DOWN YONDER: OLD-TIME STRING BAND MUSIC FROM GEORGIA

Art Rosenbaum

Art Rosenbaum teaches art at the University of Georgia. A renowned banjo player and collector of traditional music, he has recorded dozens of albums documenting the traditional musical styles of Georgia, Iowa, and Indiana, among other places. He is the author, along with his wife Margo, of two books on traditional music—Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia (1983) and Shout Because You Are Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia. The following essay is derived from the liner notes Rosenbaum wrote to accompany the 1982 Folkways recording Down Yonder: Old-Time String Band Music from Georgia (FTS 31089) and subsequently updated for publication in American Musical Traditions.

Gordon Tanner welcomed his old friend, Smokey Joe Miller, and Uncle John Patterson, the "Banjo King" from Carrollton, into the "oblong concern of a chicken coop" back behind his home on the outskirts of Dacula, Georgia. He had converted it into a music room and explained, "We run the chickens off, brought some halfstumps in."

"I'm a country boy and feel right at home," said Uncle John.

Actually the now-famous building is well fitted-out, with a carpeted area at one end for the musicians, old photos and more recent trophies lining the wall, and an assortment of upholstered chairs and two wood stoves provided for the comfort of the folks who gather on Friday evenings to hear Gordon fiddle the pieces he recorded with his father's renowned string band, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers. He is usually joined by his son Phil and the Jr. Skillet Lickers who lean toward more of a bluegrass approach.

Gordon has continued to work on the earlier sound however, and this warm October Saturday in 1979 he had the typical old-time string band, with "one on the fiddle, one on the banjo, and one on the guitar," as Uncle John declared. "This is the first time I played with Gordon Tanner, but I played a thousand times with his dad." John was explaining why he had no trouble falling in with the familiar old numbers. He was in typical form, his bare feet patting out a beat, his bare fingers picking and strumming his old S.S. Stewart, the banjo muted but not dulled by a towel behind the head. Gordon's fiddle began to wail out, then whispered, then chopped out a breakdown rhythm, and he smiled and cocked his head back in a pose reminiscent of his father's old photographs. Joe Miller's guitar line was well salted with runs learned firsthand from Riley Puckett, the guitar picker of the original Skillet Lickers. The three men were putting their lifetimes' experience into some of the finest string band music to come out of Georgia in years.

Born in 1916, Gordon Tanner has lived most of his life in Gwinnett County, where his father was a chicken farmer, Saturday night fiddler, and frequent participant in the fiddlers' conventions in nearby Atlanta. Gordon remembers the time in 1924 when he heard his parents discussing the offer by Frank Walker of Columbia Records that Gid go up to New York to make recordings; Gid said he would go if he could get a certain "blind boy" to go with him. A few weeks later Gordon was listening to the Tanner-Puckett duo on the "little grindin' Victrola" his father brought back from New York.

Gid Tanner expanded his recording group into the famous Skillet Lickers, which included Clayton McMichen, Lowe Stokes, Fate Norris, and others. Gid was a warm and exuberant entertainer and was much sought after for live shows. As Gordon tells it, "he'd be full-time (in music) till things got shallow, then he'd bounce back on the farm. He always kept two mules at home, and a milk cow, and raisin' two hogs a year, but he never hesitated to unhitch the mules and get his fiddle and go, whenever there was a request for him."

It was difficult to assemble the Skillet Lickers for live performances, and Gid Tanner often recruited other musician friends and members of his family for shows close to home. Of Gid's children Gordon was "strongest with the musical talent," and Gid fitted out his shy little red-headed son with thimbles to play rhythm on a washboard; Gordon would also be asked to sing songs like "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More" and "Letter Edged in Black," dance a buck and wing, and play straight man to his dad's jokes.

Gordon remembers going to Atlanta with his father on a wagon and seeing Gid attract a huge crowd in front of some merchant friend's store with his fiddle, only to be moved on by the police. As Gordon told it,

The law has to come in, the streetcar is blocked—and made him put his fiddle up. Of course, me, small as I was, it scared me. Of course, it didn't scare my daddy…. He'd scramble around and put his fiddle up, we'd walk around the corner, do the same thing, and I was scared to death the law was coming again…. But that's the way it was. They was hungry for that kind of music.

Gordon recalls other occasions when he had to provide an impromptu "second" on his dad's banjo when Gid had to play at a courthouse square or similar setting.

He'd give me the banjo, and had a clamp on it… by the thumb string, and right below there were two fingers, and that was G chord, and he said, 'Hold that right there!' He knowed I could beat time on anything. I would play that, you know…. He didn't have time to be teaching me. Had to get goin'! 'Course, a lot of his songs, you had to be quick to get in another chord anyway! So … I learned that I wasn't wigglin' my fingers up and down there too much, and somebody might find out I wasn't playin'! So I begin to feel bad about that, and then the fiddle created a lot of interest, and I wound up bein' a fiddler.

