I recently started playing banjo, and it got me into a bigger moral dilemma that would have ever suspected from this seemingly inoffensive instrument. As I was starting to discover new old-time style banjo players, the all-powerful Youtube algorithm presented me to Clifton Hicks. His style of playing and teaching appealed to me, and I ended up listening to a lot of his recordings and following his tutorials. But then I discovered the less savory sides of his character, including the beef Hicks had with fellow banjo player Jake Blount, and it was my first time having to genuinely ask myself: is it possible to separate the man from the artist? Indeed, there is little alternative to Hicks’ content in terms of style, proclaimed authenticity, and quantity. I originally found myself siding with my new-found banjo instructor, Hicks, even though he was clearly the bad guy in this situation. In order to see a bit clearer for myself, and in the hope that it might instruct others on Hicks’ character, I decided to write this piece.

Background

Old-time music is a genre of North American folk music that focuses on playing traditional songs (ballads, traditional dances); the bands are usually a combination of a fiddle with other string instruments like guitar, mandolin and banjo. It developed in North America as a mix of music from the British Isles and other European countries (France, Germany), and African origins, e.g. the banjo. It is the precursor of country music and modern folk music.

Short History of Old-Time Music

Old-time music evolved from folk music played by working class people in rural regions of the Southern United States and the Appalachians throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and as such has little written history, relying mostly on oral transmission. In the early 20th c, this type of folk music got popular with “hillbilly music” records, and East-coast folklorists and musicologists like John and Allan and Lomax or Pete Segeeger started to record fold songs on the field. It is important to note that it was primarily music from working-class southern rural white people commercialised for wealthier East-coast audiences; this will be important later on. These early recordings gave rise to later North American music genres like country, blue grass, and the folk music revival of the 40s and 50s. As folk music evolved and diversified into all these genres, the “authentic” style of the early 20th century crystallised and became known as “old time music”. Today it is seen as a genre of its own, with bands making to the mainstream (like Old Crow Medicine Show), festivals, music schools, etc.

Current Politics of Old-Time Music

Because it is so foundational to many later American music genres, there is a lot of discourse surrounding old-time music. To simplify greatly, there are two main discourses: the class-based discourse that opposes the authentic, working class, Southerner history against the academic elitist Northerner narrative, and an anti-colonial discourse that opposes White against Black and Native perspectives.

The class-based discourse defends a Southern, rural, mostly white working class history of old-time music, as opposed to an elite East-coast view. For instance, for some time, it was claimed that banjo was brought to the Appalachians by minstrel shows performers from the North. Some Appalachian folklorists refute this narrative and claim that banjo was transferred from African Americans to European Americans earlier in the 18th c. George Gibson is such a folklorist and transmitter of an oral tradition, and he argues that the minstrel show theory perpetuates the stereotype of the uncultured hillbilly who has to be taught by the civilised Northerner.

On the other hand, the decolonial discourse claims that because the contemporary definition of old-time music relies on the crystallisation of White working class music in the early 20th c., it erases other forms of Black and Native folk music. Efforts to re-claim a more diverse heritage of banjo and old-time music are an example of an action inspired by it.

The Characters

Clifton Hicks and Jack Blount, the two main protagonists of this drama each represent one of these old-time music discourses.

Clifton Hicks is a White banjo player born around 1985, from Florida and living in North Carolina. He was in the Army and ended up opposing the Iraq war, adopting an anti-authoritarian, sometimes bordering on leftist/anarchist stance. He has been actively promoting his music since at least 2010, and he has a Youtube channel with 36K subscribers, where he posts recordings, tutorials, and videos about the history and the culture surrounding banjo and old-time music. From personal experience, his video are recommended quite frequently once the algorithm notices you’re into old-time music.

His style is very traditional, almost purist; most of his recordings are just videos of him in his cabin or in the Appalachians wilderness, self-released on Youtube or Bandcamp. His approach of old-time music is also traditional with heavy emphasis on oral transmission, learning by ear instead of relying on sheet music and theory. He frequently records songs with controversial history, like songs linked to minstrel shows or murder ballads , but he always claim that he plays them for their historical value.

