String band

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This article is about a type of early 20th-century American string ensemble associated with old-time music or jazz. For the Virgin Islands fungi ensembles known as "scratch bands", see Fungi (music).

A string band is an old-time music or jazz ensemble made up mainly or solely of string instruments. String bands were popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and are among the forerunners of modern country music and bluegrass.

String bands in old-time music[edit]

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, other stringed instruments began to be added to the fiddle-banjo duo that was essential to dance music of the early 19th century United States. These other instruments included the guitar, mandolin, and double bass (or washtub bass), which provided chordal and bass line accompaniment (or occasionally melody also). Such an assemblage, of whatever instrumentation, became known simply as a "string band."

In the 1870s African-American dance houses of Cincinnati had musicians who played violin, banjo, and bass fiddle.[1] East of the Mississippi, the genre gave way to country music in the 1930s and bluegrass music in the 1940s. During the same period, west of the Mississippi, Western musicians retained the acoustic style of the bands while the big Western dance bands amplified their strings.

String bands in jazz[edit]

Artists began to combine and record string-band music in collaboration with other popular styles in the 1920s. Lonnie Johnson and his brother, James “Steady Roll” Johnson were both proficient at banjo, guitar, and violin, and recorded with various string bands in a blues style. Lonnie Johnson also recorded duets with Eddie Lang during the late 1920s, and set the precedent for string band jazz, which included Bull Frog Moan/A Handful of Riffs from 1929. As influential as the Johnson/Lang duets were those by Lang and Joe Venuti. These works, completed in 1926, emphasized the rhythm of a chordal guitar with the melody in the swung violin line.

Red McKenzie, who also recorded with Lang, recorded with an influential string band group during the 1930s, the Spirits of Rhythm. The group consisted of tiple, guitar, homemade percussion, double bass, and often involved scat singing. The particular form of scat that was eventually associated with string band music was based on Harlem slang, and can be heard in McKenzie’s recording My Old Man, from 1933. Another string band from the 1930s, Slim and Slam, continued this particular form of scat in their recording The Flat Foot Floogie.[2]


  1. ^ The Music of Black Americans: A History, by Eileen Southern, published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. pages 327,328. ISBN 0-393-03843-2, ISBN 978-0-393-03843-9
  2. ^ Shipton, Alyn. "String band in Oxford Music Online." String Band. Oxford Music Online. Web.

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