Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Dueling Banjos (1973)

Performer: Eric Weissberg                                    Writer: Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith
Highest US Chart Position: #2                              Label: Warner Brothers
Musicians: Eric Weissberg, Marshall Brickman, Clarence White and Gordon Terry

This is one of those incredible circumstances in which a song that has absolutely no business being on the Hot 100 becomes a hit by striking a chord in the American consciousness. In this instance it was the association with the film Deliverance, which featured Burt Reynolds and was a huge box-office success at the time. At the beginning of the movie, four friends are going out on a canoe trip in the backwoods of Georgia before the whole valley is flooded by the building of a dam. As Ronny Cox is tuning his guitar, an inbred boy with a banjo starts mimicking him and eventually the two of them launch into a rousing rendition of “Dueling Banjos.” The song is straight-ahead bluegrass and yet made it all the way to number two in the pop charts at the beginning of 1973 because of its infectious melody and its association with the film. Being very young at the time, I wouldn’t actually see the film until later, but I can vividly remember my dad’s friends being in complete awe at how well this mentally disabled kid could play and thinking he must be a musical savant--not realizing that it was just an actor, and on subsequent viewings it’s clear he’s not really playing the instrument. But those urban myths were just the kind of thing that helped to make the song, and the film, so popular.

The song begins with a couple of strummed notes by Marshall Brickman on the guitar, as if the tuning was being checked. Then Eric Weissberg on the banjo answers a half-note below and slides up to match the chord. This is followed by a bigger chord on the guitar and the banjo going an octave higher. From here the guitar individually picks out the six notes in the G chord, while the banjo answers with three. Finally, the guitar strums the distinctive five-beat call and answer, moving from a G chord to a C on the fourth beat, which the banjo repeats. This is played four times before the guitar picks out a descending melody, answered again by the banjo. Then a new melody is picked on the low notes of the guitar, and followed up twice by the banjo. When the same melody is picked up one string higher, the banjo repeats, before the call and response happens again another string up. The song is half over by the time the five-beat call and response chords happen again, and everything to this point has been slow and quiet. But now the pace picks up with the descending melody played on the guitar, the banjo playing underneath as well, before both descending into a loping version of the tune, the banjo picking out the melody and the guitar strumming beneath. Then the earlier melodies are picked out and echoed with the support of the other instrument before both of them launch into the full-speed version of the song with Weissberg playing a wonderfully intricate banjo solo. At the end of the song the guitar drops out and the banjo finishes with an extended series of licks and is joined on the last note by the guitar.

What’s so interesting about the success of this song is that this wasn’t the first time this had happened with a bluegrass tune, and it happened in almost exactly same manner. In 1967 the movie Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, was a box-office smash. In several spots on the soundtrack an old bluegrass tune by Flatt and Scruggs was used, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” from 1947, and the song unexpectedly became a hit on it’s own, going to number fifty-five in the pop charts twenty years after it was first recorded. When “Dueling Banjos” came out the songwriting credits were listed as Traditional, meaning that the song was based on an old tune long in the public domain. But that wasn’t actually the case. It had been written and recorded in 1955 by the great guitarist, Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith and he successfully sued Warner Brothers for royalties on the new version. The song entered the charts in mid January and climbed all the way to the number two spot, where it sat for four weeks in March behind Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” unable to reach the top spot. The B-side was an actual traditional number called “Reuben’s Train” from the Civil War period, and pulled off an album recorded by Weissberg and Brickman ten years earlier which Warners would shamelessly repackage as the Soundtrack to Deliverance. Nevertheless, “Dueling Banjos” remains an iconic bluegrass song, and part of the popular consciousness because of its unexpected success in the winter of 1973.

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