Roger Sprung has been inducted into the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame.

The American Banjo Museum (ABM) Hall of Fame recognizes those who have shaped the past, present, and future of the instrument. As in past years, 2020’s honorees have each displayed a lifelong commitment to the banjo in one of five categories.

A Newtown resident since 1969, Sprung was inducted in the category of Instruction & Education.

This year’s inductees also included Gary “Biscuit” Davis, for Five-String Performance; Ed “Fast Eddie” Erickson, Four-String Performance; Don Reno, Historical; and Geoff Stelling, Design & Manufacture.

All five were inducted into the Hall of Fame virtually last week, after the museum made the decision to “reimagine this year’s ABM Hall of Fame induction ceremonies,” it announced earlier this month. Due to COVID-19, the statement continued, virtual celebrations were planned for the week of October 12-16.

In past years, gala Hall of Fame ceremonies were held in Oklahoma City as part of the ABM Banjo Fest Weekend.

With the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases, and no “means of organizing such a large event with people from all around the country while ensuring everyone’s safety and well-being, this year’s induction ceremonies will be a virtual event streamed via the internet,” organizers announced earlier this month.

The decision was made to air interviews online, one each day, featuring this year’s inductees speaking about their life’s work with the banjo. Each interview debuted at noon CDT (1 pm EST); Sprung’s interview went live on Tuesday, October 13.

Then on Friday night, October 16, the museum broadcast a special coast-to-coast road trip, “visiting” each honoree and presenting their induction ceremony into the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame from their hometowns. The Hall of Fame program Friday evening also included special guest appearances by Dolly Parton, Tony Trischka, John McEuen, Jason Skinner, Bill Dendle, and Shelley Burns, among others.

An Adventurous Career

Music is Roger Sprung’s life. He cannot live without it, he told this newspaper last year.

“Music is my world,” he said in an October 2019 Snapshot column. “I teach music lessons, buy and sell instruments, and play different instruments,” said the then-89-year-old. Sprung reached his 90th birthday this past August.

His favorite music is traditional folk and bluegrass, “because bluegrass is an instrumental style. You can play anything in bluegrass,” he also told The Newtown Bee.

According to a release last week from ABM, “An argument could be made that Roger Sprung was the first progressive five-string banjoist. While his contemporaries in the bluegrass world were experimenting with swing in the 1940s and ‘50s, Sprung was expanding the acceptable banjo repertoire to include swing, ragtime, pop, and classical styles as well.

“Credited with introducing bluegrass banjo techniques to the folk music world, Sprung’s eclectic musical influence is reflected today in players such as Bela Fleck while Sprung himself continues to explore new and exciting musical possibilities for the banjo,” the statement continued.

Johnny Baier, director of ABM, interviewed Sprung for the online series that debuted last week. Calling the Sandy Hook resident “a banjo legend,” Baier also said Sprung was “a central figure in the folk music revival of the 1940s and ‘50s, a founder of the ‘newgrass’ or ‘progressive bluegrass’ music revival, or movement, of the 1960s and ‘70s, and one of the men who influenced guys like Tony Trishka and Bela Fleck and Steve Martin.

“Banjo icons today all look to Roger Sprung as being one of their guiding lights,” Baier enthused.

Speaking from his home for his part of the interview with Baier, his trademark Hamburg hat atop his head, Sprung began by talking about his early days of learning to play the piano from a maid who worked for his parents. From that starting point he moved a few months later to playing the guitar, he said.

It was not until he was about 17, he said, that he picked up a banjo.

“That really hooked me on, real good,” he told Baier.

All of this may not have happened had the younger Sprung not been introduced by his older brother, George, to the 1947 music scene of Washington Square Park. The musicians during that first visit to the historic park in New York City were playing music that was very different from what the younger Sprung sibling was then learning.

“I saw people of all ages, playing and singing. I loved it,” Sprung told The Newtown Bee in June 2009. “So I threw the piano out the window and the guitar came in.”

Two months later, he took up the banjo. He taught himself how to play, he told this newspaper in October 1997, by listening to 78 rpm recordings of Earl Scruggs. With that he was off and running, eventually becoming a leading architect of many of the trends that are now commonplace among contemporary bluegrass musicians.

He is credited with creating progressive bluegrass, matching the bluegrass banjo playing style with unrelated material, resulting in a very distinctive sound. Progressive also incorporates traditional bluegrass, where songs are performed with guitar, bass, mandolin and/or fiddle accompaniment.

Sprung describes progressive bluegrass as going “out of the main line of bluegrass tines. You use horn pipes, reels, contra dances, pop tunes... anything,” he said in 1997. Thanks to this blurring of the lines, Sprung’s performances cover everything from “Jingle Bells” and “Puff the Magic Dragon” to “Greensleeves” and “It’s A Small World.”

