Black History Month 2019 | The Ebony Hillbillies | Study Guide

FEBRUARY 6 & 7, 2019

10:30AM & 12:30PM

BLACK HISTORY MONT H AT

THE TOWN H ALL

BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Each year, since 1997, The Town Hall presents a series of free live performances—through the support of Con Edison—in celebration of Black History Month. The program consists of daytime performances, about an hour each, which are offered free of charge to New York City public elementary and middle school children and their teachers / chaperones.

Following the concert, a Black History Month poster and essay contest is held for students who attend the performances. The contest encourages students to think critically about the performance, as well as to express themselves through words and pictures. Winners will be awarded a monetary prize and will have their posters and essays featured for one year on the Town Hall website.

HOW TO USE THE STUDY GUIDE

The purpose of this guide is to provide teachers and administrators with contextual information about the performance, as well as activities and additional resources that can be used to develop lesson plans, to prepare students to be intuitive audience members and deepen their experience at Town Hall, and to offer additional pathways into possible connections with existing school curriculum.

WHAT TO EXPECT AT THE SHOWS

Most of The Ebony Hillbillies’ repertoire comes from the 19th century, before the advent of Dixieland and the blues. They introduce students to sounds that highlight an almost forgotten American culture, style, and era.

Beginning with a focus on instruments and style that captures the culture/moment in time, they then delve into deeper exploration through which students gain a sense of the human experience through the eyes of the musicians that captured that moment in sound.

Students will learn about people, sound, the place of music in our culture and history, and even themselves, and will begin to recognize how music reflects and informs our lives.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

You may wish to consider the following questions as you read through the study guide. These questions may also aid discussion with students after viewing the performance.

Pre-Performance

What are the origins of old-time music? How did old-time string music develop?

How did African-Americans contribute to string band playing?

Which instruments play the melody in Ebony Hillbilly music? Which play the accompaniment?

What special instrumental techniques are used to play old-time music?

Post-Performance

What did you hear or notice while listening to the music? What stood out to you while you were listening?

What did you notice most about the Ebony Hillbillies’ repertoire?

What are some distinguishing characteristics of their music? How is it similar to or different from other music you’ve heard?

How much improvisation was used during the performance?

They “recreate the music you would have heard if you could time travel to a country dance in Mississippi around 1902.”

-- Mike Gold, BBC Producer

GROUP BIOGRAPHY

delighting audiences, educators, and students of all ages with their unique combination of interactive storytelling and exciting musical performances, describe themselves as one of the last black string bands in America, though their style also incorporates jazz and blues improvisation. Black string band tunes originated in the interplay between slave songs and the songs and fiddle tunes from the British isles, blending the European jigs and reels with African tunings and syncopations.

The Ebony Hillbillies have performed at countless bluegrass and folk festivals; the Kennedy Center; the Lincoln Center plaza; Carnegie Hall; a Smithsonian Folklife Festival; and the Spoleto Festival USA, an annual international festival of opera, dance, theater, and music in Charleston, SC.

The venue which has most popularized the Ebony Hillbillies in New York City, however, is the subway. They are buskers, playing in subway stations twice a week for tips from passersby, one of 350 soloists and groups vetted by the Transit Authority’s Music Under New York program.

Additional Resource: The Ebony Hillbillies perform at the Herald Square subway

As one of the band members once said in an interview, “The subways afford you an instant stage and a perpetual audience.” In another he said, “When you play on the streets, you bring the theatre, the temple, and the church with you. You create that atmosphere.”

GLOSSARY WORDS:

Improvisation | Creating on the spot, usually from a repertoire of known patterns (licks).

Syncopations | Rhythms which emphasize the off-beats. Buskers | Street performers who play in a public space for tips.

INSTRUMENTS OF THE EBONY HILLBILLIES

GLOSSARY WORD:

F IDDLE

The violin and fiddle are one and the same instrument whose name simply varies with the style played. Both create sound with a vibrating string which has been plucked or bowed. The rhythmic back-and-forth of the bow in “old-time” fiddling is called shuffling. Shuffle bowing is in a rhythm that sounds like “grasshopper” with one long and two short sounds. Two or more strings are bowed, one on which the melody is fingered and one which creates a drone.

