The Psychology of Clawhammer Banjo

My big accomplishment of the summer was to start playing the banjo. I've played the guitar for about 15 years but have always wanted to try the banjo. I guess my wife got tired of hearing me talk about it so she got me one for my birthday. Now she's tired of hearing me play it.

Anyway, playing the banjo has got me thinking a lot about the process of learning a new physical skill. For the style I play (called "clawhammer"), the basic right-hand technique involves curling your hand up like a claw and plucking downward at the strings with the back of the fingernail of your index finger, which feels very awkward at first. The banjo is also tuned differently from the guitar, has five strings instead of six, and the fifth string only reaches about three-fourths of the way from the bridge to the peghead. This means that when you look down at your right hand while playing, you see five strings. But when you look up at your left, you see four. This can be confusing when you're looking back and forth between your hands while struggling with "Cluck Old Hen."

Slowly, however, I am getting the hang of it. Moves that seemed next to impossible at first are now fairly easy and some of the simpler songs that I've been learning are starting to sound pretty good. I'm starting to think that I might even be a "real" banjo player someday.

Experiencing and thinking about this reminded me that there is a well established area of psychology that is concerned with just this kind of thing. It is referred to as the study of "motor performance" or perhaps the study of "perception and action." There are laboratories, graduate programs, scientific journals, and textbooks devoted to understanding how we generate, control, and refine voluntary movements to do things like brush our teeth, catch a ball, drive a car, type, and so on.

Yes, a man might play the banjo as an act of passive aggression against his wife (I say might), and everyone would recognize this motivation as something "psychological." But the act itself of playing the banjo is psychological too. And many of us think that it is at least as worthy of study.

Now I've got to get back to working on "Four Wet Pigs."