B.A. Parker is learning the banjo

 

Jackie Lay

Parker has been trying to find her place in the banjo world. So this week, she talks to Black banjo players like Grammy nominee Rhiannon Giddens about creating community and reclaiming an instrument that's historically already theirs.

Transcript

B A PARKER, HOST:

Heads up, there's some salty language ahead. Hey, everyone, you're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm B.A. Parker. (Playing banjo) That still sounds bad. Wait. So I'm learning how to play the banjo. Be kind - I'm not great. And I've been getting some guff about it. (Playing banjo) You'd be surprised at the amount of attention one gets as a Black woman commuting on the subway with a banjo on her back. It's mostly older white guys telling me to keep up the good work. Like, they're passing this baton that's inherently theirs. And to be honest, that's what learning it at home was feeling like. (Playing banjo) There's still - we're a work in progress, people.

(SOUNDBITE OF STRUMMING BANJO)

PARKER: I mean, there's YouTube tutorials galore, but they're mainly white guys teaching how to be the next Ralph Stanley.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

RALPH STANLEY: It's hard to get that little sneaky lick, you know, slow, but I'll get it as slow as I can.

(SOUNDBITE OF STRUMMING BANJO)

PARKER: That's made learning how to play the banjo a bit lonely.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED BANJO TOSS OFFICIAL: Come on down, folks. Come this way.

PARKER: So when I finally sought out community, I didn't know it would lead me to a banjo toss - or, rather, the banjo toss.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED BANJO TOSS ATTENDEE: Hello.

(CHEERING)

UNIDENTIFIED BANJO TOSS OFFICIAL: Welcome to the 2024 banjo toss.

PARKER: It's this absurdist event at the Brooklyn Folk Festival, where competitors toss a banjo on a long rope into the Gowanus Canal.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED BANJO TOSS OFFICIAL: Yeah - whoa.

UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: Whoa.

PARKER: The person who throws it farthest wins free dinner and a show. Now, I didn't do the toss. I was there to spectate and mingle.

UNIDENTIFIED BANJO UKE PLAYER: I play a banjo uke.

PARKER: A banjo ukulele?

(SOUNDBITE OF BANJO MUSIC)

PARKER: And I was kind of overwhelmed by just the sheer amount of people with banjos that were around on this cold November afternoon. Like, dozens and dozens in a circle jamming together, all knowing Americana songs and Southern spirituals.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP #1: (Singing) Down by the riverside, I'm going to lay down my burdens. Down by the riverside, and study war no more. I ain't going to study...

PARKER: The juxtaposition wasn't lost on me. Like, I know the history of the banjo - how it comes from West Africa, how enslaved people in the Americas and Caribbean adapted this gourd instrument from their homelands into the banjo that we know today, how the banjo was almost exclusively played by Black folk until minstrelsy - so I can enjoy myself as one of the few Black people on that cold afternoon, but still feel a bit of friction. And I needed help reconciling that feeling, so I went straight to the top.

RHIANNON GIDDENS: I have some notions.

PARKER: Yes, please.

GIDDENS: (Laughter) 'Cause it's kind of, like, that whole idea of discovery of the banjo, but then that question of, like, why don't I know this? You know what I mean? Why is this constantly a discovery for us?

PARKER: That's Rhiannon Giddens. She's a Grammy winner, Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur Genius fellow.

GIDDENS: I am a singer, banjo player and cultural historian, I guess.

PARKER: Giddens is also the woman who blessed us with the opening riff of Beyonce's country hit, "TEXAS HOLD 'EM."

(SOUNDBITE OF BEYONCE SONG, "TEXAS HOLD 'EM")

PARKER: All in all, Giddens is that girl.

GIDDENS: For the people who are exposed to my sound already, yeah, that's really cool. There's way more people who have no idea who played that banjo. And that's OK, that was by design - not my design, but (laughter), you know, that wasn't the focus of that track. And that's fine. Like, I didn't do it for that reason. I did it because I just want the sound of it out there, and I happen to play it. When that song came out, what I did on my Facebook feed is every day I highlighted a different Black banjo player.

PARKER: I saw.

