NativeGround.com
Title
Old-time, historic American, bluegrass music and cooking-Native Ground Books & Music
Description
It was 1973 and Wayne Erbsen had just moved from his home in California to Charlotte, North Carolina. His aim was to dig deep into the roots of Southern Appalachian music by learning from the masters. Charlotte was chosen because this area had once been a hotbed of traditional Southern music. To his shock, Wayne discovered that little of the old music was left. Instead, North Carolina seemed intent on covering up its own Appalachian roots with concrete and embracing the new music of New York as well as Los Angeles and Hollywood, two places that Wayne had just escaped from!
Realizing that the true Southern Appalachian music was on the verge of becoming extinct, Wayne was determined to ensure that this music was preserved and passed on to future generations. First, he met and learned from many of the masters of Southern Appalachian music including Charlie Monroe, Tommy Jarrell, Kyle Creed, Albert Hash, Jim Shumate, Wiley and Zeke Morris and Jimmy Buchanan. Wayne then began presenting programs of North Carolina traditional music to students of all grade levels. At that very time in the 1973, the movie "Deliverance" came out. Although it promoted a stereotype of the Southern mountaineer, it also fired people up about the banjo. Wayne’s banjo classes at Central Piedmont Community College were suddenly filled and overflowing with people wanting to find their own roots and learn to play the banjo.
To better serve his many banjo students, Wayne typed up his lessons on an old-timey typewriter and off-handedly titled his book, A Manual on How to Play the 5-String Banjo For the Compete Ignoramus! Because he knew all his students personally, Wayne wrote the book in an extremely relaxed, informal style that would later become his trademark. One of his students, Julie Gillespie, owned a fancy IBM electric typewriter, so that "high-tech" piece of equipment was used to type up the manuscript for the printer. Another of Wayne’s students, Everett Carpenter, was a graphic artist, so he produced the cover. Other friends and students contributed drawings for the book.
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