Jerron Paxton

speaker

135 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Dec 2024

Jerron Paxton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Fresh Air · Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy · 6 Dec 2024 podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know how great a musician he was, but she knows he played them.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh, well, my favorite is probably the Pullman Passenger Train, which I can't do here. Let's see if...

Showing 21–40 of 135 · page 2 of 7