Gordon's first modest goal on the fiddle was to play a recognizable tune. At fourteen he was playing "Georgia Wagoner" with his father and Riley over the radio in Covington, Kentucky. During his high school years Gordon played in occasional contests and joined his dad playing for Gene Talmadge's 1932 gubernatorial campaign. His fiddle playing progressed quickly; though Gid was still his chief influence, he learned much from the Skillet Lickers' lead fiddlers, Clayton McMichen and Lowe Stokes, both through occasional personal contact and through the records which were at the Tanner house.

In 1934 Stokes and McMichen had left the band, and Gid was asked by RCA to reassemble the Skillet Lickers to cut some sides in San Antonio, Texas. Riley went along, and Ted Hawkins was added on mandolin. Gordon, a seventeen-year-old student in Dacula High, was told by his dad, "'You gonna be out of school for a week—talk to your teacher."' Gordon presumed that he was being asked along to help drive, as Riley was blind, and Hawkins, as old as Gid, didn't drive. Gordon recalls the trip vividly:

We didn't drive at night, so it took us three days. We'd get up early and drive as long as daylight'd last, then (we'd lodge) in a boardin' house or tavern. We'd have to take whatever we could…. One place we stopped, the sidewalks were made of boards, like a Western town…. We was drivin' an old '30 Chevrolet. It was already four years old, and my daddy had done a lot of travelin', and it was wore out, the front end was out of line, and I'd be give out in four hours, and he'd take over…. Every long hill, he'd say, "Son, cut the motor off, save all the gas you can." … We went into this San Antonio Hotel, the oldest hotel in San Antonio, and this here recording setup was in, looked to me like it was big enough for a basketball court. And no furnishing in it… and we was out almost in the middle of it, settin' around one mike. We didn't rehearse, and so this man got us spaced around it. … Course I was at the mike, my daddy in back, and Riley on the left, Ted on the right. So he begin to name out things he wanted us to play.

When asked if he really didn't know he would be playing until the session, he replied, "Well, I sensed that I might be privileged to play one or two numbers … but I did play lead fiddle on everything that was played." Among the twenty-four sides cut in that historic session, the Skillet Lickers' last, were some of their most popular numbers, "Back Up and Push," "Soldier's Joy," "Tanner's Hornpipe," and, of course, "Down Yonder."

Gordon's name was not on the labels, though his picture appeared in an RCA publicity booklet. For years he respectfully deferred to the assumption of many that his dad was playing lead fiddle. Though Gid never did claim to have played "Down Yonder," Gordon remembers that he "coached my daddy in learnin' to play it after I saw that it was selling. I said, 'People's gonna ask you to play it wherever you go.' But I never could get him to get the double stops. He would 'single-out' strings. And people would say, 'Nobody plays "Down Yonder" like your daddy!' I said, 'That's right.' I never did have no reason to try to steal the credit, because I was lucky to be on."

Gordon graduated high school in 1936. Though he was offered a basketball scholarship to North Georgia College, he didn't want to go into debt to buy the uniforms and stayed at home. He married later that year, and he and his bride, Electra, worked at chopping cotton for seventy-five cents a day to pay the rent on the house they rented, later bought, and still live in. Gordon also sharecropped with his father, drove a school bus, and later went to work for General Shoe Company in the county seat of Lawrenceville.

Even at $9.45 a week such jobs were hard to find in the midst of the Depression, and Gordon was reluctant to leave for the uncertain life of a professional musician, particularly after the couple's first child was born. He worked his way up to being a foreman at General Shoe, and later worked at Georgia Boot in Flowery Branch until his retirement in 1981.

Gordon did continue playing with his father in the area and at church on Sundays. In 1956 he began to make violins and has mastered this difficult art.

Gid Tanner died in 1960, and in 1968 Gordon and his son Phil organized the Jr. Skillet Lickers to keep the name and the music going. They have played at the Georgia Grassroots Festival in Atlanta and the Georgia Mountain Fair in Hiawassee, where Gordon won the "King of the Mountain Fiddlers" crown, just one of his many recent honors. In 1980 Gordon and Phil performed at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife in Washington.

Norm Cohen has pointed out that Gid Tanner, forty at the time he started to record, was older than Puckett or McMichen, and unlike these musicians who absorbed popular and jazz influences into their music, "his orientation was toward traditional music." ("The Skillet Lickers: A Study of a Hillbilly String Band and Its Repertoire," Journal of American Folklore 78, 1965.) Gordon has inherited this love of the older material from his father and knows a good portion of the traditional songs and tunes played by Gid and others in the Skillet Lickers' circle. Like his father, Gordon can sing along with the fiddle, and, though he does not have Gid's gift for extroverted comedy, he is a warm and communicative performer and has surpassed his father's technical ability on the fiddle. The good response to his music at recent festivals has convinced Gordon that it still can speak to contemporary audiences: "It's genuine, not a fad … something that blooms up and goes away, and you talk about it years ago, that come up like a storm, and went on."

