David
"Stringbean"
Akeman
"Playing the banjo is our way of proving that America is a free country."
- Anonymous 1 Banjo Player
Bluegrass music, its plaintive vocals notwithstanding, is primarily an instrumental genre. And the most recognizable of the sounds - and certainly the most distinctive - is the ring of the five string banjo.
But that wasn't always the case. When Bill Monroe started up his "Bluegrass Boys" the band featured mandolin (played by Bill himself), guitar (Cleo Davis), fiddle (Art Wooten), and bass (Amos Garren). Up until 1941 the personnel changed but not the instrumentation.2
Footnote
It's rare that you can pinpoint the time a particular art form emerged. Exactly when the baroque, classical, romantic, and modern orchestral music began are a matter of much interpretation and opinion.
Not so with Bluegrass. Bill Monroe and his brother Charlie began singing as a duo in 1936. Earlier Old Time or country stringband music has similarities with their style but was primarily dance music. So the tempos were more sedate. Bill and Charlie ramped up the velocity considerably which necessitated playing to a sit-down audience. Then in 1938 Bill took off on his own and he and his new band, the Bluegrass Boys, helped fix the instrumentation and the name of the music.
Then in 1942 Bill hired a banjo player named David Akeman. Although described on a popular informational website as playing in a "relatively primitive" style, "Stringbean" - as David was called - was actually a master at the Old Timey or "clawhammer" technique. It was only later that the preferred style of the bluegrass banjo took on the sound - as one practitioner of the technique described it - of spitting BB's into a tin can.3
Not that much later, though. Stringbean left the band after two years and in 1945 Earl Scruggs took his place, bringing in his virtuosic three-finger picking. How the banjo styles developed is a complex and not completely resolved tale. But certainly by the 1930's there were players in North Carolina who had forsaken the traditional clawhammer or frailing style where the strings are plucked by striking with a downward motion of the fingernail of either the middle or index finger. "Two finger picking" - using the index finger to pull the string up while the thumb plucks down on the fifth string and "drops" to play the other strings - was also a common style early on. But eventually the middle finger was brought in leaving the little and ring fingers to rest on the banjo head. Earl himself said the first person he personally knew to play the three-finger style was a banjoist named Smith Hammett. Even DeWitt "Snuffy" Jenkins, Earl's fellow North Carolingian and his senior by sixteen years, also said Smith was the first three-finger picker he knew.
However, scholars of the instrument - yes, there are banjo scholars - have pointed out that in the 19th century there were indeed "classic"4 banjo players who played in a style similar to classical guitar5. Banjo instruction manuals were published before the American Civil War. These usually emphasized the clawhammer method although in 1855 a manual mentioned playing the instrument "like a guitar". Then in 1869 Frank Converse published the first instruction book that in addition to teaching clawhammer also clearly specified a right hand "guitar style". As Frank put it:
As a general rule, the strings are fingered thus, 3rd string, first finger; 2nd string, second finger; 1st string, third finger; using the thumb for the 4th and 5th string. This rule seldom varies.
Footnote
"Classic" banjo - as classic banjoists point out - is not the same as "classical banjo", the latter being playing classical music - Bach, Mozart, and the like - on the banjo. Classic banjo can include classical banjo, although the classic banjo refers to a broader and wider range of playing.
Footnote
Deciding on who was the "inventor" of the "classical guitar" is also a bone of contention. Although many will say it was Andres Segovia Torres, classical guitar was played as long ago as Beethoven's time. Not to deny the importance of Andres for the development and popularity of the classical guitar in the 20th century, but he had many contemporaries and in fact there were a series of recordings released some years ago on this very topic.
What the knowledgeable reader will note is that Frank was referring to four-finger picking - the p-i-m-a method6 of the classical guitarist. However as anyone who has tried the banjo knows, playing the third string with the thumb is pretty straightforward and so using the thumb, index, and middle fingers will suffice.
Footnote
That is, p="thumb", i="index", m="middle", and a="ring". These abbreviations are borrowed from the Spanish words: pulgar (thumb), indice (index), medio (middle), and anular (ring). The classical guitarist Narciso Ypres, though, would sometimes use the little finger as well.
