Tray Wellington
Proud to Continue the Two-Century Tradition of Black Banjo Players
When Bill Monroe was a young man, he befriended, played with and even did gigs with the Black guitarist Arnold Shultz. Shultz’s influence on Monroe is clear and obvious, and yet there is sadly no recording of the legendary guitarist.
IBMA Hall of Famer Doc Watson came across some vinyl records made by blues artists as a young man and loved them, and later on he befriended a blues musician in the early 1960s who influenced him as well. On the amazing three-album collection of live performances and tales from his upbringing shared called Doc Watson and David Holt—Legacy, Doc tells the story.
“In 1963, I was playing in Philadelphia at a place called The Second Fret in downtown in Center City and I was going to have to stay in a little ole motel across the street,” says Watson, on the Legacy album. “But if I did that, it was going to eat up what I earned in the two weeks I was opening for a group headed up by Roger Bush. I can’t remember the name of them, Clarence White was in that band. I wasn’t going to clear but $50 or $60 a week and I couldn’t see doing that, because it was hard work. It was five nights a week, and I made up my mind that after those two weeks I was going to go home and stay there.
“Jerry Ricks was a great big ole black fellow and a friendly blues-playing man who was cooking for Manny Rubin in the kitchen,” continues Watson. “After I finished my set of music, he come up and says, ‘Doc Watson, there is a good, clean room over at my house with a nice bed in it and your name is on the door. I want you to come stay with me for these two weeks. You don’t need to stay in that old flea bag.’ He wasn’t going to charge me. I said, ‘Jerry, if you let me split the grocery bill at least, I’ll go. But if you don’t do that, I won’t feel right.’ He said, ‘Well, if nothing else will do you, you can do that, if you will, and we’ll pick.’ Well, he learned all kinds of things from me and I learned a few blues licks from Jerry and it worked out great. We ate like kings. I think it cost us $35 a week a piece in those days to have anything we wanted to eat. He was a friend in need, and he’s been a friend ever since. I’ll always treasure him as a friend. And, it was then that I decided I better not quit. I took about $200 home and I thought, ‘You can’t quit now, son.’”
Obviously, Black folks and Black music infused itself in the overall bluegrass sound right from the beginning.
That was evident two years later when the future Hall of Famers Jim and Jesse decided to record an album of the music of the great and legendary Chuck Berry in 1965, doing it bluegrass style. Unfortunately, that project brought out the racist side of bluegrass music at the time as Jim and Jesse caught all kinds of guff for openly and blatantly performing the music of, well, I’ll let you fill in the adjective. I have talked to Jesse McReynolds directly about the response they got back then, and he confirmed it.
All of these decades later, bluegrass music continues to be a mostly White genre of music. Yes, over the years, more diversity has been experienced in the genre. Thank God for our Japanese brethren, for example, who have embraced this Appalachian roots music in amazing ways.
As for the inclusion of Black folks in bluegrass, the story is bigger and goes deeper. The origins of the banjo are, without a doubt, African in nature. In Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, which he wrote in 1781, he says, “The instrument proper to them is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa.” “They,” of course, were Africans enslaved by Jefferson at the time, even though five years earlier Jefferson oddly added anti-slavery passage to his early draft of the Declaration of Independence. It is a part of the dichotomy of the American experience.
The truth is; the vast majority of string band music in the 1700s and the 1800s was performed by Black musicians. It was a multi-century legacy which, admittedly, America’s Black population turned its back on when the sad days of blackface minstrel shows came along in the early 1900s. Then, blues and jazz music thankfully bubbled up from the Black neighborhoods, Jim Crow plantations and clubs.
I learned a lot more about this phenomenon when I keyed into the Black Banjo Gathering from afar in 2005. Happening at Appalachian State University in Boone, ironically not far from where local music hero Doc Watson grew up and where his statue stands today on King Street, the Black Banjo Gathering is where the Carolina Chocolate Drops band was created. In the Yahoo message groups that surrounded that event 17 years ago, that is where I first met Rhiannon Giddens, who was an original member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Since then, Giddens has done many great things with her talent, including winning a Grammy Award with the Chocolate Drops, recording a wonderful series of acclaimed solo albums, winning the prestigious Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, being inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, becoming one of the new recipients of the Genius Grants given out by the MacArthur Fellows Program in 2017, commissioned to write the musical play Omar, and so much more including recently becoming the new Artistic Director of Yo Yo Ma’s Silkroad musical organization and so much more. In fact, earlier this year, Giddens won another Grammy Award in 2022 for “Best Folk Album.”
A few years ago, Giddens was also the keynote speaker at the annual IBMA World of Bluegrass Convention held in Raleigh. Said Giddens in her speech, “What makes this bluegrass, old-time, and other forms of music so powerful is that there is room for everyone to explore these incredible traditions. I want people to understand that recognizing the African American presence within these traditions does not come at the expense of trying to erase all of the other tradition bearers who have already received so much of our attention. I want to celebrate the greater diversity of the people who have shaped the music that is so much a part of my identity. I want the public to appreciate this string band music, this bluegrass music, as a creole music that comes from many influences—a beautiful syncretization of the cultures that call this country home.”
A few years ago, a young Black banjo player arose out rural Ashe County, North Carolina, named Tray Wellington. He first made his bluegrass bones by joining Liam Purcell in the band Cane Mill Road, which was based in Deep Gap, North Carolina, located next to Boone, where Doc Watson lived most of his life with his wife Rosa Lee and kids Merle and Nancy.