Sprung’s banjo playing is done by ear, not sheet music. To this day, he does not read music.

“Most bluegrass players don’t read music,” he said. Despite legends like the aforementioned Scruggs and Bill Keith having written massively popular books that offer introductory and master lessons, respectively, Sprung told ABM Director Baier that he thinks they are among the exceptions of banjo musicians.

Teaching came in 1950, and folk musician Erik Darling was among the first of Sprung’s students. Among the 3,000-plus students he has educated over the decades, familiar names include John Stewart of The Kingston Trio, Chad Mitchell, and Frank Hamilton among them.

He teaches four main banjo styles: clawhammer, sometimes called “frailing” or “drop thumb”; Pete Seeger pickin’; three-finger bluegrass; and classic nylon.

An Award-Winning Performer

Sprung has built a long history as a performer and educator. He has recorded well over 50 albums.

Among his accolades, he earned the World Champion Banjo Player title at the 1970 Old Time Fiddler’s Festival at Union Grove, N.C. — one of many career high points for the self-taught musician — and he was honored in 2009 as a Pioneer of Bluegrass by the International Bluegrass Music Association.

During the latter event, his trophy from the 1970 festival was donated to the International Bluegrass Music Museum.

“They wanted my banjo, but they can’t have it,” he said with a laugh 11 years ago.

For years Sprung has played one of two banjos. His most treasured instrument is a five-string 1927 Gibson he designed, constructed from the parts of three different Gibson banjos.

The other banjo that occasionally appears in public with him is also a five-string banjo. Far more ornate than the 1927 example, the peg head of this 1957 Gibson All-American banjo is an eagle. Another eagle is carved into the back of the resonator. The heel and the back of the peg head feature additional intricate carvings, while along certain frets are hand painted scenes of the United States.

Sprung has performed before a wide range of audiences, from Carnegie Hall to folk festivals. He has played with Doc Watson and Willie Nelson, Woody Guthrie, Kay Starr, Sonny Osborne, and Don Reno, among many others.

He has performed at the Ridgefield Playhouse and regularly at Roxbury’s annual Pickin & Fiddlin’ competition. There has been plenty of time for home shows, as well.

“Family was always important,” Sprung told The Newtown Bee in 2009, “and I didn’t like to travel too far. I performed with a lot of good people, but I never did road tours.”

Sprung has performed for Waldorf School special events, at the Farmers Market at Fairfield Hills, and was among those featured during the 2014 Newtown Arts Festival. Sprung performed twice that year, in fact, first in the Performance & Dance Tent on Saturday of arts festival weekend and then as Roger Sprung & The Trunk Band in the Music Tent the following day.

Since 1999, Sprung has also been the base component of the monthly coffee house events at Newtown United Methodist Church. He is regularly joined by friends for a few hours of bluegrass, folk, and old favorites by musicians from across the state, as well as New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

‘A Very Nice Surprise’

While most people in Newtown know him as their friend and/or neighbor, and someone who has lived here for nearly half a century, many from outside town see Roger Sprung as so much more. Yet, one of the world’s best and most recognized five-string banjo players continues to lay low when it comes to publicity and fame.

Speaking to Joseph L. Davis for a Banjo Newsletter cover story in March 2011, Sprung said he did not worry about that part of his life.

“I don’t advertise. I don’t have an agent. Those who ask, I tell. If nobody knows, it happens every day,” he said. “People say ‘You were there?’ and ‘I didn’t know that you’re famous.’ I don’t know if I’m famous.

“Sometimes people say ‘What are you doing at this party? I thought you’d be in Carnegie Hall,’ or something like that,” he continued. “I sing ‘Simple Gifts.’”

At that point Sprung did indeed sing to Davis, “It’s a gift to be simple, a gift to be free. It’s a gift to come down where we out to be.” (He has started humming or singing during interviews with The Newtown Bee in the past, as well, often making a point by illustrating it with music. Those points are accompanied by a smile that reaches the corner of his eyes.)

“That answers the question,” Sprung then told Davis. “If you put me on a pedestal, take me off. I’m a friend.”

Fellow Newtown musician and friend Erick Feucht mentioned Sprung when Feucht was also interviewed for Snapshot, in November 2019. When talking about his own love of music, and then someone who has been the greatest influence in his life, Feucht said “Musically, it’s Roger Sprung.”

Feucht said it was a “great honor” to play alongside Sprung for 15 years at that point.

“He just radiates goodness,” Feucht said of his friend.

Just last year, when Sprung was featured in Snapshot, the genial musician said one of his proudest moments in life has been “getting to make a living out of playing banjo.”

When asked this week about his feelings concerning his latest achievement — of being named an American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame member — Sprung still played it cool. His response to The Newtown Bee was one sentence:

“It was a very nice surprise.”