Tommy Thompson: New-Timey String Band Musician by Lewis M. Stern

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tommy Thompson: New-Timey String Band Musician by Lewis M. Stern Mark Allan Jackson Tommy Thompson: New-Timey String Band Musician. By Lewis M. Stern. Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2019. Pp. xvi, 231. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4766-7508-4.) Tommy Thompson is an old-time music hero. Along with many other young people in the 1960s, he got caught up in the folk music revival, picking up the banjo and plucking along with neophytes in the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, area. Unlike most, he did not stop performing traditional tunes for adoring audiences until early onset Alzheimer's disease robbed him of his abilities in the mid-1990s and eventually his life in 2003. Although his name may not ring out in the same manner as Mike Seeger's or John Cohen's, Thompson's legacy marks him as an important link between little-known traditional Appalachian and Piedmont players from the early twentieth century and many leading stringband musicians of today. Now Lewis M. Stern's Tommy Thompson: NewTimey String Band Musician appears as a tribute to a man who dedicated himself to America's root music. As Stern notes early on, "This book is my attempt to represent the parts of Tommy that combined to make a whole that was at once bigger, more consequential, forceful, and creative … than any of the singular dimensions that contributed to the sum of the parts" (p. 6). Thus, readers get sections on [End Page 756] Thompson's college football career at the University of Florida and Kenyon College, his stint as a philosophy doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his efforts as a playwright and an actor, and his many other activities, all undertaken by a man who constantly reached out for new challenges. But the bulk of the book focuses on Thompson's musical efforts, because once he took up the banjo, it continued to be his most reliable companion and collaborator. The book contains dozens of photographs of Thompson cradling a number of instruments through the years, all of them discussed in detail in the appendix under the heading "Tommy's Banjos." Thompson first learned to play the five-string banjo by following Pete Seeger's tried-and-true method, but then he expanded his style through extensive jam sessions with other players drawn to bluegrass and old-time music, especially fiddler Alan Jabbour. Together they formed the Hollow Rock String Band in 1966, along with Thompson's wife, Bobbie Thompson, on guitar and Bertram Levy on mandolin. But it was through Jabbour, a folklorist, that many old-time tunes came to Thompson's attention. They took up old fiddle tunes and expanded them for their ensemble. This approach, looking to the past for material but then shifting it to fit present musical tastes, became Thompson's trademark, not only in his work with his most lasting and important band, the Red Clay Ramblers, but also with his many solo efforts. To limn this tale of the banjoist, Stern draws heavily on the Tommy Thompson Collection in the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but he also undertook more than eighty interviews with Thompson's family, friends, associates, and fans. Certainly, the research necessary to any scholarly biography has been done as part of this project. But the many threads that the author takes up make for a rather fragmented narrative, for it begins as a dry biography that sometimes lingers on rather uninspired details, such as Thompson's individual grades in junior-high and high school. Then, the book solely centers on Thompson's musical odyssey for several chapters, even as it largely ignores other important aspects of his life, such as his marriages and children. A chapter on his philosophical and education history then interrupts before the book again returns to and ends on the focus on his musicianship and artistry. All these moves tend to leave the reader with a less than fully rounded sense of Thompson, even as Stern's book celebrates a man who has made an important mark on...