Eventually, Wellington would enroll and graduate from East Tennessee State University’s Bluegrass, Old-Time, Celtic and Country Music Program located an hour away in Johnson City, Tennessee. Since then, he has gone on to create the Tray Wellington Band while also becoming the Communications Director for the Pinecone Organization, aka the Piedmont Council of the Traditional Arts, which works with the IBMA every year to host the World of Bluegrass Week in Raleigh.
When I first interviewed Wellington a few years ago for the Mountain Times newspaper in Boone, his goal was to be a banjo player at a high level who happened to be Black. But as his knowledge of history grew and he became an adult who desired to be a positive example in bluegrass music and in the community, he conceived his latest solo album called Black Banjo.
Now out on the Mountain Home Music Company label, Black Banjo is produced by Jon Weisberger, an IBMA Award-winning songwriter and musician, and it also features guitarist Jon Stickley, mandolin master Wayne Benson, bassist Kevin Kehrberg, and fiddlers Carley Arrowood, Avery Merritt and Lyndsay Pruett. The Grammy Award-winning Tim O’Brien also sings a duet with Wellington on “Wasted Time.”
While growing up in West Jefferson, North Carolina, Wellington discovered the banjo when he was a teenager. Soon hooked on bluegrass, he was mentored by two great teachers of the music in Eric Hardin and two-time National Banjo Champion Steve Lewis. Combined, these two musical educators have taught hundreds of young musicians who have gone on to fill these western North Carolina mountains with roots music.
“There are a lot of people out there that are making great roots music as black musicians and are doing amazing work,” said Wellington. “I think it is very important to be straight forward with the history of Black folks playing the banjo so I can get that message spread to more people. When I was younger, some folks did look at me funny for wanting to play the banjo, but it was not an area-specific thing, it was mostly just people. I didn’t hear a lot of it, but there was some negativity. But I don’t think a lot of people thought it was negative as much as there was a lot of ignorance surrounding it. There were a few times when people would say, ‘You shouldn’t be doing that (taking up the banjo).’ When I first started playing the banjo, a lot of people came from a good place in their heart, yet there would be ignorance in the comments I received.”
On Black Banjo, Wellington gets the chance to showcase his love for musicians that have inspired him over the years, from John Hartford to John Coltrane.
“John Coltrane grew up in High Point, North Carolina, and he was awesome,” said Wellington, who chose to do a newgrass arrangement of Coltrane’s “Naimi” on this new recording. “‘Naimi’ has so much space in it. The hardest thing with recording that song was filling up the space, to make it not sound empty. John, obviously, did an amazing job of filling up the space on his version. But, that was the hardest challenge for me when I arranged that song. But, that is also a fun thing to do.”
Similar to how music was recorded decades ago, Wellington and crew chose a live approach for recording “Naimi,” imperfections included.
“On the album, we recorded it as a trio with banjo, bass and fiddle and that was pretty cool,” said Wellington. “I had heard a live recording of Coltrane doing it and on that recording, he did it in a very minimalistic way and I wanted to catch that same vibe. So, in the studio, we did all of the tracking for ‘Naimi’ 100% live, with me, Kevin and Avery playing around one mic in a room. It turned out to be super cool. It is one of those recordings where you hear little mistakes in it, but when we listened to it back in the booth, the feeling we got was exactly what I looking for, so I wanted to keep it. We did two or three takes of it, but the one we released had the best feel and vibe, so I was really happy with it.”
The rest of the Black Banjo album is filled with wonderfully-upbeat bluegrass music showcasing an excellent musician coming of age and surrounded by great talent in the studio. Some of the fun cuts written by Wellington include “Crooked Mind,” “Port of Manzanita,” “Wasted Time,” “Saw A Little Boat,” “Pond Mountain Breakaway,” a very special instrumental in “Nightfall Rendezvous” and the rollicking “Georgia Turnaround.”
In a nod to past greats, Wellington plays a version of “Half Past Four” on the album, written by the acclaimed 1900s West Virginia fiddler Ed Haley and made popular by the late and great IBMA Hall of Famer John Hartford. Hartford loved the music of Haley, and even spent a lot of money and time researching Haley’s life. Haley died in 1951 and Hartford left this world 50 years later in 2001.
“I love John Hartford,” said Wellington. “I love John Hartford’s music because I think he was a very different kind of artist that touched on a lot of things. In his own life, I think he was a true artist that did 100% his own style, and I think that is a really cool thing to hear. He did whatever he wanted to do, and yet it was undeniable that he had his own sound, no matter what he did. I’ve listened to him for such a long time that I can’t remember where or how I first heard him. Although, I do remember listening to his classic album Aereo-Plain for the first time and I think that is what turned me on to his music. It’s a great recording.”
Wellington has gone from winning an IBMA Momentum Award in 2019 for “Instrumentalist of the Year” and establishing himself in the bluegrass world with Cane Mill Road to being an assistant instructor at Bela Fleck’s Blue Ridge Banjo Camp in Brevard, North Carolina, and creating his own identity as a solo artist with his new Black Banjo album.
To keep up with this artist-on-the-rise, please go to traywellington.com and mountainhomemusiccompany.com.
