Steve Martin Awards Third Annual Bluegrass Prize

September 20, 2012, 8:55 am

By DAVE ITZKOFF

After a summer spent watching his coastal community get pounded by tropical storms, Mark Johnson, the emergency management director for Levy County, Fla., recently decided to take a day off. Seeing a FedEx truck pull up to his house that day, Mr. Johnson recalled telling its driver, “I sure hope you're from the Publishers Clearing House. I could use a change of gig here.” Instead, Mr. Johnson signed for and opened his envelope to discover it contained a check for $50,000 from Steve Martin.

“I went down on my knees,” Mr. Johnson said in a telephone interview. “I'm going, ‘Oh my goodness.' The driver thought I was having a heart attack. I go, ‘I'm O.K., I'm O.K., I won.'”

This was how Mr. Johnson learned he was the third annual recipient of the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, an award that the actor-author-comedian-musician helped establish to reward artistry and bring greater visibility to bluegrass performers.

“Every time I listen to one of his records,” Mr. Martin said of Mr. Johnson, “I think, wow, this is the sound of the banjo that made me fall in love with it.”

In addition to his demanding day job, Mr. Johnson is an accomplished live musician and recording artist, known in his field for having mastered a challenging style of five-string banjo-playing, known as “frailing” or “clawhammer,” but which he calls “clawgrass.”

As Mr. Martin explained it, the five-string banjo “has basically been played two ways through history.”

The picking style pioneered by Earl Scruggs, he said, “is plucked up with the fingers. And clawhammer, played without picks , is struck down, with the fingernail. It's like the difference between tap and ballet. It's completely different â€" one is toes out and one is toes in. It's just backwards.”

“When I started to learn to play three-finger and got good enough,” Mr. Martin said, “I started to hear clawhammer and I went, ‘Oh, no â€" I have to learn another style, too, because it's so good.'”

Mr. Johnson said he and Mr. Martin met about five years ago through the International Bluegrass Music Awards, “and we just became banjo buds.”

Mr. Martin said Mr. Johnson epitomized the kind of artist he hoped the Steve Martin prize would reward, who, in addition to full lives outside of bluegrass, continue to devote themselves to a musical genre where a good banjo can cost upwards of $125,000.

“He has a day job,” Mr. Martin said admiringly of Mr. Johnson. “I can sort of understand it. I mean, he's not working at a mine.”

In addition to the $50,000 award , Mr. Johnson will receive a bronze sculpture created by the artist Eric Fischl, and will perform with Mr. Martin on CBS's “Late Show With David Letterman” on Monday.