Man of musical talents
Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative member Josh Johnson masters the art of old-time music on banjo and fiddle.
Photo by Milton Morris
Josh Johnson
Age: 43.
Home turf: Pumpkintown.
Claim to fame: Winner of the 2018 South Carolina Old Time Banjo competition; third-place finisher in the 2018 fiddle competition.
Day job: IT engineer for Windstream Communications.
Just his style: Johnson plays clawhammer banjo, a style different from the three-finger picking “roll” style common in bluegrass.
Night gigging: Johnson also plays fiddle in a local bluegrass band, Mountain Bridge. “I love performing,” he says. “I keep a day job to keep playing music because music only pays for itself.”
Co-op affiliation: Member of Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative.
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Old-time music—the kind Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative member Josh Johnson prefers to play on both banjo and fiddle—might as well be called long-time music. Because to master it takes, well, a really long time.
“You spend about three to five years learning to play the fiddle,” Johnson says. “You pretty much don’t take it outside the house during that time period. Then you spend the next five years learning how to play like another fiddle player. You sort of branch out from there.”
Branching out is something Johnson knows about. Growing up in the Upstate, he played classical guitar as a teenager. In his 20s, he switched to playing clawhammer banjo, a style in which you curve your hand and strike the strings with your index fingernail. In his 30s, he picked up the fiddle.
Johnson travels to various old-time music contests throughout the Southeast exhibiting his skills on both instruments. At the 2018 Old Time Fiddling Convention, he won the Old Time Banjo competition and finished third in the Old Time Fiddle competition—the highest-place finish by a South Carolinian.
“When I play contests, I always try to play tunes that I know came from South Carolina,” he says, citing tunes like “Rhubarb” by Vernon Riddle and “The Hammett Grove Waltz,” titled after a Spartanburg County community.
To win competitions, Johnson says, “You have to be technically robust, proficient in the music, and historically accurate, as well as be knowledgeable about the music and able to execute it cleanly.”
But he also thinks of competitions as reunions, where he can catch up with old friends and maybe pick up new tunes.
“Taking home a trophy and cash prize,” he says, “is just the icing on the cake.”