Joe Miller is a longtime friend of the Tanner family and played guitar with Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett in many shows in the forties. He can evoke a vivid contrast between the generous, outgoing, and comical "Mr. Gid" and the introverted and moody Puckett. He was born in Walton County in 1918, and his family wanted to instill an interest in music in him at an early age: His mother made him a gourd fiddle fitted with strings unwound from a sieve, and a cornstalk bow. When Joe was four or five his uncle bought him a twenty-five-cent Marine Band harmonica, and, Joe says, "Next time he came to visit, I was playing that thing, and it just thrilled him to death! So that fall he gathered his crop and bought me several more, different keys. I though I was really uptown! I'd tote three of them in my pocket. People would give me nickels and dimes to play.… I was so little, you know, the curiosity."

It was the guitar that most attracted him, and, as he tells it, his parents "ordered a 'leven-dollar-ninety-five-cent Bradley Kincaid Hound-Dog guitar, and that was my start. Mother's brothers would come by and tune it up for me, and sing a few songs, show us a few chords…. And on those long winter nights we'd parch peanuts and I'd thump on that old guitar."

Joe first heard Riley Puckett play when he was about six or seven, and he took every opportunity to go to Skillet Licker shows. "I was always hanging around the side of the stage … to catch what I could. Riley just took my fancy as a guitar player, and it never changed." Joe adapted Riley's unique way of playing runs with index and middle fingers to the flat pick. His first professional experience was with fiddler Charlie Bowman playing for the WSG Barn Dance at the old Erlanger Theater in Atlanta. Having extremely poor eyesight, Joe felt he could make a living as a musician, and in 1939 went up to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to play over WDOD with Chester Anderson and Kentucky Evelyn. He was guaranteed five dollars a week, which "didn't leave much to play on" after spending two dollars for groceries and three dollars for a one-room apartment with a bed, two-burner stove, a little table and chair. After "a few months … my shoes would get to ramblin', I'd get to thinking about things back home. … I'd get homesick and was ready to give it up."

In the early forties he went on the road again, this time with Fisher Hendley and the Rhythm Aristocrats out of Columbia, South Carolina. Hendley gave him the nickname "Smokey Joe" for his ability to play lightning-fast runs and note-for-note fiddle tunes.

Back in Georgia Joe worked with Gid Tanner, whom he considers "the most honest, the most congenial man I ever worked with in show business. … I played with him up to the time I got married, and some for good old brotherly love after that." His marriage was in 1943, and shortly thereafter he went to work at the Carwood overall plant, a job he held until his retirement in 1981. He got the calling to preach in 1951 and was ordained by the North Georgia Conference of the Congregational Holiness Church. For the last twenty-six years he has had a radio ministry, first out of WIMO, Winder, then WMRE, and currently WKUN, both in Monroe.

His wife died in 1981, and Joe lives alone in a big house in the Walton County village of Campton; he gives music lessons in the tiny music store he keeps in the side room. Music is the cement for his friendship with Gordon Tanner, whom he considers dear as a brother. "There's a bond like that between most musicians…. It's the best recreation I have. (Some) go to their football games … hoot and holler their head off—just give me my old guitar and two or three of my good friends, brother, I'm in heaven!"

Though he is a religious man and often sings and plays gospel music, he continues to love the secular folk songs and parlor songs of an earlier day. For him,

it expresses the early pioneer life of people in America, their heartaches and sorrows…. Back in those days when a tune came out, it usually had an authentic background…. They sang about things that were tragic, and some love songs. But I remember as a young child sitting around the fireside, and hear musicians sing these songs on phonograph and radio, it just seeded in my soul. And at a tender age I could just weep when they'd sing those beautiful songs with that pretty harmony, telling those sad stories. I guess I'm living in a changing age, and it breaks my heart to see those old songs put back on the shelf, and the younger generation doesn't know about it. And I'm persuaded to believe that if it's introduced to them … it would touch their heart. It made a better person out of me. I'm sure of that.

John Patterson died in the spring of 1980. He was a warm and outgoing southern gentleman of the old school, and a master stylist and technician on the five-string banjo. He will be missed by his many friends and the growing number of people who are coming to appreciate his importance to the story of southern old-time music.

He learned to pick "Shout Lulu" on his mother's lap when he was three years old. If his first tune was typical for southern banjo pickers, his very early start and subsequent spectacular career certainly were not. Bessie Patterson was a champion banjo player, and when she died in 1924 she had already schooled her fourteen-year-old son in the basics of his extraordinary style, a combination of two-finger or up-picking style with chordal brushes and three-finger style melody playing; on her deathbed she had him promise never to let anyone beat him playing a banjo.

