Despair not, all ye who have struggled to learn the banjo. Self-described “ebanjolist” Matt Brown brings good tidings of great two-finger picking joy.
He declares anyone can learn to play the banjo using that style.
“I had a 100 percent success rate getting people playing two-finger,” says Brown, who has taught all three styles. “With clawhammer, it was never 100 percent. With Scruggs’ style, it was never 100 percent. But everyone could do two-finger.”
Perhaps you've been vanquished by the intricacies of the Earl Scruggs three-finger roll. Or maybe after months of practice, the unnatural stroke of the clawhammer remains a mystery. On twofingerbanjo.com, Brown offers online instruction in a style that he says anyone--and he means anyone--can employ to make music on the banjo.
Brown grew up in West Chester, Pa., in a family that loved old-time music. The night before his birth, his parents were at a square dance. His father played the five-string banjo. Brown grew up going to festivals, and traveling musicians often stayed at the house. At the age of four, Brown took up the fiddle through the Suzuki method. By the age of 16, he was a touring musician and left high school early to study music at nearby West Chester University.
And then, he experienced an instrumental change.
“I never really fell in love with the banjo until I made my first album as a fiddle player, and the banjo player on that record was Paul Brown,” (no relation) says Matt Brown.
“Growing up, I wasn't super impressed with the banjo. It just seemed like a normal thing that everyone did because my dad and all his friends seemed to play banjo. But there's something about Paul Brown’s style that broke through the normalcy of that and just blew my mind. He was very tasteful, and he never just pigeonholed himself into one style. I was just riveted by what he was doing.
“I first met Paul at Swannanoa Gathering’s Old Time Week and just fell in love with his sense of humor and then his musicianship.”
Matt immersed himself in the banjo, often taking the train to Washington, D.C., to get a lesson from Paul Brown, an NPR journalist and newscaster at the time. Now retired, he lives in North Carolina and is a highly regarded traditional banjoist and fiddler.
.
“I just fell in love with his style and at first, I literally just tried to learn his parts off of our album. And then it became a little bit bigger than that,” says Matt. “That turned into me then taking the two-finger lick that he does in some lead style and starting to explore other tunes in that regard.”
In 2011, Matt moved to Chicago to begin teaching at the storied Old Town School of Folk Music. The introductory class he took over offered basic instruction in three styles: clawhammer, two-finger, and three-finger. Matt was becoming more intrigued with the two-finger style and offered to develop advanced classes for interested students.
“And so for seven and a half years, I taught hundreds of people in Chicago how to play two-finger thumb-lead, or two-finger banjo in particular. And I somehow stumbled into this niche that I'm into this day. That's kind of the main thing that I'm known for.”
The two-finger style was more prevalent before being overshadowed by the three-finger style that Bill Monroe showcased in his band after WWII. Matt has discovered many old-time banjo players who have incorporated various two-finger styles into their vocabulary. And he says there are licks that work in both styles.
“There are moments when two-finger and bluegrass people might be doing the exact same combination of strings. It's just whether we're using two or three fingers to produce the sound.
As two finger players we can kind of live on the line between bluegrass and old time and hang in both worlds, which is super satisfying.”
Now Matt has embraced online learning and is creating videos, tablature, and other instructional material for his YouTube channel and twofingerbanjo.com. “My focus has turned to how I can teach the most people in the best way and that has led me to hosting a Patreon community where I teach intermediate and advanced arrangements of mostly old time, but not just old-time music to banjo students,” he explains.
After years on the road, Matt doesn’t miss performing. When his second appearance on The Grand Ole Opry struck him as “just another gig,” he knew his heart was in teaching.
“I'd rather play music in a jam or share what I know about the banjo with the community of people around the world who are also interested in it. That really is much more fulfilling to me than going on a tour and playing the next show somewhere.”