Channel 2's Jeff Dore Helps Banjo Pickers Set World Record

Have you ever seen one of those National Geographic films of a hundred thousand sea birds crowded together on a wave-battered rock of a rookery, all squawking and screeching at the same time, making a cacophonic racket like 230 banjo players all plucking random strings as loudly as they can?

That’s what it sounded like in a huge tent behind the right field seats at Turner Field as I joined 230 banjo pickers, every one of whom was hammering through disjointed bars, notes, slides, hammer-ons and pluck-offs of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” It sounded like crazed, reproduction-oriented terns by the gazillions. It was music to my ears.

My ears are suspect, though; I am a wannabe banjo picker. For decades I’ve been one of those guys of a certain generation who strummed a guitar in private, singing Bob Dylan tunes, imagining Joan Baez gratefully supplying the harmony, trying my hand at writing my own protest, love and anxiety songs. And then few years ago, some guys at my church took up mandolins, and another guy, who has a history of forming new bands almost as often as some potters form new pots, got us together to make a string band with a bluegrass orientation. After a few months of practicing, we took the bold step of playing one morning in Fellowship Hall as people gathered for Sunday school.

One of the older church members came up afterward and told us, “I have a banjo I bought about 30 years ago that I’ve been meaning to learn how to play. It’s looking like I might not get around to it now. If I donated it to the church, would one of you want to play it?” I raised my hand and became the band’s banjo player. Playing banjo requires lightning reflexes in the fingers and a good sense of timing. My wife, who has finally given up on ever teaching me to line dance without knocking over and hurting long lines of innocent line-dancing people, could tell you about my timing. And anyone who has watched me try any sports involving a ball can tell you about my reflexes. But I have persevered.

Now jump ahead a few years. I take banjo lessons from a mandolin player, Brad Laird, one of those guys who can not only play anything with strings but can teach them all, too. Brad was talking with one of the guys who runs banjo-dot-com, a store and website selling banjos and unicycles (loosely joined, I think, under the category of “things Jeff is too uncoordinated to do”). The banjo-dot-com guy was asking about ideas to promote the business, and Brad, who is always awash in ideas, suggested a tribute to the great bluegrass banjo player Earl Scruggs, in which we would assemble the largest collection of banjo pickers ever gathered and, all at the same time, play the great Earl Scruggs tune, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” John at Banjo-dot-com ran with the idea, which evolved into all the banjo players meeting at Turner Field, gathering along the base lines before the game, and playing a very fast banjo piece together.

So I found myself with my banjo in a tent before the game. Most banjos are carried around in black cases, so strewn all around this tent were identical, black, banjo-shaped cases, like so many sleeping penguins on an ice floe. The problem was that the banjos were not in the cases, but were in the hands of 230 banjo players all practicing their licks and rolls before the big event.

At 4:30 we crowded around the leader for a rehearsal. Just getting everyone to stop picking long enough for him to shout out the directions took awhile. Then he explained that a base player would thump out a few notes, the leader would play the first few bars that call for a G chord, and everyone would jump in at the moment it switched to E-minor. Good plan. But could it possibly work?

Amazingly, it did. When the song switched to that E-minor, 230 left-hand middle fingers hammered down on the fourth string, second fret at precisely the same instant, followed by the middle finger of the right hand picking the first string while the ring finer of 230 left hands mashed down on the first string, second fret. And so it continued.

The rules for The Guinness Book of Records say an ensemble has to play for five minutes for it to count, and must be lead by a real conductor. Up in front of the assemblage was a conductor, wearing a real, button-down shirt with a tie. I asked him how he happened to be there. He knew somebody who knew somebody, short answer. He is also a legitimate band leader from Cobb County, whose day job is leading school bands. He’s horn player, the only member of his family who doesn’t play the banjo, as it turns out. But he kept the beat and watched the clock, and signaled for everyone to stop playing together.

There’s a joke about banjo players. If you want to make a banjo player play slower, put sheet music in front of him. If you want him to slow WAY down, put notes on the sheet. Having a conductor didn’t seem to hurt the process any. I realized that by the first run-through, we should already have qualified for the world record for the most really, really white guys under one tent.

The challenge with doing the same song bunched up along the first and third base lines on the field was that we were spread out, we didn’t have a tent over our heads to contain the sound so we could all hear each other, and the public address system was likely to pick up what we were doing and send it back to us about a second late, further throwing us off. But they lined us up, we walked out onto the field, some of us waving grandly to a sparse crowd between double headers with the Phillies, they showed a camera shot of Earl Scruggs himself on the giant, jumbo-mega-gargantuan-tron TV. screen perched over Center Field (he was in one of the Lexus-level suites watching) and we all cheered madly for him, and then the conductor raised his baton, the bass player began the lead-in, and the lead banjo player started up on that G-chord part.

Unfortunately, those of us just part way down the first-base line couldn’t hear a thing, and judging by how slowly the ensemble joined in, I’m not sure anyone else, could, either. But the sound was sort of relayed down the base-lines until eventually everyone was in synch. And what a marvelous thing it, was. The crowd was grinning and clapping, people were taking pictures, and we could only imagine that Earl Scruggs was enjoying the effort and not suffering brain injuries from the noise. It was, to banjo players, a glorious sound.

I don’t normally like the inconveniences of big crowds and lock-step activities. And I will confess here that I was one of the few banjo players there who couldn’t keep up with the finger-picking and just hit the chords, although every now and then I took a stab at it, failed miserably, and was comforted that in all the noise, no one could possibly have heard me screwing everything up. This was a very, very fun event, and now I am part of a world-record setting event. For the record, there was no previous record for most banjo players playing a song at the same time.