He is representative of the class-based discourse: he studied banjo and banjo history with George Gibson, and his video on the early history of banjo presents the same narrative. Even though he is not a professional historian he is clearly very knowledgeable about the history of banjo and Appalachian folk music and he has some academic credibility (for instance he is cited in this article from the American Musical Instruments Society).

Jake Blount is a multi-instrumentist born in 1995; he is the child of a White mother and a Black father. After attending an elite private school in Washington D.C., he then studied at a liberal arts college in New York and was as of fall 2023 a PhD student in Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Brown university, focusing on early African American folk music. He is also openly gay (this will be relevant for later).

His approach of old-time music is innovative, he mixes traditional repertoire and instruments with modern sounds and production techniques, and his music includes themes of social and environmental justice. His first album was released in 2022 on the prestigious Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label, and was covered in mainstream music press (Rolling Stone, NPR…)

He is an advocate of a decolonial view of old-time music; he questions the notion of old-time as a genre in itself, and he studies and promotes African-American and Native folk music. He is also a member of Bluegrass Pride, a group that supports LGBTQ+ musicians and advocates for more diversity in the music industry.

Both artist are quite active on social networks, in particular on their own Facebook and Instagram pages and in various Facebook groups.

The Drama

As a disclaimer, I should say that Jake Blount had a public Google Drive folder documenting the whole affair, which I had access to but since then it has been made private, so some of the drama is recollected from memory.

It is easy to see that Hicks and Blount are diametrically opposed to each other, and they each represent the “other side” in their conception of old-time music. Clifton Hicks is a working-class, Southern, White, traditionalist player who claims a “raceless” history of banjo and has no problem playing potentially problematic pieces from the traditional repertoire, while Jake Blount is an educated, East-coast, mixed-race, innovative musician and academic who incorporates themes of contemporary social justice struggles in his art.

In 2019, after a scuffle in the comment section of a post on Blount’s Facebook page, Blount DM’d Hicks to ask him to be more courteous on his page and to apologise. Hicks responded by giving very troll-y answers, claimed to be a voice to underprivileged people (poor white Southerners), and that he wasn’t going to apologise to a privileged East-Coast elite like Blount. He then allegedly used both his main account and throwaway accounts with racially offensive names to troll and harass Blount in various groups, group chats and forums of the old-time music community. Understandably, Blount recontacted Hicks via DMs to ask him to stop, recognise his inappropriate behaviour and apologise. In the following conversation, Hicks made homophobic remarks about Blount being attracted to him.

In about 2021, Hicks’ trolling and race-baiting behaviours became more and more frequent; this included for instance using a Facebook cover photo showing a sign with racial slurs, posting excerpts of articles seemingly minimising the racist nature of minstrel shows, and complaining about “woke” people. This culminated when Hicks published in November 2021 the Ballad of Kyle Ritthenhouse, a song about the Kenosha shooting taking the side of Rittenhouse, written in the style of traditional murder ballads.

The Aftermath

After that, Hicks was branded as an alt-right troll; as a result, he was dropped by a part of his followers and by the record label he had a deal with. On the other hand, he gained some popularity with the alt-right audience. It seems he embraced the strategy of pandering to a racist audience, and it seems like it is somewhat paying off as his Patreon currently has 1,266 paying subscribers. His videos are still widely recommended by Youtube to beginner banjo players, but it usually doesn’t take long until they realise the type of person he is.

Jake Blount documented the whole thing on a Google Drive, but he has since made it private; the only reference to the feud I could find is now this thread on Reddit. He is continuing his career of releasing successful music and studying anthropo-musicology.

My final thoughts on this are that Hicks’ rhetoric is very insidious: he always claims that he isn’t racist by framing his work as homage to tradition and historical interest: the Ballad of KR is a contemporary take to old-time murder ballads, the minstrel articles are attempts to nuance the contemporary judgements, etc. It can be convincing, because he is a talented player, he does have a lot of knowledge and he does use some historical methods, i.e. critical analysis of sources, making hypotheses instead of statements, not applying modern-day values or judgement to past discourse, etc. But in the light of his behaviour, it is clear that he is no historian and he is pushing racist views because he believes in them and he realises it can make him money.

In the end, I don’t listen to Hicks’ recordings anymore but he did introduce me to some other old-style musicians like Ola Belle Reed, Lead Belly, etc. This text helped me see more clearly through Hicks’ nefarious discourse and I hope it will serve as a w