GIDDENS: You know, 'cause I'm like, this is - OK, so if eyeballs are coming my way because of that song, they need to go to the community.

PARKER: And I'm looking to find my place in that community. I've been searching for Black banjo players in my city to no avail. But maybe I'm not searching in the right places. So this week on CODE SWITCH, I'm learning how to play the banjo and talking to Black banjo players about creating community and reclaiming an instrument that's historically already theirs.

Right now, eyes are on the Black banjo community. That's because beyond "TEXAS HOLD 'EM" being nominated for multiple Grammys, Giddens herself is currently nominated for best American roots performance for a song called "The Ballad Of Sally Anne." It's a story song about a lynching written by Black country songwriter Alice Randall.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE BALLAD OF SALLY ANNE")

GIDDENS: (Singing) Johnny got married in his one good suit, but the ride from church, it bore strange fruit. Down by the road you can hear her cry, as he hung from a tree, she watched him die.

PARKER: The song was first recorded by a white man 33 years ago. Now Giddens is the first Black woman to record it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE BALLAD OF SALLY ANNE")

GIDDENS: (Singing) Who's going to dance with Sally Anne? Who's going to touch her tremblin' hand?

I'm mostly excited for Alice Randall because it's her song. It's a song about lynching that, you know, finally got a performance by, you know, the Black woman that she wrote it for. So I'm excited for her that this story, which is a very difficult story, has been, you know, highlighted by the nomination.

(SOUNDBITE OF RHIANNON GIDDENS SONG, "THE BALLAD OF SALLY ANNE")

PARKER: So how did you get into playing the banjo?

GIDDENS: I got into playing the banjo through dance. I heard the banjo as a sort of dance instrument, like, the clawhammer style, really for the first time and was like, this is amazing. What is this? This is not bluegrass. Like, I love this, you know, and really just danced to it for a while. And then was kind of like, OK, I need to learn how to play this. And then, as I started to play with the white, old-time musicians in the area, which - they were lovely folks. And, like, they were like, well, you know, the banjo's African. I was like, what? What are you talking about? And then that kind of started me on my journey of, like, oh, my God, what else don't I know about my own culture?

PARKER: So Giddens dug into that history.

GIDDENS: The banjo is an instrument of slavery. It comes out of enslavement. There is no banjo without the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So to understand the banjo, I was like, I really need to understand the history that surrounds it.

PARKER: In her research, she found a banjo instruction manual from 1855, the first of its kind.

GIDDENS: How to play the banjo, how to be a minstrel - like, all of these things.

PARKER: And it had all the basics to songs like "Yankee Doodle" and "The Jim Crow Polka."

GIDDENS: The tunes in that 1855 book are really proto-American tunes, old minstrel tunes. I had to throw the words out 'cause it was just so depressing, you know?

PARKER: Yeah.

GIDDENS: But really, I'm interested in the music, you know, because all the early minstrel songs that we now call folk songs (laughter), that we now teach our children, you know...

PARKER: Yeah.

GIDDENS: ..."Blue Tail Fly" and all that stuff - those tunes are legit American tunes, you know? They're coming...

PARKER: Yeah.

GIDDENS: ...Out of that sort of folk soup of music.

PARKER: And if you don't think you know "Blue Tail Fly," you might actually know the lyrics because if you grew up in America, you know the songs in that folk soup.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

BURL IVES: (Singing) When I was young, I used to wait on my master and give him his plate.

MEL BLANC: (Singing as Bugs Bunny) And pass the bottle when he got dry and brush away the blue tail fly. Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care. Jimmy crack...

UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Singing) ...Corn, and I don't care.

97TH REGIMENTAL STRING BAND: (Singing) Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care. Oh...

UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Singing) ...My master's gone away.

PARKER: Blackface minstrel songs like this one are a far cry from the songs used to emote and amuse between work on a plantation. Yes, culture ebbs and flows, but it helps to acknowledge how the banjo changed hands.

GIDDENS: So in the time leading up to the 1920s, you know, Black people were moving out of the South. You know, we were, like, moving in huge numbers as part of the great migration for a better life - right? - to escape racism, lynching, whatever. We end up in the North. We end up in the West. We end up in the Midwest.

