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Alan Munde Solo Banjo
by: Alan Munde

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Way back in the 20th century, I started showing my students a version of “Long Journey Home” (a.k.a. “Two-Dollar Bill”). It’s not just that it’s a good song that every picker should know. Listen to the first measure, “Lost all my....” That’s the same melody you get in “Mountain Dew” (“They call it...”), “I Saw The Light” (“I wandered so...”), and a slew of other songs. They all have that same rising melodic contour and short-long-short meter. So if you have a way to render this bit of melody on the banjo, you’ll be able to use it again and again. You can also use it to approximate similar but wordier vocal phrases like “I’ve laid around and...” (from “Gotta Travel On”) or “It takes a worried...” (from “Worried Man Blues”).

Here’s how I show my students this useful little phrase:

The notes on the fourth string are the melody notes. Notice how neatly they fit into two repetitions of the TITM roll. (Call it whatever you like—alternating thumb, Cripple Creek, square roll—it’s very likely the first roll you learned.) After a TITM roll, experienced players generally expect the next note to be played by the thumb, but the second TITM here starts before it’s time for the next melody note. So we reach for a filler—the fifth string—to start that second TITM. This right-hand approach—two TITMs, the second of which starts on the fifth string—comes in handy in the second line of “Long Journey Home,” too, where we’d sing “two-dollar” over the C chord. The melody is different, but the rhythm is the same, so we can use the same roll structure:

One day an intermediate student asked me to transcribe a solo from the IIIrd Tyme Out recording of “When The Angels Carry Me Home.” As soon as I heard Terry Baucom’s banjo kickoff, I knew what that opening phrase had to be: the same thing I’d been teaching my beginners to do in “Long Journey Home”. Or was it? As I listened more carefully, I realized that I couldn’t hear any fifth string at all. So I slowed down the tape and found something like this:

A quick look reveals that the melody notes are all in the same places as in my version, but the filler notes are different. Try playing it, and you’ll probably find that you can get it flowing smoothly without much practice. Why? Well, it uses a roll every banjo player knows. TMTIMITM is the same pattern we use for the most common fill-in (or tag) lick:

If this roll works for “Lost all my,” it should also work for that “two-dollar” phrase over the C chord, right? And sure enough, it does:

I can think of at least one other way we can use common rolls to get those melody notes in exactly the same places. Think about how often we hit a long note (a quarter note) on the first beat of a measure, then go up to the fifth string and fill out the rest of the measure with some forward rolling, like this (just for example):

We can use this T-TIMTIM approach to play our “Lost all my” phrase like this:

and our “two-dollar” C-chord phrase like this:

If it feels strange to pick the fourth string with your index finger, you’re not alone. Earl Scruggs is one of the many players who generally avoid doing that. Some players, though, seem to welcome itmost notably, Ralph Stanley. Check out this fill-in lick that I transcribed from the original (1959) version of “How Mountain Girls Can Love.” As with Baucom’s opening phrase from “When The Angels Carry Me Home,” I thought I knew exactly what was going on, until I listened more closely:

So far we’ve been looking at licks that put those melody notes exactly where a singer would sing them. But there’s nothing wrong with taking a few liberties with the melody anticipating or delaying notes, or simplifying and streamlining a phrase. Here’s an approach that sounds like something Don Reno might have played:

Note how it uses the very same roll that we used in the Stanley-style example: T-TIMTIM. Here, though, we don’t play the fifth string at all. Instead, we keep the thumb on the fourth string. That means that that second-fret E gets played just a little earlier than in the previous examples, which gives this version a little swinging syncopation. And of course, we can apply this approach to the C-chord phrase, too:

Finally, we can simplify. We don’t always have to play every note that the singer would sing. It’s often sufficient to indicate the general rhythmic and melodic contour of the phrase. Think about how a cartoonist might suggest his subject with just a few strokes, instead of drawing a complete outline and filling it in with color, shading, etc. We can use a forward-backward roll (a.k.a. reverse roll or forward reverse roll) to outline our phrases in this song. Instead of “Lost all my,” here’s “Lost...my”:

and instead of “two-dollar,” here’s “two...-lar”:

Why bother with all this? Why not just have one way to play a phrase, and be done with it? I think there are several reasons. First of all, if you get into the habit of figuring out how to use different rolls to get a desired result, you’ll find it easier to figure out other players’ arrangements, or to come up with your own. Also, when you’re improvising, your right hand will sometimes go its own way, regardless of what you intended; if you have more than one way of playing something, you’re less likely to improvise yourself into a corner. And finally, well, it’s kind of fun.

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About the Author

Ira Gitlin, a native of New York City, is widely known and respected in Washington-Baltimore bluegrass, folk, and roots-music circles as a versatile multi-instrumentalist, teacher, and writer. A former National Bluegrass Banjo Champion and six-time Wammie award winner, Ira has worked with such nationally known performers as Bill Harrell, the Johnson Mountain Boys, and Peter Rowan, and has played on over two dozen recording projects. He can be seen performing frequently with the Blue Moon Cowgirls, Karen Collins & the Backroads Band, the Oklahoma Twisters, and other D.C.-area artists.

In addition to numerous festival workshops, Ira has taught at the Maryland Banjo Academy (1998, 2000, and 2002), the Swannanoa Gathering (2001-3), the Augusta Heritage Workshops (2004-7), the Grey Fox Bluegrass Academy for Kids (2000-2007), and the Kids’ Academies at the Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival (2003-2007) and the Joe Val Memorial Festival (2004-7).

Ira has written about bluegrass music in the pages of Bluegrass Unlimited, Banjo NewsLetter, and Bluegrass Now, and he has contributed liner notes to several commercial recordings. He has lectured on the history of bluegrass for the Smithsonian Associates, and in 2005 he delivered a paper (“The Parking-Lot Vernacular”) at the world’s first academic symposium on bluegrass.

In 1993 Ira was a one-day winner on the television game show Jeopardy.

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