Yorker Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger had a big influence on banjo culture, much bigger than he's given credit for.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
which I think includes finding those words and making them ubiquitous among banjo players. But the stroke style is you stroke the string with the tops of your fingers rather than picking it like that with each individual finger. You hit it with the top. And you can hear, like, the difference between picking and...
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Each one of those stroke notes have a little bit punchier sound and you combine that with the way you play with your thumb and you get a nice cross-cultural reference here.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Well, I'd had trouble with my peripheral vision my whole life. But then I had two different eye diseases that start to mess with my central vision. And once that started to happen, the problems with my peripheral vision got to be bigger. pretty unavoidable and, you know, in some places got to be a little bit hazardous, you know.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
I don't know if you know, but people from South Central, especially during the day and time I grew up, we didn't move too much. And Los Angeles being a big driving culture, you sure didn't walk any place. You know, I left as an 18-year-old having, I think, maybe walked a mile in my neighborhood and could count the times I did that on one hand.