John got his first chance to defend his mother's title a month later at the Fiddlers' Convention at Atlanta's City Auditorium. He found himself up against Rosa Lee, the daughter of Fiddling John Carson, later to be known as "Moonshine Kate." The full story of this epic contest has been told by Uncle John in his own words in the notes for his banjo LP (Plains Georgia Rock, Arhoolie 5018), and by Dr. Gene Wiggins in both prose and poetry ("Uncle John Patterson, Banjo King," Devil's Box 13, no. 3). Rosa Lee had already played John's best piece, "Spanish Fandango", so the sixty-seven-pound boy, wearing a shirt made out of a flour sack and a pair of his "granddaddy's pistol pants," picked "Hen Cackle" so spiritedly that "old Gid Tanner, and even John Carson … got to cackling and got to crowing." In the finals John was allowed to play "Spanish Fandango" and won. "And from that time till now I've managed to take care of myself," he said in recent years. He has been national champion and never lost a contest.

Uncle John—he has worn the "Uncle" since boyhood—had been playing at dances with the famous fiddler Ahaz Gray, like the Pattersons a resident of Carroll County on Georgia's western edge. He later teamed up with John Carson, as well as many other noted Georgia string musicians, in the 1932 Talmadge campaign; he met Gordon on some occasions when Gid Tanner was along, but Gordon was usually helping with the driving rather than playing.

After Gene's election, John, who had been a sharecropper, became the governor's bodyguard. John Carson was made elevator operator in the statehouse, and the two musicians often played together in the statehouse and at Talmadge parties. Following Talmadge's defeat in the early forties, John went to work at Lockheed Aircraft as a hydraulics engineer. Music was not neglected during the following years: John toured with Smiley Burnett in 1952, and in 1962 he played his banjo composition, "John Glenn Special," in a five-hour marathon, exceeding his goal to play it as long as the astronaut was in orbit! John had politics as well as music in his blood, and he served from 1968 to 1974 as state representative from Carrollton.

John was an all-around musician, adept on the fiddle, piano, and musical saw as well as banjo. After losing his picking index finger in an accident in the fifties he simply shifted the lead to his second finger. Before his Arhoolie record, on which he was backed by his son James on guitar, he recorded little—one disc in 1931 and another in 1947 with his Carroll County Ramblers. In his last years John performed at the Georgia Grass Roots Festival in Atlanta. In addition to his other achievements, Uncle John Patterson will be remembered for his work with two other veterans of Georgia's great age of old-time music.

Afterword: Gordon Tanner died in 1982 after having played at the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap Farm in Virginia, but before he could make a scheduled appearance at the Brandywine Festival at a reunion of musicians from the early Skillet Licker band. Smokey Joe Miller is still an active musician at this writing (2001). The Skillet Lickers' early 78-rpm recordings (dating from 1923–1934) have been reissued by both County Records (release numbers 506, 526, and 3509) and Old Homestead (release numbers 192 and 193).

The author subsequently expanded this essay into a chapter on Gordon Tanner and his circle of musicians that was published in the book Folk Visions and' Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia (University of Georgia Press, 1983). Currently the Tanner legacy is being carried on by Gordon's son Phil and his grandson Russ, a fourth-generation Tanner family fiddler, in a band that still bears the name Skillet Lickers or Skillet Lickers II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS AND ARTICLES

Cohen, Norm. (1965). "The Skillet Lickers: A Study of a Hillbilly String Band and Its Repertoire." Journal of American Folklore 78.

Daniel, Wayne W. Pickin' on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia. (1990). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Rosenbaum, Art. (1983). Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Wiggins, Gene. "Uncle John Patterson, Banjo King." Devil's Box 13, no. 3.

Wiggins, Gene. (1987). Fiddlin' Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin'John Carson—His Real World and the World of His Songs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1987.

RECORDINGS AND VIDEOS

Down Yonder. 1982. Produced by Clate Sanders with Art Rosenbaum. 28 min. Georgia Public Television documentary featuring Gordon Tanner, Phil Tanner, and Smokey Joe Miller. Available from Media: Georgia Center for Continuing Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602.

Phil Tanner's Skillet Lickers: The Tanner Legacy Now! Produced and annotated by Art Rosenbaum. Global Village CD 311.

Plains Georgia Rock. 1977. Uncle John Patterson. Arhoolie 5018.

Skillet Licker Music, 1955–1991: The Tanner Legacy, with Gid Tanner's Last Recordings. 1992. Produced and annotated by Art Rosenbaum Global Village CD 310.

Smokey Joe Miller and His Georgia Pals Newman Young and Lawrence Humphries Sing Old American Heartthrobs. 1982. Folkways FTS 31093.