And, you know, we didn't put the banjo down in as much as that a lot of the folks who left - you know, they discover, oh, I'm in a different place. Like, music is different here. Like, oh, we don't have corn shuckings anymore. I don't need this old banjo. You know what I mean? Like, oh, they're playing the hip music or this - oh, this new guitar thing is really cool or, you know, whatever. But there are still plenty of Black people who still play the banjo.

But when you get the music industry coming in they would go in, and they'd set up, and they'd put an ad in the paper - you know, colored performers, you know, come bring your blues on a Thursday, and, like, you know, hillbillies, come bring your fiddle tunes on a Friday. And if you're a Black fiddler, you show up on a Friday, and they're like, well, you know, blues day was yesterday. It's like, if you're a Black fiddler, you're like, well, I better learn some blues if I want to get a job.

PARKER: Between the Great Migration and World War II, a lot of Black musicians pivot and adjust with the times. And it left an opening, particularly with the American folk music revival, to reappropriate things like the banjo. So we start to hear white artists, like Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, turn slave songs into songs for the white working class. And now the way a lot of people view the banjo is Earl Scruggs. It's Steve Martin. It's Kermit the Frog. But for Giddens, her touchstone wasn't any of these.

GIDDENS: Kind of all roads lead back to Joe Thompson really, for me.

PARKER: Joe Thompson was Giddens' teacher and led her to what would become her famed former string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

GIDDENS: Joe Thompson was an African American fiddler who lived in Mebane, North Carolina, and he was part of a long line of Black string band musicians in a family tradition that kind of stretches back to the time of slavery. But he - you know, Joe was kind of one of the last members of, really, once an enormously thriving Black string band tradition that stretched all over the country, really.

PARKER: Here's the Carolina Chocolate Drops playing the traditional song "Georgie Buck" with Joe Thompson.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GEORGIE BUCK")

JOE THOMPSON: (Singing) Georgie Buck is dead. The last thing he said - don't put no shortening in my bread.

GIDDENS: So for white string band musicians, there were many elders that were still playing that they could learn from and they could be, you know, with, but for the Black community, there weren't very many. And so to have somebody like Joe Thompson at the time that we had him - and he was 86 when we first started playing with him - but I feel like it's one of the most fortunate things that I've had in my life.

And I feel like I'm kind of in a dilemma, you know, because it's something I'm really thinking about a lot with this music. You know, I had a very special experience of, you know, apprenticeship. And that just - it worked out because I was living in - I mean, I'm from - like, my family's from Mebane, you know? Like, you know, I lived 40 minutes away. Like, we could meet. Like, Joe didn't charge us money. Like, there was no...

PARKER: Yeah?

GIDDENS: Yeah. I mean, he was there to play. That was his job, is to be the community musician. So anybody who came, he would play with. Now, we started, like, we would get gigs, and then we would bring him out, and we'd give him all the money. You know what I mean?

PARKER: Yeah.

GIDDENS: So that's the kind of way we could pay him back. And there are a lot of cultural exchanges that we had during those times that you cannot get in a formal classroom. You know what I mean? It's a totally different ball of wax. What I hear from folks in the community, in our community who are learning this music, it's not like, oh, I just want to play the banjo so I can play some tunes. It's like, there's this connection, right? There's this historical connection. There's this cultural connection. There's this ancestral connection, and that's a different thing to me.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PARKER: I feel like Giddens lucked out early and found her community. But for me, I'm still looking for mine. I've been putting out a bat signal trying to find Black banjo players in New York City, and when I talked to Giddens, that community was still eluding me - until I found someone who showed me I was going about it the wrong way.

HANNAH MAYREE: Maybe we're learning songs that, you know, have been saying for hundreds of years, you know? Because so much of that comes from Black people, they should have the option of being in a Black space.

