Eric Weissberg and the Deliverance of the Banjo
Banjo jokes have had their own subcategory of musical humor for years, and one of them goes like this.
A banjo player gets a new banjo and can’t find anybody to take his old one. Used instrument stores won’t buy it, his friends don’t want it, he literally can’t give it away.
But he doesn’t want to throw it in the trash, so he drives his car to the worst crime-infested section of town, parks the car, opens the windows, props up the banjo in the back seat and goes for a walk, fully expecting it will be stolen.
He comes back an hour later, looks in the back seat and finds four more banjos.
Yes, the banjo has had issues with respect. It’s also had musicians it’s impossible not to respect, like Earl Scruggs or Bela Fleck, and we just lost one of the best: Eric Weissberg.
Weissberg, who died Sunday at the age of 80 from complications of Alzheimer’s, was the rare banjo player who crashed the musical mainstream, thanks to his 1973 duet of “Dueling Banjos” with guitarist Steve Mandell.
That lively tune spent four weeks at №2 on the Billboard pop charts, courtesy of its featured appearance in the movie Deliverance.
In a sense, the movie and the song were an odd couple. “Dueling Banjos” invites the listener to break into a buck dance — like the old-timer in the movie — whereas Deliverance itself invites viewers to drive home and lock all the windows and doors.
Still, as an invocation of Southern culture, “Dueling Banjos” did the job, and the opening notes in the movie could portend either merriment or menace.
Credit that to Eric Weissberg. He didn’t compose the tune, though the Warner Bros. release gave Weissberg credit before the real author, Arthur Smith, filed suit and won both a cowriting credit and a boatload of royalties.
What Weissberg did was play it, and while he learned from Pete Seeger and Scruggs, he didn’t sound like anybody else. Never had, never would.
As a musician, Weissberg was a lifer. He was born in Brooklyn and his parents sent him to the Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village, where his music teacher was Charity Bailey. Bailey taught there for a dozen years, laying out an international buffet of folk and other music. She was a particular heroine to Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary.
In the folk music history book Bringing It All Back Home, Weissberg told author Robbie Woliver that he also attended Seeger’s Saturday morning “wing dings” for kids, where young folks were serenaded by the likes of Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston and Leadbelly.
“It was an unbelievable experience then,” he said, “and it’s even more unbelievable to think about it now.”
By the time he was a teenager, Weissberg had learned banjo and fiddle and he was playing on Sunday afternoons in Washington Square Park, often with his friends John Herald, Paul Prestopino and Bob Yellin.
It was a crowded scene in which Weissberg built a reputation the old-fashioned way. “I’d practice all week,” he told Woliver, “and on Sundays I would see if I could do it in front of people.”
At 18, in 1958, he joined Herald in the Greenbriar Boys. Two years later, while studying at Juilliard, he replaced Erik Darling in the Tarriers, a group that had been playing folk music for five years and scored a couple of chart hits with “The Banana Boat Song” and “Cindy Oh Cindy.”
Folk music was having a modest burst of commercial success by then, so the Tarriers stayed alive for another five years, largely on the college and folk circuit.
They played a rich blend of traditional songs (“Children Go Where I Send Thee,” “Pastures of Plenty”), international tunes (“Manha De Carnaval”), and numbers from the new folk wave, like Tom Paxton’s “Rambling Boy” and Ed McCurdy’s “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.”
Their shows and records included showcases for Weissberg, either solo or sometimes with guitar/mandolin player Marshall Brickman, who would later share an Oscar with Woody Allen for cowriting Annie Hall.
After the Tarriers broke up in 1965, Weissberg became an itinerant musician. In demand for session work and jingles even before “Dueling Banjos,” he accompanied Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Loudon Wainwright III, the Talking Heads and the list goes on. He formed and toured with a couple of bands.
His long-time friend Jim Rooney reminisced on Facebook about forming the Blue Velvet Band with Weissberg, Bill Keith and Richard Greene. Their record didn’t sell much, but Rooney recalled Weissberg saying it was the most fun he had in a studio.
Every reminiscence of Weissberg says he was relentlessly upbeat. “He was never down,” wrote Rooney. “He wouldn’t let you be down. His playing was never stale, his singing was always full of energy.”
Eric Weissberg wasn’t just a banjo guy. Anything that had strings, he could play. He probably could have played string cheese.
But he was the one who, for a time, made a cluster of banjo notes into the most recognizable sound in the country. He brought the banjo out of America’s back seat.
