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banjo… it’s very automatic. It was never really a question of learning it, it was just a question of if there was one around. It’s a kind of osmosis. In high school, there was a anjo next to the couch and so my daily routine was like: get up, amble downstairs, draw some comics and then sit on the couch and absent-mindedly play the banjo while reading the newspa- per. It wasn’t like I was a great banjo play- er, but I could. In New York, I had friends who played old-time music, a fiddler called Rhys Jones, so that’s when I got to playing a lot more old-time banjo too. “
There was also work for Sam with Stars Like Fleas, an avant-garde version of a similar thing, song-based experimental rock with a heavy improv element in which he mainly played violin. He relished the opportunity to play with different types of players such as the drummer in Doveman, Dougie Bowne, a legendary punk/free jazz drummer (who played with Iggy Pop amongst many others), as well as deciding to start work on his ambition to be a ses- sion guitarist, the banjo becoming “sort of limited.” He started from scratch, dabbling in early chord structures through Bob Dylan or Beatles songs, but would also trade lessons with musician friends.
“Me and my friend Shahzad Ismaily have a wonderful relationship based on trading lessons. I’d give him a banjo lesson and he’d give me a guitar lesson and then we’d have a free jazz improvisation session at the end. He is a wonderful multi-limbed lizard of a person who plays literally every sound under the sun, and has done so with every possible person from Neil Young to the Master Musicians Of Jajouka to Carla
Kihlstedt to Laurie Anderson. He’ll be play- ing bass with one band and then ten min- utes later, without that band’s knowledge, he’ll be playing moog synthesiser with Mark Ribot or be composing a film score for a bunch of Armenian musicians!”
love with old-time folk songs was, strangely, much the same as any of the young indie kids who seemed to be turn- ing to traditional material in a new wave of revival interest, finding old field recordings in hip record stores, filed next to drone minimalism or experimental jazz.
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“The only difference was that I was aware that there were people still doing this kind of thing. I think that a growing amount of young people in the late ‘90s realised that these old field recordings are pretty bizarre, similar in ways to avant- garde music in that they are quite abrasive to listen to. As a kid, when I used to hear old field recordings, I would think they sounded like people playing badly. I’d think, ‘Give me a good Irish fiddler rather than this scratchy old-time stuff!’ In down- town Brattleboro, there was a hipster CD store. I noticed that all of a sudden they started to stock all these old field record- ings. I remember very vividly when they first had a Dock Boggs CD. I saw this pic- ture of guy with a banjo and I thought to myself, ‘What’s all this? This is the nerdy shit I don’t tell my friends about, that we go and do at the folk camp in the summer. Why is it here?’ And I bought it and took it
nother route to developing his guitar skills was returning to source materials and singing old-time folk songs. He describes how his falling in
home and my folks said, ‘Oh yeah, Dock Boggs, we have that record.’ Maybe the ’70s was about this community folk music- making; the ’90s and early 2000s, it’s been more about the weirdness of old American folk music. That’s where all that freak folk thing comes from, I think.”
I wonder what now draws Sam to a song, whether it’s the weirdness or the sto- ries, the darker elements?
“People seem to have been a lot more in touch with the dark side of things back then. I’m not someone who has an ency- clopaedic knowledge of the songs. I know 2000 Irish tunes but I pretty much know the folk songs I have recorded and about 20 more. I definitely stole from my parents a lot and I’ve borrowed from the Sacred Harp. I’ve gone a lot to Dock Boggs, and Bessie Jones was hugely important, with her children’s singing games. She was a black woman from the Georgia Sea Islands. There’s that interesting distinction when you look at field recordings – how- ever true it is or not – of ‘collector’ versus ‘naïve singer on the mountain’, but often those people were very aware about what they were doing.”
“Bessie was like an ethnomusicologist in the sense that she married into that area. She was an insider because she was part of that community but it’s almost like she was an outside collector because she self-consciously learned these children’s songs. She hadn’t necessarily sung them when she was a kid. She’s almost in the middle between someone like Alan Lomax and Roscoe Holcomb. What I love about those children’s singing games… my folks
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