DWIGHT DILLER

By Bates Littlehale

  • "I grew up here in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, and I had the privilege of knowing the last of the old people who played the old mountain music. The most well-known, of course, were the Hammons. I dearly love their fiddle tunes, but since I can't do much with a fiddle, I take it out on the banjo," said Dwight Diller -- historian, philosopher, Mennonite pastor, and, fortunately for appreciators of old-time music, consummate clawhammer banjo player and teacher.
    I met Dwight when he was teaching a five-day clawhammer banjo class at Augusta Heritage, at Davis and Elkins College, West Virginia. When I heard him play, I could understand how BNL readers had ranked him among the top five old-time banjo pickers in the country. Later I was able to spend some time with him at his home in Hillsboro.
    Dwight brought me to a small cemetery in the mountains of east central West Virginia. We sat eating lunch by the tombstone of Edden Hammons, born 1876. The Yew Pine Mountains rose in the background.
  • DWIGHT DILLER: "Edden was one of the last of the "real" fiddlers -- meaning that that's what he *did* with his life. He was a fiddler in the sense of the old musicians -- the European bards. Edden was brother to Paris, who was father to Burl, Sherman and their sister Maggie, who can be heard on the Library of Congress recordings and Rounder records. Lee Hammons (no relation) was born in 1886 and was a contemporary of the great old fiddlers. I spent many hours with the four of them.
  • BNL: Did Edden, like Lee, play banjo as well as fiddle?
    DD: I don't know. The banjo didn't seem to be held in that high esteem around here back then. The fiddle was *the* instrument, not the banjo, though most mountain homes had some sort of banjo rather than a fiddle hanging around. And from what I gathered from the old people, the banjo and fiddle just weren't played together much. It didn't seem to be part of the tradition.
  • BNL: How was the banjo used, if not to accompany a fiddle in the old days? Obviously as a solo instrument, but was it used to accompany a song?
    DD: There are lots of old tunes that are just "banjo" tunes. But from what I have observed, they just didn't sing and play at the same time.
  • BNL: Your banjo playing, with its drive, rhythm, and strong "snap," sounds quite different from other players, and totally traditional. What are your stylistic influences?
    DD: First of all, my make up, who I am inside, compels me to play as I do. I don't know how I play, but hopefully it does come from deep inside. I grew up here in the mountains and I was resonating with them years before I heard my neighbors play the music. Their really good music was crooked and lonesome -- just like the land. For a couple of years I lived, ate, and slept the music of the Hammons and Hamp Carpenter. I lived it until it *became* me. At that point I didn't have access to anyone else but them. Looking back, I'm glad. The other group that I later really took to was that bunch in and around Clay County, WV. I met them a couple of years after hanging out with the Hammons. Some of the music in Clay County was hotter -- not more fire, just hotter -- then here in Pocahontas. Well sir, back then in the early 70's, that just suited me. The main old man to invite me to play on and off stage was Lee Triplett. He was just tops as an old time fiddler. Too bad he got ignored. Wilson Douglas helped me be extra thoughtful about my music, and Glenn Smith insisted that I sweat blood if I was going to play music with him. Last of all, John and David Morris, of Ivydale, hired me on as their banjo player. They were my age and steeped in the local music tradition. John Martin was playing French harmonica, and he was unbeatable. Now *that* music had fire. Mind you, "fire" doesn't mean speed. In fact, beginners always err on the side of playing too rapidly. "Fire" is raw gut power from the depths that is telling a cultural story. The "Bing Brothers Band" is the only band that I have consistently heard play this way, in the so-called "old-time" music scene today.
  • BNL: You have developed a certain reputation as a hard taskmaster yourself, when you are teaching banjo. What do you consider the most important thing in your teaching?
    DD: That people catch on to what the music is really about. The music is not about tunes. It is ultimately about transferring cultural messages. What is the cultural message in the West Virginia music as opposed to Kentucky or southwest Virginia or whatever? Once you catch on to the fact that there *is" a message, then you can start working on how to understand that message and what your part is in transferring that message. If you're from a totally different culture, different social bracket, different economic bracket, then it is going to take harder work and a lot of time, but you shouldn't come to it with some sort of arrogance that you think you *do* know. You have to approach the music with some humility. As far as transferring it within its own mountain culture, the message in the music is pretty much dead. The mountain people just aren't taking it up for the most part.
  • I also encourage my students initially to listen twice or three times as much as fooling around with the banjo, as they saturate themselves with the music. I tell them to listen to old musicians born before 1910. The ones born after that generally were influenced by the commercial music -- not all of them, but most. Secondly I'd encourage them to listen to the fiddle as much if not twice as much as the banjo. In the old days, the fiddler was more the one passing the message around the community. So, if you want to connect with the message, even if it is on the banjo, much of it originated from the fiddle. Wade Ward's banjo playing is a good example of this. Ward had something going on there that was just scandalously good. He was passing on stuff that I'd like my students to catch on to way down deep. That doesn't mean they can play Wade Ward's story. They can only play their own story, in their own setting. Anything else is a lie. They still, I feel, have to accept the discipline of being steeped in the tradition as much as possible."
  • Gordon Banks has added a Dwight Diller page to his web site at:
    www.pitt.edu/~gebanks/pers/Dwight.html
  • You can connect there to a complete discography, and a fairly extensive set of Hammon tune tablature, as played by Dwight.
    You can contact Dwight at
  • Dwight Diller
    Hillsboro
    West Virginia, 24946
    304 653-4397
  • Continued in Banjo Newsletter Vol. XXIII-8, June 1996