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.
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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And when you're a throwback and you're born in 1886—
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
Showing 61–80 of 135 · page 4 of 7
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