photos by Michael Todd
The tour of Jerry Spahn’s basement living space halts abruptly in the banjo room.
Both because there’s not much else to see in the narrow set of rooms that contains a kitchenette, a recliner and a sleeping cot, and because the three stringed instruments hanging from the wall of the boiler room are the focal point of the entire home.
He points me toward one of a pair of chairs that face each other. I reach for a notepad, expecting we’re about to talk about his 68-year relationship with the instrument. Instead, he thrusts a banjo into my outstretched hands. It’s little more front-heavy than I’d imagined, and I put my left hand on the fretboard.
“You just leave those the hell alone,” Jerry says gruffly. “That’s not how you start.”
He removes a second instrument from the wall for himself, slings it around his body in one unhurried motion and shuffles to the other chair. He faces me with his eyes nestled somewhere deep behind a pair of ample, wire-rimmed glasses.
Then the 80-year-old banjo instructor begins this unsolicited lesson the way he has hundreds of times before: “Now, the thing you have to know about the banjo is…”
This is Jerry Spahn’s version of a handshake.
***
The Note You Leave Out
Spahn’s house — his daughter inhabits everything above the basement — is clean and modest, divided from the rest of the rigid Lincoln neighborhood grid by an out-of-place gravel road and a nearby neighbor’s majestically overgrown tree with Spanish moss. From the east, the house is draped in the mournful quiet of Wyuka Cemetery. And just like him, all of Spahn’s eastward neighbors live underground. He lives in the basement with no cell phone reception, six banjos, 160-year-old books about the instrument’s history and a 17-year-old blind and deaf dog that uses only the tip of its nose to feel around cement floors and walls.
In this space, he teaches the banjo to his grandson, Johnny Spahn, a half dozen other students and half of the best banjo players in Lincoln, Spahn says.
Spahn is a proponent, or a preserver, of the two-finger playing style. While much of American old-time music is uses the down-picking clawhammer style (the shape of the hand being the claw), Spahn favors the two-finger style for his own well-constructed reasons.
He describes the shortcomings of the all-clawhammer player in a band setting. Midway through the song, he steps to the front of the stage, dazzles the crowd with a solo and retreats to his supporting role as a hightone timekeeper for the remainder of every song.
From his chair, Spahn begins to pick the traditional American song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” It starts as a series of eighth notes in open G, the banjo’s standard tuning, in a sing-song, alternating thumb-finger-thumb-finger style.
“The most important note,” he preaches, as I try to mimic his two fingers pinching in time, “is the one you leave out.”
But this is actually two notes, he goes on to say, in between bouts of singing along. His singing voice is a baritone drone. From a 25-year old, it might seem tuneless and affected. But from an 80-year old, it pays its respects to the traditional imperfections of folk music, nodding at the rail lines and campfires that don’t prioritize sweetness.
Each movement on the banjo is simple and easy. This is why Jerry claims to make proficient players in a year’s time. And yet the instructions are carefully crafted, depending on how far the player might go and how much of the banjo’s world he might come to explore.
Don’t use the index finger in two-finger style, Spahn says, because some day — “just maybe!” — you might want to put on three finger picks. In the one sense, he’s taught me his two-finger style in 10 minutes. In another, he’s established just the first layer of building blocks for a learning experience that’s spanned his entire life.
Take a Clawhammer Banjo Lesson with Jerry Spahn:
Spahn loses me, stroke-for-stroke, when he begins to demonstrate his precious omitted notes. At the end of the phrases in the song he calls simply “Circle,” he leaves a quick hole. And the other missing note appears when he begins switching from thumb lead to a finger lead, which again creates a grooving rhythm, as opposed to a beat-for-beat timekeeping.
As if we can’t hear the newfound bounce, Spahn announces the arrival of the groove himself: “All of a sudden the music is jumping!”
“Without the two notes you leave out, it’s just drivel. That’s what’s wrong with bluegrass banjo picking in general. There ain’t no rhythm there, and there ain’t but a little bit of melody there. All there is is a bunch of rolls, up and down.”
Afterward, Spahn explains that his transition from playing in a local trio (now known as Shoestring Band) and sojourning to play with banjo masters to teaching was accidental. The musical style is a three-decade montage of practice and close listening to banjo luminaries. The desire to instruct arose naturally from his genial but rough exterior.
“My personality is outgoing and pushy, so I just started teaching. I’m a grouchy old bastard ‘cause I won’t let you do it wrong. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who do (two-finger style) the same way I do it. But I’ve never heard another person tell you the way I tell you.”
I’ve completely stopped playing at this point, and while Spahn knows I’m not in his basement for a lesson at all, he emphasizes the chief tenet of his banjo philosophy as though I’d signed on for an apprenticeship.
