A B3RT Editorial Ledger · Issue No. 1
A working record of the banjo tradition in the North Carolina High Country — the styles played here, the builders who shape the wood, and the contests that keep the music alive past Labor Day.
The banjo is older than the country that plays it. In the High Country it has become inseparable from the porch, the fiddler's convention, and the long winter.
Drive south out of Boone on Highway 105 in late August and the first thing you hear at the campsite is a banjo. Not always a good one — a factory five-string run through a chipboard speaker, or a tack-head gourd played so quietly the only signal is the heel tapping. It is a banjo, and it has been a banjo in these coves since before the Civil War. A working ledger of the styles, builders, players, contests, and slow changes that have kept the tradition alive since the 1840s follows.
The instrument arrived by way of the West African akonting and xalam, carried north by enslaved people in the 17th and 18th centuries. The earliest American banjos were gourd-bodied, skin-headed, and fretless — closer to their African ancestors than to anything a Gibson would later assemble. The four- and five-string banjo of the 20th century is a different instrument from the three-string mountain banjo of the 1880s; both are legitimate.
The High Country is the highest stretch of the eastern Blue Ridge — four counties above 3,000 feet, hollows that hold a snowfall into April, porches that hold a fiddle tune into October. The music is the same it has been since the 1920s: old-time, ballads, percussive banjo tuned gDGBD, played at the same contests.
The banjo is one instrument played four distinct ways. Each style has its own right hand, its own tuning, and its own room in the High Country sound.
Most High Country banjos are tuned open G (gDGBD) for clawhammer and three-finger. Double C (gCGBD) suits frailing tunes in modal keys. Sawmill (gDGBE) raises the second string a half step for older modal tunes like “Cumberland Gap.” Modal and dropped tunings are common at the contests and rare on stage.
| Tuning | Notes (5th–1st) | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Open G (standard) | gDGBD | Clawhammer, 3-finger, Scruggs. The default. |
| Double C | gCGBD | Frailing, modal fiddle tunes. Drone fifth. |
| Sawmill | gDGBE | Older modal tunes. Common in Asheville sessions. |
| Old-time D | aDF#AD | Civil War–era tunes. Fifth string dropped a step. |
| G modal | gDGCD | West African–derived work. Gourd-banjo revival. |
Five factories and a constellation of regional luthiers. Each shop has shaped a different slice of the modern High Country banjo.
The most widely sold American banjo of the 21st century is the Deering Goodtime — a lightweight open-back with a maple rim and a Renaissance head, designed in 1996 to put a playable banjo in a beginner's hands for under four hundred dollars. The instrument most High Country learners start on.
Steve Nechville patented a tone ring that wraps in a shallow helix around the rim, eliminating the standard archtop ring without giving up the loud bluegrass sound. His banjos are quieter than a Gibson Mastertone but more articulate in the midrange — a sound that records well and sits under a fiddle.
Made an hour and a half west of the High Country proper, Pisgah is the closest banjo factory to the Boone session scene. Their banjos use local curly cherry for rims, a 17-fret neck, and a skin head. The sound is dry, woody, quieter than a Deering — closer to an old Vega than a modern bluegrass banjo.
Geoff Stelling's Sunflower and Bellflower were the bluegrass banjo of choice for serious players from the late 1970s until the early 2000s — heavier, brighter, more refined than a Gibson Mastertone. A Sunflower from 1985 now sells for two to three times its list. The Galax workshop still produces custom five-strings under Geoff's son.
Steve Huber builds banjos the way Gibson built pre-war Mastertones — three-ply maple rims, twenty-hole hooks, original-style tone rings, nickel hardware. His work is the closest you can buy to a 1935 Gibson RB-3 or Granada without buying a vintage at auction.
Beyond the five factories, a small constellation of one- and two-person shops builds open-back and gourd banjos in the High Country proper. Most commission from Spruce Pine hardwood dealers, source skin heads from a single Georgia broker, and build one or two instruments a year. Lead times run 12–24 months. The closest thing to a 19th-century mountain banjo is built in a garage off US-421.
Four banjo voices that shaped the High Country and the wider Southern Appalachian tradition.
Ralph Stanley learned from his mother, who learned from her family in the Clinch River valley. He played three-finger early with his older brother Carter, then settled into a percussive, modal clawhammer that defined the high-lonesome sound for two generations. The Clinch Mountain Home album (1973) is the closest a recording gets to a High Country porch in winter.
Arthell Watson grew up three miles from the Watauga County line, learned banjo from his father before going blind at age one, and switched to guitar because the banjo was too loud on the radio. His banjo work — sparse, percussive, tuned to the singer — is the foundation of the Watauga flatpicking tradition. The Doc & Merle Watson Guitar Museum in Boone sits two miles from the house.
Mike Snider is the rarest thing on the Opry stage: a working comedian whose instrument is a five-string banjo played in clawhammer. He joined the Opry in 1989 and has been the de-facto ambassador of the clawhammer style on a stage dominated by three-finger Scruggs players for forty years. Closer to Ralph Stanley's modal clawhammer than to anything in the modern revival.