In any case we can conclude that there were up-pickers - even using the three finger style - from the antebellum era. But it can't be denied that before Earl Scruggs came along, most "country" banjo playing was the clawhammer, of which, as we said, Stringbean was a master.7
Footnote
As to why the - quote - "popular informational website" - unquote - referred to Stringbean's playing as "relatively primitive", it may be due to his tendency to make expansive gestures with his left hand and continue to strum with his right. The non-banjoists may see this as "relatively primitive" playing since there are times he doesn't even press the strings on the fingerboard.
Such playing though is possible when you adjust the strings to an open-chord as is common in Bluegrass tuning. Bluegrass most often uses the open G chord, gDGBD, which in scientific pitch notation is G5-D4-G4-B4-D5 ("Middle C" is C4). You can hear the tuning if you click the button.
Banjo Tuning - Open G Bluegrass
The astute reader and listener will note the oddity that in listing the tunings and in the playing above, the fifth string is first and the first string is fifth:
g(Fifth)D(Fourth)G(Third)B(Second)D(First)
Also when holding the instrument the fifth string is on top and the first string is on bottom. As to why such strange conventions, well, that's just the way it goes.
Why did Stringbean leave Bill's band? Well, by most accounts playing with the Bluegrass Boys could be quite an onerous undertaking. They played as many as six shows a day, starting at eleven in the morning and winding up at eleven at night. They drove by car (not even by bus), stayed in economical accommodations - ergo, cheap motels - and had to get back to Nashville each week for the Grand Ole Opry broadcast.
So personnel turnover was common, and from 1939 to 1996, there were 150 "Bluegrass boys". Bill Keith, one of the first of the "melodic" banjo players8 stayed with Bill for only eight months. Even Earl Scruggs, whose playing ultimately defined the modern Bluegrass sound, remained only two years.9
Footnote
Bill played three-finger style but clawhammer banjo also has its melodic players, probably the most notable is the well-known virtuoso Bob Carlin.
Bill Monroe, by the way, would introduce Bill as "Brad" after his middle name. It just didn't seem fit to have two "Bill's" in the group.
Footnote
Another reason Earl may have decided to move on is monetary. He was getting about $50 or $60 a week, which wasn't bad pay in 1945, but as the only one in the group with a high school diploma, he also kept the books. So he saw how much dough Bill was pulling in and it wasn't an all-for-one-one-for-all equal redistribution of wealth.
Lester Flatt also left about the same time as Earl and they formed their own band, Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys. Often and commonsensicially abbreviated to Flatt and Scruggs, they became the most popular bluegrass band of the 1960's and the first to achieve real national popularity. Among other achievements, their "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" was featured in the soundtrack of the hit motion picture, Bonnie and Clyde. Of course they played the theme song for the television show The Beverly Hillbillies, and Lester and Earl also appeared as guests in seven episodes.
David Akeman was born in 1916 in Annville, Kentucky. His whole family was musical and his dad played banjo with considerable skill. Young David showed his talent early and his dad encouraged and helped his son learn the instrument. At age 12, David was able to obtain his first "good" banjo, and he became a sought after player for dances and other get-togethers.
There was, though, a Great Depression on and one that showed no sign of letting up. Fortunately David was able to get a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC was a government sponsored program to provide employment to young men in developing government lands by building roads, dams, planting trees, and such stuff. Another Kentuckian and fellow CCC worker - not to mention aspiring (and later quite successful) musician - was Merle Travis.
Naturally David kept making music whenever he could. In 1935 he entered a talent contest sponsored by the well-established country singer Asa Martin. He not only won the competition but also performed so admirably that Asa hired the young man on the spot.
It was soon after that David Akeman became Stringbean. The usual story is that Asa was introducing the band to an audience and he stumbled over or had a momentary blank over his new banjo player's name. So he dubbed him "String Beans". The name not only fit the slender banjo player to a T, but David liked the monicker as well. Later it became one word, "Stringbean" without the "s".
With his long lanky frame and taciturn and dry humor, it didn't take long for Stringbean to intersperse comedy into his music. He was also quite a baseball player and as with the tenor of the times, organizations would field amateur or even sem-pro teams to compete against each other. In fact, it was while Stringbean was on a team playing against the Bluegrass Boys that Bill Monroe met Stringbean and ended up hiring him.
Bill expected his band members to be immaculately dressed and it was only after he left the group that Stringbean began to sport his characteristic costume with the over long shirt meeting the truncated trousers at the knees. The unique costume must really been a custom made one-piece suit lest what is now called a "costume fail" occur.
