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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And when that starts to happen, then you get an opportunity to be real inventive with what's in you.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Scott Dunbar I had to come up on later. But then, you know, I remember getting Charlie Patton's name and, you know,
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.
And that's kind of how I got my start with delving into the artists.
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.
Showing 81–100 of 135 · page 5 of 7
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