MAC BENFORD
MAC BENFORD
(April 18, 1940)
MAC BENFORD has been a leading figure in the preservation and performance of traditional Appalachian stringband music for more than forty years. He began playing clawhammer banjo in 1960, while a student at Williams College. His interest in the authentic mountain styles of playing the 5-string led him to the greatest living masters of the time – players like Wade Ward, Kyle Creed, Tom Ashley, and Roscoe Holcomb who would provide life-long inspiration and models in the formation of his own style.
Moving to California’s Bay Area in 1967, Mac began his professional performing career with the much-beloved Dr. Humbead’s New Tranquility Stringband and Medicine Show.This group specialized in the re-creation of the old-time music captured on 78 rpm records from the 1920s, most especially that of Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers. The band played festvals (rock and folk), clubs, coffeehouses up and down the West Coast, before it disbanded in 1970.
In that year, Mac began playing with Walt Koken and Bob Potts as the Fat City Stringband. Honing their skills on the street corners of San Francisco and old-time fiddler’s conventions in Virginia and North Carolina, the three finally settled in New York State’s Finger Lakes area, and there became the nucleus of the now-legendary Highwoods Stringband. Their innovative sound, combining authentic renditions of the tunes and songs from bygone days with the driving power of the competition-oriented string music of the ’70s, knocked the old-time world on its ear and provided a brand new model for the stringband revival.It was written that “more than any other band of their time, they were responsible for drawing a legion of new,young fans into old-time music by the force of their musicianship and the fact that they were having such a good time at it.”