eric weissberg and steve mandell was the name of the actor that was the banjo player in deliverance.
eric weissberg and steve mandell was the name of the actor that was the banjo player in deliverance.
what is the name of the actor that is the banjo player in deliverance?
eric weissberg and steve mandell
in "deliverance," a scene depicts billy redden playing it opposite ronny cox, who joins him on guitar. redden plays "lonnie," a mentally challenged and inbred, but extremely gifted, banjo player. redden could not actually play the banjo and the director thought his hand movements looked unconvincing. a local musician, mike addis, was brought in to depict the movement of the boy's left hand. addis hid behind redden, with his left arm in redden's shirt sleeve. careful camera angles kept addis out of frame and completed the illusion, though anyone familiar with bluegrass banjo playing can see that the left-hand movements do not match up with the music produced, and that the banjo being used (an open-back instrument) could never produce the music one hears (clearly from a resonator banjo). the music itself was dubbed in from the recording made by weissberg and mandell and was not played by the actors themselves.
dueling banjos
the accuracy of gottschalk's banjo imitations in the piece makes it a unique record of the sound of pre-civil war african-american banjo playing, and it contains evidence of techniques not found in other sources, including combinations of "downstroking" and "up-picking" found in west african plucked lute performance. this unusual accuracy has enabled at least one modern banjo player to recreate the banjo music that gottschalk transcribed, which invited speculation that gottschalk may have taken his banjo imitations from actual transcription of an unnamed african-american banjo player. unlike most banjo music in the popular minstrel shows of the time that more closely followed the melody of dance music, most of "the banjo" consists of variations of a repeating phrase as is done by musicians in the senegambia region in west africa, the source for the banjo's ancestors.
the banjo (gottschalk)