Biography
The rowdy titles captured by this pioneering banjo player from North Carolina—“High Sheriff,” “Old Corn Liquor,” “Black Annie,” “Roustabout,” “Fox Chase,” and others—mirror the rough surroundings of his origins. Yet his value as a bridge between Afro-American traditions and Appalachian idioms has drawn sustained examination from archivists and ethnomusicologists. Beginning in the late 1970s, three strong compilation albums have appeared featuring Roberts alongside fellow black American banjoists born at the close of the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Cotten’s distinctive approach to the instrument grew directly out of the same lineage. Roberts, like Cotten, also cultivated a gentler facet in which the banjo accompanies tales about animals; his rendition of “Old Blue” ranks among the strongest versions of that perennial favorite among dog enthusiasts. White old-time musicians from the Appalachian region share this trait, and the two groups overlap far beyond sentimental canine ballads. Nevertheless, numerous record labels and folklore collectors chronicling southern American music history worked deliberately, as though shielded by white hoods, to maintain a racial boundary and portray black and white musicians as having operated in complete isolation from one another.
Those seeking an accurate picture of that history prize the recordings of Dink Roberts, even though his nickname evokes the title of a Gidget film. Mid-1960s enthusiasts of traditional music centered around Durham, North Carolina, held him in similar regard. Tommy Thompson, a founding member of the Red Clay Ramblers who also wrote about music, stood at the center of that circle; together with his associate Cecelia Conway he conducted thorough documentation of Roberts and other valued senior players from the region. In 1974 Roberts was recorded at his Haw River residence on both audio and video; those materials now reside in the permanent archives of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Conway later authored the 1995 volume Banjo Echoes in Appalachia, issued by the University of Tennessee Press, which devotes considerable attention to Roberts’s piece “Garfield.” Given the performer’s documented affection for animals, an uninformed listener could easily mistake the song for a late-life homage to the comic-strip cat, recorded at a stage when an appetite for such pop-culture references might have turned obsessive. The track actually concerns an outlaw, placing it within the category of “man-against-the-law song” that also encompasses “The Ballad of Jesse James,” “I Fought the Law,” and “F*ck the Police.” Although Conway recognized the connection between Roberts and Uncle Dave Macon, her book maintains that the black banjo repertoire represented a separate tradition “governed by its own African-American aesthetic standards,” an assertion offered in rebuttal to earlier claims that black artists had simply appropriated the material from white sources. (The reversal is striking.) Researchers who have sought to sidestep racial disputes have nonetheless confirmed another key dimension of Roberts’s playing: he belonged to the small group of banjoists whose style crystallized prior to the fiddle’s ascendancy—an element termed “pre-fiddle exposure.” The trait surfaces clearly in his clawhammer technique through the alternation of ostinato melodic phrases that respond to his singing, a practice regarded as distinctly African.
Those seeking an accurate picture of that history prize the recordings of Dink Roberts, even though his nickname evokes the title of a Gidget film. Mid-1960s enthusiasts of traditional music centered around Durham, North Carolina, held him in similar regard. Tommy Thompson, a founding member of the Red Clay Ramblers who also wrote about music, stood at the center of that circle; together with his associate Cecelia Conway he conducted thorough documentation of Roberts and other valued senior players from the region. In 1974 Roberts was recorded at his Haw River residence on both audio and video; those materials now reside in the permanent archives of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Conway later authored the 1995 volume Banjo Echoes in Appalachia, issued by the University of Tennessee Press, which devotes considerable attention to Roberts’s piece “Garfield.” Given the performer’s documented affection for animals, an uninformed listener could easily mistake the song for a late-life homage to the comic-strip cat, recorded at a stage when an appetite for such pop-culture references might have turned obsessive. The track actually concerns an outlaw, placing it within the category of “man-against-the-law song” that also encompasses “The Ballad of Jesse James,” “I Fought the Law,” and “F*ck the Police.” Although Conway recognized the connection between Roberts and Uncle Dave Macon, her book maintains that the black banjo repertoire represented a separate tradition “governed by its own African-American aesthetic standards,” an assertion offered in rebuttal to earlier claims that black artists had simply appropriated the material from white sources. (The reversal is striking.) Researchers who have sought to sidestep racial disputes have nonetheless confirmed another key dimension of Roberts’s playing: he belonged to the small group of banjoists whose style crystallized prior to the fiddle’s ascendancy—an element termed “pre-fiddle exposure.” The trait surfaces clearly in his clawhammer technique through the alternation of ostinato melodic phrases that respond to his singing, a practice regarded as distinctly African.