DESCRIPTION:
From the Art Of Field Recording: Survey...Fifty Years Of Traditional American Music Documented By Art Rosenbaum

Recorded April 18, 1981, in Toccoa, Stephens County, by Art Rosenbaum; Sung and narrated by J.C. "Jake" Staggers with 5-string banjo

Jake Staggers is the only black banjo-picker we have recorded in Georgia. He was born in 1899 in Oconee County, South Carolina, though he has spent the last fifty years across the Tugaloo River in Toccoa, Georgia. At ten he began to learn the banjo from his older brother, Hansell, a friend named Jesse Godine, and Garnett Spencer, a white man. He acquired a rich repertoire of railroad songs, pre-blues frolic pieces, and spirituals, and a solid drop-thumb frailing style on the banjo that made him a sought-after musician for black and white dances, and gathering where "black and white get on the flo' at one time and dance." He is proud that in those days he "Couldn't be beat", and even in the 1980's his playing and singing vividly exemplifies the black contribution of the African-derived banjo and the songs associated with, to American music. This song is a cante-fable, or spoken narrative interspersed with sung elements; Jake learned it from his brother, Hansell, who learned it as a railroad worker. The white North Carolina collector-performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford sang and recited this piece, also to banjo accompaniment (Library of Congress recording AFS L29, "Songs and Ballads of American History and the Assassination of Presidents"); Lunsford's version associates the story with President Garfield's assassination by Charles Guiteau, seen as a small-town street attack. The sung melodies in Stagger's and Lunsford's versions are similar, and point to a black origin of the piece. ~ Art Rosenbaum

Photos: James Van Der Zee; Jake Staggers, Toccoa, 1981, photographed by Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, source: Art of Field Recording Volume 2 booklet and Folk Visions & Voices, Etnic Folkways Records FE 34161