Brad Leftwich grew up in Oklahoma in a musical family and began playing the banjo at an
early age. He spent several years learning banjo and fiddle from older-generation musicians in
the Southern Appalachian area. He is a frequent staff member at teaching camps and workshops
throughout the country. He authored a book on Round Peak clawhammer banjo published by
Mel Bay. He is a member of "Tom, Brad and Alice", a
highly acclaimed ensemble, which includes Alice Gerrard
and Tom Sauber, and performs traditional American
music. I had an opportunity to visit with Brad while he
was performing with "Tom, Brad and Alice" in March
2004 at the Old Time Music and Dulcimer Festival,
hosted by Margaret and Jerry Wright in Palestine, Texas -
http://www.geocities.com/palestinefestival/index.htm
Interview-
DLT: Brad, your role in TBA is vocalist and fiddle
player?
BL: Primarily fiddle player. They let me play banjo on a
couple of numbers.
DLT: How long have you been playing the banjo?
BL: I started to play banjo before I learned to play the fiddle. I was . fteen years old when I started
playing and I'm now . fty, so I guess that makes it 35 years.
DLT: Have you always played clawhammer banjo?
BL: Well, you know, when I . rst started out, I played three . ngers Scruggs style and played that
way for a year or two . I began to make the switch over to clawhammer. There was a long
period of time when I played both. I never played enough Scruggs style to really get good at it.
I started getting interested in clawhammer and that kind of took over my attention.
DLT: You spent a lot of time in the Round Peak area of North Carolina listening to people play
clawhammer. Why did you become interested in the music of that area?
BL: I had heard a couple of recordings of Tommy Jarrell's fiddle playing. Actually, when I . rst
heard it, I didn't much care for it. But the more you listen to his music, the better it sounds.
Eventually, I just got to where I loved his . ddling. The recordings I had were Tommy playing
fiddle and Fred Cockerham playing the banjo. I just loved that banjo-fiddle sound and liked
their playing. Fred was a tremendous banjo player and Tommy was a tremendous fiddler. I
thought of them as the rock stars of the old time music world. I never dreamed that you could
actually go visit them and spend time with them. One summer I ran into some people who were
just coming back from visiting Tommy. They told me anybody could go visit him and that he
was a real nice, hospitable guy and I should go down and visit him. So, I wrote him a letter
and said, "If you don't mind, I'd like to come down and visit you." He didn't have a telephone.
There was no way to call him on the phone. I had a friend, David Winston, who was learning
to play banjo about the same time I was learning to play the fiddle. We went down to North
Carolina together and spent a couple of days at Tommy's house and after that I was hooked.
We just went back there whenever we possibly could. Tommy was the most generous man you
could ever imagine. He showed you anything you wanted to learn on fiddle or banjo either
one, and you were welcome to stay as long as you wanted. Anything he had, he was willing to
share.
DLT: Tommy was a pretty good banjo player as well as a fiddle player, wasn't he?
BL: That's right, he was. He was mostly known as a fiddle player but he also started playing the
banjo before he started playing the fiddle. He started playing the banjo when he was eight or
nine years old. He didn't take up the fiddle until he was thirteen. He was really good banjo
player. For a long time, he didn't have a banjo. A friend of his, Paul Brown, a well known
banjo player in his own right, loaned him a banjo that Tommy used for the rest of his life.
Tommy wasn't always in good practice like he was on the fiddle because people didn't ask him
to play banjo all that often. He did keep a couple of his favorite numbers dusted off. He would
play "Step Back Cindy" and "Rockingham Cindy". If you asked him to play any of the other
Round Peak area tunes, he could play them, too, and do some really nice picking.
DLT: As a result of your exposure to the various Round Peak area musicians, you authored a
book "Round Peak Clawhammer" containing information and instruction on the area's
pickers and playing styles, complete with tablature. What got you interested in that
project?
BL: I never really intended to do that. About ten or . fteen years ago, I had a banjo student who was
really interested in the Round Peak style. I would show him the tune and he would get it on
his tape recorder, take it home and tab it out. After a while, he had a pretty good sheaf of tabs
and he brought them back and said, "I've got a lot of tabs here; you ought to make a book out
of these." I was reluctant at . rst because I had mixed feelings about using tablatures. To get the
nuance of the music, you really have to use your ears. But it seemed to be a pretty good idea,
if I could pair it with a CD where people could actually listen to the tunes and hear the music,
then use the tablatures to see what was played on the CD.
It turned out I didn't actually use his tablatures the way he had written them out. I went back
and overhauled what I had shown him because I wasn't necessarily teaching exactly the way I
would like to see it in a book. You make a lot of changes to suit a person's particular style or
what they want or just what you happen to be doing at the time. He convinced me I should do
the book. His name is Ray Wakeland, a real nice guy. So, I made a list of tunes that everybody
in the Round Peak area would play. I set a goal to write at least two tabs of tunes everyday until
I got it . nished. I think I ended up with about eighty tunes and it took a month and a half. Then,
I went to the studio and tried to play the tunes pretty much as they were written in my book.
DLT: For me, the Round Peak area style, until your ears become accustomed to it, can be
dif. cult to play even with the tabs.
BL: It is a very intricate kind of playing, very detailed. They are not doing anything that most banjo
players don't know how to do. It is all slides, drop thumb, hammer-on, or pull-offs, but they
use them in a particular ways that create the style.
The other reason I wanted to do that book was because there are a lot of misconceptions about
what Round Peak music is. When I was teaching workshops, I would hear people say all kinds
of things about Round Peak that just weren't true. I wanted to get the idea out there what it
was , where it was from, and who the main players were. I tried to capture some of that in the
introduction of the book, the biographies, and a little bit about the history of the music, brie. y,
in the front of the book. In a couple of cases, I tabbed out different takes on the same song.
Like with any style, individual players have a different take on the same tune.
DLT: How much do you play banjo now?
BL: Not as much as I would like. I really love to play the banjo but I just don't have occasion in my
spare time. In "Tom, Brad and Alice", I mostly play fiddle. One of these days, I'm going to sit
down and really polish it (banjo playing) up and try to do it the way it ought to be done.
The Tab that follows of the tune " Sugar Hill" is taken from ROUND PEAK STYLE Clawhammer Banjo by Brad Leftwich and published by Mel Bay. The sound byte is from the included CD. The tuning is (ADADE) or
Double C with capo at 2nd fret. Brad may be contacted through www.tombradalice.com