PARKER: That's coming up. Stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PARKER: Parker. Just Parker. CODE SWITCH. I've been talking to banjo GOAT Rhiannon Giddens about the Black history of the banjo. So I'm at the beginning of my banjo journey, and I've started taking lessons, and, like, I'm in a group course, and it is a majority white people. And, like, I'm in this room. I am very aware that I'm a Black person, and we're, like, playing, like, "Down By The Riverside," (laughter) and some - like, there's, like, this - I'm enjoying myself, but there's also this kind of cognitive dissonance that I'm experiencing, of, like, a group of white people teaching me, like, Black Southern songs.

GIDDENS: Yeah.

PARKER: Like, tonight - so tonight I have a recital, which is coincidental to this interview.

GIDDENS: Oh, my God.

PARKER: And I'm very - I'm stressed. It's not - it's a group recital, so we're not - it's an adult showcase. But we're going to perform "Georgie Buck," which, I don't know, it just seems like a Black Southern song that I'm going to perform with a group of white people in front of another group of white people. And I'm trying not to, like, get in my - too much of my head about it, but I'm also very aware of that history while I'm learning.

GIDDENS: It's very fraught. It's very layered. It's very much you have to kind of hold things simultaneously, if you know what I mean.

PARKER: Yeah.

GIDDENS: You know, there is a shared common Southern heritage of music and culture - right? - that everyone, you know, has pieces of, and things have gone back and forth between cultures and all this kind of stuff, and that is the same for the music. And you can go, OK, this is something that, you know, belongs to all of us, but also, given the way that the history has been taught, given the way that we have been erased from this history, you feel that, you know, otherness for a music that supposedly is from your own (laughter) - you know what I mean? - is from...

PARKER: Yeah.

GIDDENS: ...Your own ancestral history. So I'm like, come to my house, and I'll teach you "Georgie Buck." We'll just sit and play "Georgie Buck." You know what I mean?

PARKER: Yeah.

GIDDENS: Like, that's what I'm interested in, is this, if you really want to learn in a context of being a Black string band musician, then we have to figure out ways of passing this on within our - you know what I mean? Like, in addition to taking classes. In addition to...

PARKER: Yeah.

GIDDENS: ...You know, being in, you know, being in that recital or whatever. But, like, how do we do it when there's so few of us?

PARKER: Yeah.

GIDDENS: You know what I mean?

PARKER: I - like, I know I'm not going to get any kind of, like, historical context when I'm taking the course right now, but I know that I'm going to get some kind of technical skill. Although, I mean, thank goodness the "Georgie Buck" I got to learn - all I got to do is a G and a E minor the whole way through, and that is OK with me.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP #2: (Singing) Georgie Buck is dead, and the last words he said...

GIDDENS: Your journey is your journey. Like, as long as you end up playing the banjo, does it really matter how you got there?

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP #2: (Singing) Don't put no shortening in my bread.

PARKER: So after I talked to Giddens, I performed in my first recital. It was nerve-wracking.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP #2: (Vocalizing).

PARKER: But it was a group of us, and the audience was very kind. And, finally, the songs I had heard not so long ago at the banjo toss were at my fingertips, albeit a little clumsily.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP #2: (Singing) I will lay down.

(APPLAUSE)

PARKER: With the recital being the end of my classes, I started looking for other avenues to learn, and I found Hannah Mayree. They're a musician and a teacher.

MAYREE: I started and run an organization called the Black Banjo Reclamation Project.

PARKER: Hannah is creating spaces for Black banjo players to come together, which is a change of pace from how Hannah was introduced to the banjo - hitchhiking around the country.

MAYREE: I got into the banjo as a person that was traveling through American society in the folk tradition. So I came across it, like, in the wild, if you will.

PARKER: In my mind, now I'm picturing you, like, hopping on the railways just playing (laughter), like, as a raconteur, playing the banjo.

MAYREE: Well, I don't know what a raconteur is, but I have rode some trains in my day.

PARKER: Hannah, you're like an actual folk hero.

MAYREE: (Laughter).

PARKER: I asked Hannah about their goals for the Black Banjo Reclamation Project.

MAYREE: I think there's a few. One of the outcomes, in theory, would be for Black people to have the experience of pursuing and stewarding folk music while being in Black spaces. So maybe we sit around a fire, maybe we're learning songs that, you know, have been sang for hundreds of years, you know? I think people should have the option of doing that. Because so much of that comes from Black people, they should have the option of being in a Black space, and that's what I feel like the advocacy work has been of Black Banjo Reclamation Project, is making more spaces, more comfortable spaces for Black people to just pursue cultural learning and have it not be out of context.