Tony Trischka has spent five decades expanding what a five-string banjo can do — Béla Fleck is his most famous student. He has recorded more banjo albums than any player alive. Trischka does not live in the High Country but tours the regional contests, and his Robot Monster (1983) and Glory Shone Around (1993) are part of every banjo teacher's curriculum.
The banjo is a Black American instrument. Its ancestors came west across the Atlantic, and its modern form was made in the hands of enslaved people and free Black craftsmen in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The banjo's closest living African relatives are the akonting of Senegal and the Gambia, the xalam of Mauritania, and the n'goni of the western Sahel — long-necked, skin-headed, gut-strung lutes played with a percussive right-hand. The earliest American description is in a 1787 Jamaican travelogue; the earliest surviving instrument is a gourd-bodied fretless banjo built by an enslaved craftsman, in the Colonial Williamsburg collections. The name is a corruption of mbanza or bangoe, Kimbundu and Mandinka terms.
By the 1840s, the gourd banjo had been replaced by a drum-head banjo with a metal tension hoop and a fifth drone string added in the 1830s. Joel Sweeney is credited with the fifth string, though disputed. Both the four-string gourd banjo and the five-string banjo of the 1840s were built and played overwhelmingly by Black musicians in Virginia, the Carolinas, and the lower Mississippi valley.
The High Country tradition runs through these African roots, though quieter than the East Coast one. The first recorded banjos in western North Carolina appear in the 1840s, played by Black string bands along the French Broad. By the time the instrument reached Boone, the African right-hand technique had become the Appalachian clawhammer — the same downward strike, the same thumb-on-fifth drone. The wood changed (gourd to hoop-and-rim) and the strings changed (gut to wire); the right-hand logic did not.
Between 1840 and 1880 the banjo was rebuilt to fit the minstrel stage. The change was technical, commercial, and racial; the legacy is the modern instrument.
The American minstrel show — white performers in blackface parodying Black music and speech — was the first mass-mediated popular music in the United States, peaking just before the Civil War. The banjo was the minstrel instrument: every troupe carried at least one, and the standard ensemble was bones, tambourine, and banjo. Loud enough for a hall, cheap enough for a working musician, portable enough to tour.
Northern makers produced banjo kits in volume. William Boucher of Baltimore built the first factory banjos in the 1830s; by the 1850s the Bacon, Dobson, and Vega shops in Boston were producing instruments by the hundreds. The minstrel banjo was louder, deeper, more standardized than the gourd banjo: a wooden rim, machine-tightened hooks, a calfskin head tensioned by a metal hoop, and (after 1869) frets hammered into the fingerboard. The five-string banjo of 1880 is the banjo we play today.
The minstrel era also fixed the racial politics of the banjo. Black musicians were the source; white performers took the stage; the music carried into the parlor, the concert hall, and the Appalachian front porch carrying both the African technique and the American stereotype. The High Country tradition has had to reckon with this since the 1960s — the instrument was shaped by the minstrel industry, even when the music was not.
From the 1960s folk revival to the 2020s clawhammer boom — three phases of the modern High Country banjo.
The folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s put the banjo in front of an urban audience that had never heard a clawhammer roll. Mike Seeger, Ralph Stanley, and Roscoe Holcomb became touring names; the Appalachian String Band Festival at Clifftop, West Virginia, started in 1990 to host the contest circuit; the High Country sessions at Boone and West Jefferson pulled in players from Asheville, Knoxville, and Charlottesville.
The 1970s and 1980s were the bluegrass decade. Earl Scruggs's three-finger style dominated the festival stage and the Opry. The Huber and Stelling workshops took over where Gibson had left off; the five-string banjo with a resonator became the high-lonesome standard. Clawhammer held on but was a single-digit slice of the banjo market.
From the late 1990s onward, the clawhammer boom. Open-back banjos from Deering, Pisgah, and the regional luthiers became the default for new High Country players. The community on YouTube and at the camps outgrew the festival circuits by 2010. The High Country plays more banjo than at any point since the 1880s.
Two festivals, one fiddler's convention, and a season of local contests that keep the music honest.
Founded in 1990 at Camp Washington-Carver near Clifftop, West Virginia, three hours north of Boone. The largest old-time banjo and fiddle contest east of Galax, four days of competition and late-night picking. Runs Thursday through Sunday over the first full week of August.
Run since 1925 in Union Grove, Iredell County, on the Saturday after Easter. The oldest continuously running fiddler's convention in the South. Categories include clawhammer, three-finger, and old-time three-string. The contest draws 8–12 thousand on the Saturday and is the first major event of the High Country contest season.
Galax's annual convention has been the premier old-time banjo contest in the Appalachians since 1935. The clawhammer and two-finger categories attract the working players — Ralph Stanley and Mike Snider both won the senior clawhammer here. Two hours north of Boone along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The regional contest, run since 1998 at the Jones House in downtown Boone. 30–50 contestants. Categories include clawhammer, three-finger, and a beginner's contest for players under three years. Sunday afternoon picking on the lawn is the closest thing to a community banjo session in Watauga County.
Run inside LEAF (Lake Eden Arts Festival) since 2009, the showcase is a curated three-string and open-back banjo contest with a heavier experimental bent than the older conventions. Categories include fretless, gourd, and a progressive category for non-standard tunings.