Styles in country dance music change from generation to generation. In Thomas Jefferson’s day most dancers were accompanied by a solo fiddle. Later on in the nineteenth century banjos and guitars were added.
Just as there are many varieties of popular dance instrumentations using wind instruments, there are many regional varieties of country dance orchestras. In the north the tendency is to the use of pianos; in the south, electrified string instruments, particularly the (electrified) Hawaiian guitar. Louisiana has a distinguishing feature in its country dance music—the old-fashioned “wind jammer” accordion, the kind that you push in to get one note and pull out to get another. In the southwest, among Spanish-speaking people whole orchestras are composed of nothing but guitars. One guitar will carry the melody, another guitar takes just the bass obbligatos, and a third guitar will use only the chords. In the north central states, such as Minnesota, you can still hear the Scandinavian technique of several fiddlers playing at once.
The Negro people in America carried on in many forms the African tradition that the “rhythm is the thing. “Plantation parties” often used nothing but clapping and the rattling of ‘bones’ to accompany dancing. Today, in the streets of New York City you can hear teenage rhythm bands composed of a bongo drum (taking the solo) and a coke bottle and a waste basket (taking the accompaniment).
Who it was that invented the first washboard rhythm section we don’t know. Probably in the nineteenth century some ingenious man or woman tried accompanying a dance with the rattling of tin pans and found that the rippling sound of thimbles on a washboard worked well with it.
In the 1920s a number of country style commercial recordings were made of washboard bands using kazoos or harmonicas to take the melody. In this half of the twentieth century they can still be found in many corners of the country, but especially in the south. Various instruments will take the melody—fiddle, harmonica, guitar, mandolin—but note that the washboard, carrying the rhythm, still remains the central instrument.
SOURCE Liner notes to Washboard Country Band Dance Tunes, Folkways Records FA 2201, 1963 (originally released 1956).
… Nailed to an ordinary tin washboard, with wooden frame, might be a tin pie plate or a cheap tin frying pan and a few tin cups or even a brass cowbell. It is amazing how the “clickety, tick, pling clunk, punk, clonk” can cut through all the noises of a crowded dance floor.
Unfortunately, at the present time, there is no music school in the nation that gives instruction in washboard playing. All we can do is highly recommend the technique for anyone wishing to accompany square dances. To assemble one, go to the local hardware store and buy an old fashioned washboard. If they don’t have one you can order it from Sears Roebuck et al. Attach a few tin plates and cups of the right tone and pitch. Get a set of thimbles (metal, not the plastic kind). Be sure to buy some extra ones, since a night of hard playing will dent them considerably. Every state in the union has people in it who can play the washboard and could give instruction. Conscientious searching would locate them.
One nice thing about the homemade character of the washboard as an instrument is that it encourages other homemade instruments. The washtub bass or the jug which will give off a bass throb when “beeped” into; don’t forget tissue paper on a comb, penny whistles and tablespoons rattled on the knee.
Vivat floreatque sympsalma trabe
lavatorum rusticorum compacta!
Long live the country washboard band!