PARKER: Hannah invited me to an online banjo study group that they run - just a Zoom call once a month, and each person on the call gets to share what they're working on banjo-wise.

Hi, I'm Parker. She/her. I'm in Brooklyn, in New York, and I've had a banjo for a bit. A friend gave me her banjo, but I'm still very novice at it. So yeah, I'm just so excited to be here. Yeah.

I didn't expect to be on a call with over a dozen Black banjo players from all over the country, of different ages and backgrounds and skill levels, all seeking community. That's what I'd desperately been looking for. I wasn't alone.

I wanted to thank you for inviting me to your class 'cause now I have something to look forward to the first Saturday...

MAYREE: Yay.

PARKER: ...Of every month.

Yes. I mean, I enjoyed the class that I had before. I'll go to a physical space, we'd play. But, again, I was like, I'm a Black person. But, like, I was seeking out other Black banjo players, and I wasn't getting anybody. And in one meeting, being in your study group, met, like, three people in my city, and now we've got plans that we're going to meet at the end of the month and, like, bring our banjos and talk and, like, have community. And I just really wanted to thank you for that because, like, that was, like, such a joy and such, like, an incredible opportunity.

MAYREE: I'm so glad to hear that. I mean, that is definitely my intention. And I feel like if that is happening, then, like, what is happening with Black Banjo Reclamation Project is working and it's, like, fulfilling its cause, you know?

PARKER: Is there anything you think I should work on before our next study session? Like, do you - what do you think I should look up?

MAYREE: I would have to answer that a little more specifically. Like, I would be asking you questions about what you were working on in the class and stuff and...

PARKER: I'm still working on my, like, my chords in the key of G. That's what I'm still, like, really working on.

MAYREE: I feel like you're at work right now, but I would be like, yeah, just whip out your banjo real quick and just show me, you know, or whatever.

PARKER: It's right here. I don't mind embarrassing myself. It's OK. All right. So, like, (playing banjo). I keep wanting to use my thumb. I know I'm not supposed to use my thumb...

MAYREE: I mean, you can...

PARKER: ...Like, just leave the thumb alone.

MAYREE: ...I mean, have you ever seen how, like, Jimi Hendrix plays guitar?

PARKER: Well, he was left-handed, though.

MAYREE: But, like, there's different - there's blues fingering for guitar, for example, where you can, like, grip your thumb around it. If you can make it work, if that's your anatomy, then, like, that's what it is. You can slow it way down because, like, you want to be able to, like, make all of the beats consistent. So if you have to go this slow (slow clapping) in order to get the chord change on your left hand...

PARKER: (Playing banjo) Oh.

MAYREE: ...You want to do it at, like, the slowest pace that will allow you to have fluidity.

PARKER: The fluidity has never even occurred to me until you just spoke (laughter), 'cause I'm trying to go like...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PARKER: I actually heard about the Black Banjo Reclamation Project because a listener told me that I needed to check it out. Hannah said that they got the urge to create the project in 2018.

MAYREE: I was coming out of an artist residency where I was learning a lot about different types of harm that white people cause to Black people and artist spaces. And it really just dawned on me to be like, I need to be asking people for banjos. That was just the first initiative of it, was receiving banjos in the name of reparations and distributing them to Black people who had expressed explicitly that they wanted to be on a journey with the banjo.

PARKER: Now, Hannah didn't give me a banjo, but they've welcomed me into the space and encouraged me to respect this instrument that I feel this connection to - respect which Hannah feels like should be the bare minimum.

MAYREE: Like, how many times have you been subjected to hearing a joke about a banjo from a white person? Little do people actually stop and think, this is actually, like, offensive.

PARKER: It turns out there are endless jokes that are all basically alluding to the same thing, that banjo players aren't very smart and that the banjo sounds annoying.

MAYREE: When you're talking about an instrument that has already gone through so much insult, like, specifically through minstrelsy, and then to have somebody make jokes like, oh, how does the banjo - whatever. I don't know what the hell you're saying, but it's not something that's supporting my motherf***ing banjo journey.