It was probably no coincidence that Stringbean left the Bluegrass Boys in late 1944 and married Estelle Stanfill in 1945, which was also the year when String (as his friends like Roy Acuff called him) became a regular of the Grand Ole Opry. The Opry was the most prestigious country show in the nation and provided not only steady work but returned a quite comfortable paycheck. Now freed from the grueling touring schedule, Stringbean was able to settle down near Nashville and at the same time keep playing.
Still, it wasn't until 1969 that Stringbean came into mainstream American national consciousness. In that year he was hired to be one of the regular cast members of Hee-Haw, the highly popular television show the networks executives could not kill. There he eschewed his costume with the low slung trousers and instead sported a normal shirt and overalls.
Musically, though, the writers didn't use Stringbean to his full potential. Although he would sometimes play his banjo, mostly he was relegated to being the scarecrow in the cornfield or reading the weekly "letter from home", the latter being one of his early comedy routines. The show should have featured his playing more and that of his friend and fellow clawhammer master Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones.
For all his success, Stringbean preferred a simple and frugal life. He and Estelle lived in a small house about 15 miles north of downtown Nashville and well down a long drive from the road. His only extravagance was buying a new Cadillac each year. These would cost between $6000 and $8000 and he paid cash. Actually, he bought the new Cadillacs for Estelle as he never bothered getting a driving license.
Both Stringbean and Estelle came to a tragic end when they were murdered by home intruders in 1973. Two men had heard that Stringbean kept large amounts of cash at his home and on his person. The stories were in fact true since during the Great Depression Stringbean had seen financial institutions fail and wipe out families' savings. So he just didn't trust banks.
On the night of Saturday, November 10, Stringbean was performing on the Grand Ole Opry when the men entered the home. They found nothing and were still in the house when Stringbean and Estelle returned. Stringbean realized something was wrong and went in the house armed with a pistol while Estelle waited in the car. During the encounter with the burglars, Stringbean was shot and killed. Then when the men came out Estelle fled on foot but was chased down and killed. Stringbean and Estelle were found the next day by Grandpa Jones who lived not far away with his wife Ramona.
The two men found no money and were later apprehended and sentenced to life in prison. One of them died in the penitentiary and the other was paroled after serving over 40 years.
Ironically, shortly before his death one of the Hee Haw cast members finally convinced Stringbean to open a bank account after explaining to him that his savings would be insured. He had apparently opened some bank accounts and had already deposited a goodly amount of cash. Nevertheless, over twenty years later the owner of the home found a stash containing thousands of dollars in bills. But the money was so deteriorated as to be unnegotiable and unreplaceable.
References
"Stringbean", Hee-Haw.
"The Rise and Fall of Stringbean Akeman, A Grand Ole Opry Legend", Jeremy Burchard, Wide Open Country.
"Roots of Earl and Snuffy", Bob Carlin, Remember Cliffside.
"When Lester, Earl, and Chubby Came To Town", Bluegrass Special, October, 2011.
"Everything That You Ever Wanted To Know about Classic Fingerstyle Banjo", Classic-Banjo.
"Bluegrass Boys Chronological Index", A Tribute to Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, Doo-Dah.
Bluegrass - A History, Neil Rosenberg, University of Illinois Press, 1985.
"What Is the Origin of the Banjo?", Leslie Whittaker, Our Pasttimes, September 15, 2017."The Banjo Was Originally a West African Instrument", Jeff Suwak, March 27, 2019, Medium.
"Banjo Facts: A Selected History", Hamilton College Library, Hamilton (New York) College.
New and Complete Method for the Banjo With or Without a Master, Frank Covnerse, St. Gordon Publishers, 1869.
"The 5 Most-Expensive American Cars of 1972", Tom Appel, The Daily Drive, July 28, 2014 (Update: January 18, 2018).
"An Elegy for Stringbean", Jane Stern, The Paris Review, February 8, 2017.
"Stringbean", Internet Movie Data Base.
"Hee-Haw", Buck Owens (host), Roy Clark (host), Grandpa Jones (regular), Minnie Pearl (regular), Grandpa Jones (regular), David "Stringbean" Akeman (regular), Archie Campbell (regular), Gordie Tapp (regular), Gunilla Hutton (regular), Junior Samples (regular), Cathy Baker (regular), Lulu Roman (regular), Jim and Jon Hager (regulars), Internet Movie Data Base.
"The Beverly Hillbillies", Internet Movie Data Base.
"David 'Stringbean' Akeman", Find-A-Grave, December 31, 2000.