Bill Evans and the 5-string Banjo
Photo by Snap Jackson Photography
One constant in Bill Evans’ 40-plus-year banjo career is helping others learn to play and listen to music. He began teaching in his hometown, Norfolk, VA in the 1970s, while still in high school, not long after he picked up the five string. Evans remembers sitting in the living room of his childhood home with his students, propping the book Earl Scruggs And the Five String Banjo on a coffee table while his mom shuttled in and out of the living room. Since then, in addition to touring and recording with national and regional acts and making solo records, Evans has done everything from earning a master’s degree in music from University of California-Berkeley to writing acclaimed books on playing the banjo to running his own music camps and guest teaching at hundreds of others.
Evans says that as the allure of frequent touring has diminished, teaching has become even more important in his professional life, bringing with it the emotional rewards of helping people with musical interests connect with one another and learn to play and sing together.
Talking about the bluegrass jam classes he ran in the San Francisco Bay Area for 12 years, he says, “That was just a tremendously energizing experience for me. To really see the joy that was brought to people of all ages when they discovered that they could play music, and bluegrass music with other people. And of course the way that bluegrass music is—we all know this—when you start to play you actually become part of a larger world of connections.”
Today, Evans continues to teach Scruggs-style picking, and he has teamed up with Peghead Nation to produce Earl Scruggs: A Player’s Guide, an 8-session Peghead Nation online live workshop that debuted this past spring to about 145 students and is now archived as part of Peghead Nation’s course catalog. The workshop, mostly filmed in Evans home, focuses on Earl’s musicianship during some of the peak periods in his career. It covers his years with Bill Monroe, the Flatt & Scruggs’ Mercury and Columbia recordings of the late 1940’s and 1950’s, and his work in the 1960’s.
The centerpieces of the course are well-produced, hour-long videos in which Evans demonstrates and discusses how to play some of Scruggs’ lesser-known tunes (there is also an in-depth teaching segment on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”). Evans has supplemented the videos with note-for-note tab transcriptions of Earl’s playing, and each session includes a suggested playlist of music and Youtube videos, which feature Scruggs’ performing live. Evans designed the course to make it accessible to players of varying abilities, and as he received email feedback from students during the workshop he added more material for advanced beginners and intermediate pickers.
Evans said his appreciation for Scruggs’ playing deepened and grew in the mid-1990s, when he served as associate director of the International Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky and got to work with bluegrass banjo greats Sonny Osborne and J.D. Crowe. They became two of his mentors and through watching and listening to them play together he began to see all the possibilities inherent in the three-finger rolling style. He said, “Just to hear those guys in a room playing, or to hear them live, I realized there was so much that I didn’t know about how one can take the roll pattern approach that Earl Scruggs created and use it to create just an incredible array of music. And that has been a continual wellspring for me ever since then.”
As part of his Scruggs workshop Evans’ assigned a text, Earl Scruggs And Foggy Mountain Breakdown,by the Nashville journalist and author Thomas Goldsmith, and for a couple of the sessions Evans brings in guests who sit with him to talk shop. Evans’ friend, the renowned Charlie Cushman (banjoist for the Earls of Leicester), pays him a visit in one session and demonstrates Earl’s feel on different tunes and talks about his approach to Scruggs.
“If you listen to Charlie Cushman he presents a really different take on this, where the individual detail is not so important as the overall feeling,” Evans said. “And I wanted students to understand how important that was because my own bias as a teacher tends towards the detail and tablature. Charlie is more about the feel, and the energy, and the soul and certain right hand ideas dealing with drive and rhythm and tone.”
For a follow-up to the Scruggs course Evans said that he and Peghead Nation are producing an eight-session online workshop, to be released in January 2022, that focuses on the playing of the great J.D. Crowe. Crowe, now retired, will be joining Evans for the entire course.
“J. D. and I will survey his career and banjo playing from his early days with Jimmy Martin through his own bands The Kentucky Mountain Boys and the many musical phases of J. D. Crowe and the New South,” Evans said. “We’ll talk about J. D.’s approach to tone and rhythm, how he fits fingerpicks, his right-and left-hand positioning and much more. This will be the first time that J. D. has presented his banjo playing in this format and I view this as a legacy project. It will be something that banjo players will learn from for a long time to come.”
Evans, who teaches the Bluegrass Banjo and Beginning Banjo courses on Peghead Nation, says he’s also got some other instructional projects in the works for the coming year. Currently he and Kristin Scott Benson are finishing up a book that focuses on notable solos. Titled 25 Great Bluegrass Banjo Solos, the book will profile 25 leading banjo players including Don Reno and Earl Scruggs. It’s scheduled to be published by Hal Leonard by the end of 2021. Evans is also working on a video for Homespun Music Instruction that will feature him teaching six-to-eight Christmas songs, with banjo arrangements.
In the fall, Evans will host a one-day, online banjo backup workshop with Kristin Scott Benson and Ron Block, and he’ll be teaching live at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas on the third weekend of September and at the Great Lakes Music Camp in Michigan in early October. Looking ahead to 2022, he’s planning on reviving his Berkeley, California winter bluegrass jam camp in addition to directing a winter online camp as well as the return of the New Mexico Banjo Camp live at the Black Range Lodge in Kingston in late April 2022 targeted at intermediate players.
In the works as well are one or two smaller camps in Alto, New Mexico, where Evans now resides. Evans and his wife are also working on plans to offer packages combining stays at an AirBnB next door to their home in scenic Alto with private banjo lessons.
Evans says that the foundation of all his teaching, be it online, or group sessions, is what he’s learned and continues to learn from teaching private banjo lessons. “I’ve taught 10 to 20 students a week (one on one lessons) for the last 30 years,” Evans said. “I think the strength of my writing and my group teaching and things like the Scruggs course and the other Peghead Nation courses and the books that are coming, they are all based on the one-on-one teaching. Everything comes from what I see people do in a one-on-one lesson. And people tend to have the same stumbling blocks. Especially adult learners. And so I would like to feel like I have gained some experience through the one-on-one teaching—what works with people and what doesn’t work with people. I continue to teach one-on-one folks,” Evans said, “and they teach me.”