Additional Resource: An example of shuffle bowing

BAN J O

In the 1970’s, Dena Epstein, an assistant music librarian at the University of Chicago, traced banjos back to the gourd-backed, multi-stringed instruments of West Africa that were transmitted to North America by slaves. There are three common banjo techniques: striking the strings with a flat pick; picking upward with the fingertips (pulling the fingers into the hand), sometimes using finger picks; and striking downward on the strings with the back of the fingers or fingernails. The banjo part creates rhythm, an accompanying drone, sometimes the melody, and sometimes a lower alto voice to the fiddle’s soprano.

Additional Resource: Norris Bennett explains this last technique, called frailing

ST RING BASS

The string bass is also called the double bass or upright bass and is a member of the Viol family, a predecessor of the violin family of instruments. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, bassists developed the slap style to help the instrument be better heard, slapping and pulling the strings against the fingerboard rather than simply plucking them. The slap style gives a more percussive sound to the playing. Despite the advent of the electric bass guitar in popular music, the double bass is still favored for improvisation because its lack of frets (metal divisions of the fingerboard) allows the player to slide from note to note and bend sounds.

Frets | Raised elements, usually metal, on the fingerboard of a stringed instrument, dividing it into fixed intervals of all half-steps (banjo, guitar) or a mix of half and whole steps (dulcimer).

INSTRUMENTS OF THE EBONY HILLBILLIES (CONT’D)

M OUN TAIN DULC I M ER

The mountain or Appalachian dulcimer is a simple 3 or 4 strings strung over a fretted fingerboard attached to an amplifying wood body. The dulcimer is laid flat on the lap, plucked or strummed with the right hand, and “fretted” to change notes with the left. A short piece of dowel or bamboo is used for fretting, moving it along the melody string to change its length and thus pitch. The earliest dulcimers date from the early 19th century Scots-Irish immigrant communities but would have been available to slaves as both groups were entertainers for white Southerners.

Additional Resource: A demonstration of the dulcimer

GLOSSARY WORDS:

OLD -T I M E P ER C USSION

Africans used drums to call people together and relay other messages. There was evidence that this system had been used to call people together during slave revolts like the one in Stono, South Carolina in the 1730’s. Because of these events, drums were banned in the New World. The slaves, however, became adept at figuring out ways to use household utensils like pots and pans, spoons, and washing devices, like the common washboard, as substitutes. Woodblock, cowbell, and small cymbals can be attached as traps to make a washboard kit, the same way these instruments are attached to a drum set. They also made percussion instruments out of dried beef bones.

Additional Resource: A demonstration of washboard technique

DIDDLEY BOW

The diddley bow is a single-stringed American instrument made of baling wire strung between two nails over a glass bottle that serves as both a bridge and an amplifier. The diddley bow’s origin was likely in West Africa where children would beat a similar instrument with a stick and change its pitch with a slide.

Traps | Instruments added as extensions to a drum set or drum kit.

Bridge | A device that supports the strings on a stringed musical instrument and transmits the vibration of those strings to another structural component of the instrument.

ABOUT THE MUSICHISTORY

You only have to hang out with the Ebony Hillbillies on YouTube for a short while to know that their music is often improvised in performance. Videos of their recording sessions show the music emerging fresh rather than intricately rehearsed, because their ears are attuned to the shifts and handoffs of tight ensemble playing.

Additional Resource: The Ebony Hillbillies mix on YouTube

Africans were successful as musicians by learning music that was familiar to the Europeans and began adding their own syncopations and melodies to these. Howard Armstrong, a famous twentieth century black string band black player could sing songs in Polish as well as several other languages. During the Middle Passage, attempts by sea captains to get Africans to exercise by dancing to European music were unsuccessful, so African banjo players and fiddlers were kept on the deck area to play music the captors were more familiar with. This is one story of how the players arrived in the new world.

Fiddling originated sometime in the 1500’s and, certainly over the next two centuries, there is a significant amount of this style of playing being performed by New World Africans in North America.

