Now, I’ve seen a lot of friendly crowds in the course of my professional life, but I must say I’ve never seen so many lovable, well-disposed people as I did that month in Russia. They were, at least the ones that weren’t in any gulag, full of beans—up all night and bouncy the next morning. The young ones didn’t have that shadowy look American children were taking on in those years, as if dragged outdoors from watching television; these young Russians seemed to be looking directly at life in its sunshine and its hazard. I was sorry to think it, but they were unspoiled. Grins poured from the students I would play for, in one drafty old classroom after another. Converted ballrooms, many of them seemed to be, or not even converted—they just hauled the czarist dancers and musicians out and moved the Communist desks in. There were dusty moldings and plaster garlands high along the peeling plaster walls, with the walls still painted pastel ballroom colors, and plush drapes rotting around the view of some little damp park where old ladies in babushkas, so gnarled and hunched our own society would have had them on the junk heap, were sweeping the dirt paths with brooms that were just twigs wrapped around a stick. You used what you had here. People owned so little material goods they had to take pleasure just in being alive.

I had worked up a little talk, allowing time for the translation. I would begin with the banjo as an African instrument, called banza in the French West African colonies and banjer in the American South, where in some backwaters you could still hear it called that. Slaves played it, and then there were the travelling minstrel shows, where white performers like Dan Emmett and Joel Walker Sweeney still used the traditional black “stroke” or “frailing” or “claw-hammer” style of striking down across the strings with thumb and the back of the index-finger nail (I would demonstrate). Then (still demonstrating) I would tell of the rise of the “finger-picking” or “guitar” style, adding the middle finger and pulling up on the strings with metal picks added to those three nails, and ending with bluegrass and traditional folk as revived by my hero Seeger. When I had said all that in about half an hour, with samples of what we think minstrel banjo sounded like and some rags from the 1890s the way Vess L. Ossman and Fred Van Eps left them on Edison cylinders and ending with a little Leadbelly, they would ask me why Americans oppressed our black people.