PARKER: Part of Hannah's journey involved learning how to make banjos.

MAYREE: I have learned to make a banjo, A, because I wanted to create banjos, but also because I wanted other people to have that knowledge, and I didn't want that knowledge to feel like it was being hella (ph) gatekept.

PARKER: They say they get requests all the time from Black folk who want gourd banjos, seeking a more traditional kind of instrument. These instruments are hard to come by and expensive. So they run workshops to help people build them. But everyone's journey is different.

GIDDENS: Yeah, I'm not making a banjo. I'm going to buy a banjo from somebody. A white dude made my banjo, full stop.

PARKER: Rhiannon Giddens' banjo is also a very old-school style, a style directly from 1858, because she feels a cultural and ancestral connection to it.

GIDDENS: The instrument itself is just a totally different kind of banjo. Despite the fact that it was used by Blackface minstrels, it was also played by African American banjo players. Like, this is just - it was the tool. It was the banjo of the time. And for me, it felt like a warmer way into dedicating my life to the banjo than the modern banjo, which has so much modern caricature around it, modern ideas, media manipulation around that image of what a banjo player is, and who a banjo player is.

PARKER: But those caricatures aren't my idea of a banjo player. I mean, in the past, you've got Dink Roberts. You've got Elizabeth Cotten. You've got Etta Baker. And now, Rhiannon Giddens is my gold standard. But while searching for a Black Banjo community, I realized that whether you're starting out or have become the premier banjo player in the culture, that need for connection persists.

GIDDENS: This music didn't come from a star-making machine. It came from community. It came from working-class people making a life together. And the more that we try to make it fit into that music industry model of one person at the top, the music's going to die. The music needs community. It needs sharing. It needs collaboration, or it will turn into something that we do not recognize.

PARKER: This coming April, Rhiannon Giddens is hosting her first festival called Biscuits & Banjos. It's an entire weekend of Black folk artists coming together and vibing in community. She's even reuniting on stage with the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

GIDDENS: I'm so happy you're learning the banjo. Keep up with it. And if you come to Biscuits & Banjos, we'll sit down and have a little moment - banjo moment.

PARKER: And Hannah Mayree, with the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, has created monthly spaces for culture and connection, and the community building worked because I finally found some people I was looking for.

Oh, hi.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: [inaudible] Hannah.

PARKER: Hi, I'm Parker. Nice to meet you.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Nice to meet you.

PARKER: I met with four other Black banjo players from the study group. We met in person with our banjos and just played.

(SOUNDBITE OF STRUMMING BANJOS)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: C.

PARKER: C? No, OK. Let me see your C.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: OK (strumming banjo). I'm second.

PARKER: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF HANNAH MAYREE'S "NOSE BLEEDS")

PARKER: And that's our show. You can follow us at Instagram - @nprcodeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is [email protected]. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter.

Just a reminder that signing up for CODE SWITCH+ is a great way to support our show and public media, and you get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch. This episode was produced by Jess Kung and myself. It was edited by Courtney Stein. Our engineer was Josephine Nyounai.

PARKER: Special thanks to Geoff Wiley, Kyle Tigges, Alena Megoni (ph), Schuyler Swenson, Kaivon Jones (ph) and a very special thanks to Diane Wu for giving me her banjo. The song you're hearing right now is from Hannah Mayree. And a big shoutout to the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive - Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez, Leah Donnella, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams and Gene Demby. I'm B.A. Parker. Hydrate.

(SOUNDBITE OF HANNAH MAYREE'S "NOSE BLEEDS")

PARKER: How do you take care of your nails? Sorry, this is...

GIDDENS: I just rip them off on the left hand, and then I just, you know, try to - I don't, like, I don't unzip my pants, like, with my pointer finger 'cause that's my banjo nail.

PARKER: That's commitment.

GIDDENS: Yeah. There's no magic. It's just, you know, you just try to take care of it, you know? But I can also play without it. Like, you have to eventually play without the nail. And it's a duller sound, but, you know, whatever. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.