ABOUT THE MUSICHISTORY (CONT’D)

Old-time string band music continued in the Upper South, giving birth to country in the 1930’s and bluegrass in the 1940’s. By the 1930’s, although string bands still played in the Black community, they were eventually replaced by jazz and blues bands.

The earliest jazz bands centered around a banjo player and a fiddle player, that core sound of black string bands. Elmer Snowden, who originated the Washingtonians before duke Ellington took over, was a famed jazz banjo player.

Traditional old-time music is based in multi-verse song. Interest is created by the narrative of the text and unified with a repeated refrain. When verses are performed instrumentally, interest is created by variations of the tune and with solo interludes.

Black Americans had few venues available to them in the river cities the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. Consequently they started playing on the streets near popular markets and near nightlife. Improvised instruments like jugs, which played the bass line added both novelty and necessary counterpoint. The jug band, by the way, is believed by some to be the dividing line between country music and the beginnings of the jazz band.

Additional Resource: African American Song | Library of Congress

MUSICAL STYLES

BLUES

The blues incorporates spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, which can be traced back to the music of Africa; the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common; and the trance-like rhythm that forms a repetitive effect known as the groove.

JAZZ IMPROVISATION

Jazz improvisation is the process of spontaneously creating fresh melodies over the continuously repeating cycle of chord changes of a tune. The improviser may depend on the contours of the original tune, or solely on the possibilities of the chords’ harmonies. Composed music and improvised music may seem to be opposites, but in Jazz they merge in a unique mixture.

BLUEGRASS

Bluegrass uses many of the traditional Scots-Irish tunes and old-time string band songs. Influenced by jazz, bluegrass players take turns playing melody and improvising while the rest of the instruments accompany. The texture is more complicated than the old-time style of one player leading with the melody throughout.

COUNTRY

Country music later evolved from old-time Appalachian tunes and African-American blues. It started in Atlanta, Georgia, for a market of Southern agricultural workers. As it developed in the next two decades, country incorporated blues, cowboy, hillbilly, gospel, pop, and folk.

Blues, jazz, country, bluegrass, rockabilly, and rock and roll all have their roots in old-time string bands, black and white.

BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Can you remember all of the words?

All answers are in boldface, earlier in the study guide

ROSS

3 Street performer who plays in a public space for tips

4 A style in which music is created on the spot, usually from known patterns

5 Raised elements on the fingerboard of a stringed instrument, dividing it into fixed intervals of all half-steps or a mix of half and whole steps

1 Rhythms which emphasize the off-beats

2 Instruments added as extensions to a drum set or drum kit

3 The part of a stringed instrument which holds the strings away from the fingerboard

STUDENT POSTER & ESSAY CONTEST

Students are encouraged to enter The Town Hall and Con Edison’s Black History Month Student Poster & Essay Contest following the performance. Five winners will receive an award of $50, to be presented at an award ceremony. Winners will have their posters and essays featured for one year on The Town Hall website. Teachers should review and correct grammar, but not suggest or alter content. Teachers must collect and submit all posters and essays. All submissions must include the student’s name, school grade, teacher, and school phone number on the back of each entry in pencil. Only posters or essays from students who attended the performance will be accepted.

POSTER GUIDELINES

Design a poster for Black History Month that illustrates one or more of the types of instruments demonstrated by the Ebony Hillbillies.

Size: 8.5” x 11”

Medium: crayon, marker, colored pencil, tempera paint

ESSAY GUIDELINES

Write an essay on one of the following topics:

My favorite part of the Ebony Hillbillies performance was _______ because ________.

I want to learn more about jazz improvisation, country, blues or bluegrass. Please choose one only and explain why.

During the performance, I was most surprised by ________.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Entries must be postmarked no later than Friday, March 22, 2019

Please remit to:

BRITNI MONTALBANO

The Town Hall 123 West 43rd Street

New York, NY 10036

For more information, contact Britni Montalbano at 212-997-1003 x17 or bmontalbano@thetownhall.org.

123 W E ST 43RD S T NYC 10036

Black History Month is sponsored by Con Edison. This and other programs are made possible, in part, by the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council