“It’s the note you leave out, dummy!”
***
The Living Treasure
The old master’s career on the banjo is chopped into thirds.
The first Jerry Spahn was a 12-year-old farm boy with a banjo slung around his back, likely wearing the same style of denim overalls he is in 2013. He toted around a banjo in his hometown of Raymond, Neb., until he entered high school at Lincoln High and his mother found an opportunity to sell what he’d long treated as a noisy, de facto plaything.
“Why does a kid drag around a toy truck? Why does he drag around a gun? Probably when we had the farm sale out there, my mom saw a good chance to get the hell rid of that thing,” he laughs.
Quizzically, Spahn points to the mounted shelf above the hanging banjos in the boiler room, which holds three cases and three foot-high stacks of sheet and tab music.
“That could be the one up there,” Spahn unsure of whether his first instrument is a few feet away or in the home of an old student who borrowed and never returned it. Either way, he claims not to know “the providence” or the fate of that particular instrument. As a longtime lending tree for banjos, he doesn’t care. After he plops one into the lap of a new player, he says they’re likely to take it home.
“I’d guess there’s a good dozen that I’ve given out.”
Then Spahn was 22, fresh out of the army and with a baby daughter at home. He found himself reconnected with the banjo when his wife gave him one for Christmas. This time, he didn’t let the habit go.
The second transition from proficient player to inquisitive veteran begins with an early retirement around age 50.
“I never worked very hard in my whole life, never did want to,” he says.
Spahn embarked on a series of national journeys, five or six each year, to seek out the country’s most skilled and storied banjo players. Most of the time, this took him to Appalachia and the American southeast, where he rubbed shoulders and memorized lessons from renowned players such as Cordell Kemp and Will Keys. The former was notorious for his hand tricks, like spinning the banjo end over end. Spahn demonstrates a surprisingly spry rendition. He says the latter was one of the few living people to be named “a national treasure” by what he refers to as “the National Historical Society.”
These are the musicians (among many others, he insists) from whom Spahn assembled his theories on two-finger style. The respect Spahn houses for the legendary banjoists isn’t far from the way some of Spahn’s own pupils describe him.
Max Morrissey, a Lincoln banjoist who founded the old-timey Lincoln band Bud Heavy & The High Lifes because of Jerry’s influence on him after a year of lessons, calls Spahn and the breadth of his knowledge “a treasure.”
“You don’t see a lot of people giving kids the time of day, especially those of us who had spent our time jumping around, yelling and turning our amps up as loud as we could,” Morrissey says. “But he gave me that chance. He literally changed my life.”
As Spahn moves through the banjo’s history, though I listen and make no move to paint Appalachia as the only source of its legacy, he warns in advance against it.
“Don’t kid yourself. There’s a lot of people in San Francisco who know how to play the because of the 49ers and the Gold Rush.”
In this way, Spahn renders the history of the instrument more easily framed than seems possible. He was 50 when he encountered the elder statesmen of the banjo world with experience on the instrument dating back to the turn of the century. Only 40 years before that generation, Spahn tells of the minstrel Joel Sweeney who grifted and stole the voice and tradition of the instrument away from African Americans.
Spahn is careful to note that while minstrel bluegrass was America’s first pop music craze, it came at the expense of African Americans who were mocked and dehumanized at minstrel shows. Spahn scoffs at a slanted history which postulates that Sweeney added the banjo’s fifth and all-important rhythm string. This too, he says, was the contribution of African instrument makers centuries before.
With the disturbing racial casualties in tow, Spahn is clear that the banjo quickly became the people’s instrument: easier to make and carry than a guitar or fiddle and subject to multiple styles of play.
“How many different ways do you suppose there are to tune a banjo?” Spahn asks rhetorically. “As many people as there are living in the Appalachian mountains. It’s the only American instrument before the age when things would plug in.”
The third stage of Spahn’s career marks itself with a gruff, hands-on teaching style for which Spahn has no apologies and a playing style for which he has just one.
“I’m sorry about my aim. My hands are spastic. I’m 80 years old, I can’t hit it like I used to.”
In our hours together, from this private meeting in his basement to a cgsmusic banjo workshop a few days later, this apology will come up half a dozen times: each with varying degrees of wistfulness, regret and blunt honesty attached.
“Listen, I’m 80,” he says rather forcefully when prefacing why he feels unable to play with his former band, even though he’d still like to. And he’s right. The playing does lack a certain grace and precision. What the mind and mouth command in sure tones, the body does not always comply with.
But the evidence of what used to be is in transference. It’s in the hands of his students, in the hands of his grandson.
