“I was born in Michigan during a period of relative calm between the Detroit riots and Motown’s move to LA.,” Curtis Eller says. “It’s a good town to be from, especially if you’re a musician. This is a place that Iggy Pop, John Lee Hooker and Stevie Wonder all called home. I expect the Motor City will be turning out great music long after the salt mines and auto plants have vanished from memory.
My dad was a bluegrass banjo player and a rockabilly guitarist, so I had somebody to show me the ropes. I was immediately entranced by the strange, sinewy voice of the five-string banjo. There’s a desolate beauty in the silence between the notes that draws you along like the unlit spaces between street lamps. There’s enough darkness in which to hide a great deal of mischief. In addition to being a banjo player, my dad ran a small circus in Detroit when I was growing up. Unsurprisingly, this had a very formative effect on my decision to become a performer. I was born into the circus and had to run away and join a band!
My wife, Jamie B. Wolcott, and I left Carrboro in 1995 when she got into art school in New York City. I spent years studying my craft alongside a host of drag queens, anti-folk singers, glass eaters, milliners, blockheads and Elvis impersonators. It was like a surreal, 16-year-long fever dream. I loved it! We finally moved back to Durham in 2011, largely because of the birth of our daughter, Daisy. Durham’s a wonderful place for a banjo player and an illustrator (all the beautiful artwork adorning our album covers, posters, T-shirts and other merchandise was created by Jamie) to raise an aspiring gymnast.
One of America’s greatest musical treasures, and a huge influence on me, was Pete Seeger. I studied Pete’s banjo instruction method obsessively when I was a kid, but it was his connection with his audience that spoke to me most saliently. He was a gentle radical who did to the art of the sing-along what Picasso did to painting. On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I found myself on stage with Pete Seeger during an anti-war concert in NYC. When Pete led the audience through a breathtaking rendition of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ I knew that I had chosen the right path. That’s the guy I wanted to be.
I draw a lot of lyrical imagery from American history, which I guess isn’t too surprising for a banjo player. There’s a vein of raw material running between Nat Turner’s rebellion and Richard Nixon’s fall from grace that has kept me digging for years. Whenever I can’t seem to find the right words to express my worries, I put Groucho Marx and Upton Sinclair together on a subway ride to Coney Island and eavesdrop on their conversation. All I have to do is make it rhyme.
Over the years, I’ve performed between horse races at Belmont Park, led a sing-along at the funeral of a wealthy mountain climber and shared the stage with a father-son Elvis impersonation act in Queens. These small, weird moments are the milestones by which I measure my progress.
The coming months will find the American Circus gracing stages on both sides of the Atlantic. We’ll be playing everywhere from Majorca and London to Budapest and Amsterdam, including an appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Apparently, the citizens of the world need banjo music to guide them through these dark times, and I’m glad I can be there to offer a sympathetic twang.”
