A-Side
Everyone knows the nine notes that work as a call and response between the dueling banjos: duh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh. If you and your friends are laughing about Appalachian rednecks, singing this guitar lick is the number two choice after an incest joke. For me, the notes automatically bring to mind the movie Deliverance, which I saw at the too-young age of 10 years old because my dad thought I’d like it?
If you know the movie, you know that I was shown things no young boy should have to see. This was, after all, a movie featuring Burt Reynolds’ broken bone sticking out of his leg, and some redneck’s erect bone plunging into Ned Beatty. You know: for kids!
To this day I cannot for the life of me understand why I was shown this film. The best I can come up with is I liked Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run, so naturally I’d be interested in this particular entry into Burt Reynolds’s oeuvre. Ned Beatty was in Superman. “You like Superman,” I can hear my dad saying.What could go wrong? Everything, as it turned out.
Well, not everything: The best and most famous scene is still that early one with the guitar/banjo duel. A very young Ronny Cox and a real local kid the casting director seemed to pluck out of some murky gene pool play opposite each other. It’s Cox on guitar, the kid on banjo starting off with a slowed down call and response, the main riff from the1955 song Feudin’ Banjos by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith and Don Reno. You must have seen this, right?
The movie scarred me, yes. But that scene hit just right. We’d rented Deliverance from the local strip mall video hut, so before it went back I hooked my tape deck up to the VCR’s Audio Out port and recorded the whole scene. The link above starts 26 seconds before my recording, but also can we talk about how premeditated this viewing of Deliverance was? It’s not like we were flipping through the channels and caught it from the beginning and went with it. A split second decision like that can lead a parent down some wrong turns. I’ve been there. No, no. We went to the video store. Drove there. To get a movie that my dad had scene, in which four adult friends go canoeing in Georgia only to be terrorized and brutalized by the local backwood fauna.
I listened to that tape over and over again. The contrast between the guitar’s six harmonious strings and the banjo’s more guttural and twangy five created a tension that just explodes into something whole when you finally hear them together. It was the sonic equivalent of what’s going on onscreen, and I loved how these two seemingly different species of humanoids could meet in the middle with some music and have a great time, if only for a few minutes.
And from that, a lifelong love of banjo was born.
B-Sides
- Jesus Walking on the Water, Asylum Street Spankers — This is a cover of a Violent Femmes tune, but the Violent Femmes version does not contain banjo. Neither does this version, but it could. This band has, at least, a banjo player.
- Country Death Song, Violent Femmes — This is an original by the Violent Femmes, a band with no banjo player. Tony Trischka does the honors here and it’s the banjo at its most menacing. The lyrics, too, are dark AF—the whole song is is deeply unsettling, start to finish, and it’s maybe my favorite song from this band.
- Shame, The Avett Brothers — There was a period from about 2007 to 2011 when the Avett Brothers were simply unable to write a bad song. This one grabbed me instantly. Only wealthy, billionaire-class pieces of shit can’t relate to this song. We’ve all done something shameful. This song gets to the heart of it, and the banjo makes it happen.