Eddie Peabody

An old film flickers across a late-night television, showing Mickey Rooney beside Judy Garland as he strums the opening bars of "Swanee" on a banjo with a few flashy flourishes. The player is not Rooney at all but Eddie Peabody, whose command of the instrument once supported a serious bid for the title of most famous banjoist in history. Bluegrass devotees might counter with Earl Scruggs, while a younger generation might name Bela Fleck instead. Five-string fingerpicking has indeed become the prevailing method, powering countless mainstream successes, especially on film scores such as those for Bonnie and Clyde and Deliverance. Yet there was an earlier era when the four-string plectrum or tenor banjo dominated popular stages, and Peabody reigned as its leading exponent while also shaping many of the techniques that defined the style. In contrast to the bluegrass approach of three metal fingerpicks or the bare-finger Appalachian manner, the plectrum is a flat pick gripped between thumb and forefinger. Peabody’s professional life spanned both world wars; he refined his stage presence during vaudeville’s peak years and sustained his career through the Depression. His mother first placed an instrument in his hands after noticing that the restless child quieted whenever he could pluck at a mandolin. Professional work began once he left the Navy at the close of World War I. Although he could perform on as many as thirty stringed instruments, audiences reacted most strongly to the banjo, so he gradually made it the sole focus of his act. Theatrics mattered as much as musicianship. One early high point came when he upstaged Rudy Vallee before a sold-out San Francisco crowd by descending a giant mock banjo neck while wearing a wildly patterned jacket and trousers comically oversized. Bookings filled every week of the year, allowing him to enlarge these already lavish productions. Command performances followed for the Duke of Windsor, King Gustav of Sweden, King George of England, and Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. In spare moments he experimented with new instruments, notably the banjoline, a hybrid of banjo and lap-steel Hawaiian guitar whose neck followed banjo proportions and whose third and fourth strings were doubled—one pair in unison, the other an octave apart—while the first and second strings remained single. Both Rickenbacker and Fender briefly manufactured the model. Peabody is frequently credited with introducing a soft pick for banjo playing, although similar experiments had doubtless occurred elsewhere; musicians on other continents have long employed various plectrums on banjo-family instruments. His application of a pick to the fiddle, however, was genuinely novel, and many country fiddlers who adopted the device trace the idea to him. His performances reached radio, television, and motion pictures beginning with the earliest sound films in 1926. The 1937 feature Hula Heaven contains a sequence in which hula dancers hand him successive instruments for a rendition of “I’m an Old Cowhand,” starting on harp guitar, moving through mandolin and mandola, and finishing on banjo. Dot Records began releasing his discs in 1924, including two albums devoted to the banjoline; among the best-known titles were Eddie Peabody Plays and When You’re Smiling. Although he recorded hundreds of selections, he remained especially fond of “Hello Sandy,” “Whoopee,” and “Here Comes Charlie.” Worldwide concert tours regularly included appearances at military bases, and several wartime memoirs by overseas servicemen recount such visits. He also made time to coach banjo students at music schools. A practical motive sometimes accompanied these visits: after demonstrating several instruments onstage he would sell them afterward at a premium to players eager to own one “Eddie Peabody had played.” He suffered a fatal stroke eight hours after collapsing during a November 1970 nightclub engagement in Kentucky. Lowell Schreyer later published the biography The Eddie Peabody Story. Peabody would surely have relished the enduring tale of a 1930s radio announcer’s slip: “Ladies and gentlemen…Now Eddie Playbody will pee for you.”