***
“Everybody Here Knows What The Hell They’re Doing”
“Now, it’s supposed to be a banjo workshop,” Spahn says, gesturing at the group of six players circled up in the basement of cgsmusic on a late August Thursday. “But nobody gives a damn.”
On this night, the monthly meeting is more of a jam session, and Spahn emcees the event, cracking jokes and hassling the players. He’s the Thursday night master of ceremonies, its instructor, its comic relief and it’s entirely clear from the chuckles and eyerolls of the other players that this behavior is a staple of the “workshop,” not for my benefit.
“If somebody’s having trouble, it’s knee-to-knee with them,” the teacher says. “And then if they start to feel it a little bit, I’ll leave them the hell alone and go on to the next person.”
Spahn explains that the summer weather keeps their numbers smaller (closer to five than 10). People would rather be outside than huddled in the chilly basement full of ceiling-high instrument boxes and the enormous shadows of unstrung upright basses, looming in corners. Everyone here tonight is a usual suspect.
There’s Johnny, the 12-year-old grandson with fast and confident fingers. He refuses to sing, but switches back and forth between banjo and guitar. Spahn suspects he may like the guitar a little more, but he’s devoted to grandfather’s commands to alternate between clawhammer and two-finger style.
Tuning is a performance all its own in between songs, everyone twanging strings flat and then sharp and then, they hope, into the happy middle ground. They could all just buy their own tuners.
“But you don’t need those if you’ve got Johnny,” Spahn says, winking at the boy.
Spahn admits his favorite current banjo player, one of the best he’s ever seen, is Chris Radek, a student of two years. Radek’s finger roll before the instrumental chorus of “Angeline the Baker” is a delicacy unseen in the rest of the circle.
Momentarily, Spahn steps away from their ranks and leans in toward my ear for three quick words:
“Ain’t that easy?”
Through the smack talk and the well-worn jokes, the pupils and peers seem to understand that fielding the cantankerous Spahn comes with the same territory as the lessons and his guiding presence.
“I vividly remember sitting in the basement at cgs, receiving my first lesson from Jerry,” Max Morrissey says. “For the first three quarters of the session, I was like, ‘Who does this guy think he is? He has no idea how to teach people!’ since he was being very assertive — which is generally good — but it felt a little … abrasive. But after awhile I realized he does know what he’s doing, he just has his own style.”
The group plays in the round for nearly two hours. The sharing of the songs feels genuine. There’s no soloing or showing off from the stronger players on songs they haven’t introduced. The song begins and ends with the person who offered it up. Someone is quite often out of tune. It is, after all, a workshop by name.
“It’s a lot easier to play wrong notes than it is to be out of tune, isn’t it?” jokes Gem Miller, one of Spahn’s former bandmates.
When it’s time to move beyond old favorites and the standards, Doc Manthey, the keeper of the songs and father of Eli Mardock guitarist Joey Manthey, selects new tunes from his iPad library and later emails tabs to any interested parties.
Spahn explains that the voice of the banjo can be brassy or complementary, and Miller, a slightly hard-of-hearing band leader, favors the first option. But even his strong and sometimes overpowering playing relinquishes the lead when it changes hands.
Spahn has the group’s most boisterous speaking and singing voice, both lower and louder than all the others. As if to visually reinforce his position, only two of the many fluorescent lights in the basement are lit, creating an accidental spotlight that illuminates only Jerry.
Back in his own basement a few days before, Spahn mentioned once having a massive vinyl collection of bluegrass and folk music that he’s since stopped caring for. He saves his collection of tapes only as a coming-of age present for Johnny, to continue the life of his musical genes.
Spahn says he has no use for “canned music.”
“Live music is the only real music, as far as I’m concerned.”
What Spahn once found on a dewy Southern front porch with the legendary Cordell Kemp 30 years before, he now fosters sitting next to a bashful 12-year-old who he calls Jonathan for a laugh.
As I look around the room trying to identify Spahn’s two-finger style in his disciples, Spahn sighs softly and says that, left to their own devices, most everyone there will play clawhammer style.
Fifteen minutes out from the store closing and pack-up, I ask one more time why he prefers his method with such great conviction. Is there anything that goes beyond the musicality and the 30 years of a teacher’s sheer habit?
“It got to be a self-defense thing,” Spahn says softly, not wanting to talk over Johnny leading the pack on “Buffalo Gals.” He cites his age once again, admitting his hands began to prevent him from hitting the strings cleanly in the clawhammer style. He quietly directs my eyes toward Johnny’s small fingers for an example of what the accurate strokes should look like in a player, someone naive to the possibility of fingertips one day missing their mark.
May the circle be unbroken.