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The Hand That Rocks The Camping Trip In The Woods: “Dueling Banjos” by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell

By Marcello Carlin


If you want to try to understand why American society is in its current parlous state, you might want to go back and watch Deliverance, a film which came out just at the point where some Americans delivered Richard Nixon back into the White House for a second time. Admittedly you could go further and deeper by doing some detailed research into the causes and effects of the Civil War, not to mention the first encounters between natives and colonisers. It is fitting that Deliverance was directed by an Englishman, since its roots lie in a decidedly Western European paranoia and/or fear of “the Other.”

If you so decide, then be warned that Deliverance is a rather merciless and pitiless film to watch. Horrible things happen in it. One of the four Atlanta city slickers dies. What happens to the Ned Beatty character is practically unwatchable. And yet, once the survivors are tactfully sent packing by the local sheriff – played by James Dickey, the author of the novel on which the film was based – the implication is that the whole thing could have been a hideous dream, an experience that won’t ever be forgotten, a new meaning to the concept of smoke on the water.

And yet – there is, early on in the movie, an oasis of miraculous mutual understanding. Hoyt Pollard is the boy plucking (or miming – local musician Mike Addis was sitting directly behind Pollard, doing the actual picking) the banjo, engaged in a musical conversation with a grinning, urbane Ronny Cox, who looks a little like Elvis and is the one who doesn’t make it back. The musical train patiently picks up speed until the result is as grand and rapid as the most timeless of unseen rivers, the cynosure of John Fogerty’s fantasy of The South.

There were complications; the tune was actually composed by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith in 1954, then entitled “Feudin’ Banjos” (although the “Yankee Doodle” quotes remained), and was first recorded by Smith and banjoist Don Reno the following year. It originally appeared on television in 1963, when The Dillards performed it on The Andy Griffith Show. Used on Deliverance without permission, Smith successfully sued for co-composer credits and royalties. But in this context it sounds like the oldest piece of music ever made and makes a fitting beginning to a year in which it can be fairly proposed that America was in the process of experiencing a nervous breakdown.

Date Record Made Number Two: 24 February 1973
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 4
Record At Number One: “Killing Me Softly With His Song” by Roberta Flack
UK Chart Position: 17 (credited in UK to “’Deliverance’ Soundtrack”)

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