Tam Amber’s “Teardrop” Mandolin

(NOTE: Spoiler Alert for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.)

Some readers may be surprised to see a rather obscure string instrument show up in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes—namely Tam Amber’s mandolin. As the narrator describes, he “proved something of a standout on his mandolin, riveting the crowd with his lightning-fast fingering while his face remained expressionless and distant” (Ch. 23). One may ask quite logically, “Just what exactly is a mandolin, and why is it showing up in the Hunger Games stories?” In a previous post titled The Covey’s Mountain Music, I provided some background to the “Why mandolin?” question. In brief, the mandolin rose to prominence as one of the standard instruments of bluegrass bands by the 1940’s. The “Father of bluegrass music” himself, Bill Monroe, had specialized in the smallish string instrument and elevated it to a lead performance role. With the Covey, it is clear from my own research that Suzanne Collins went “full bluegrass” with their stage shows at the Hob and at the Peacekeepers’ base.

Beyond that, I’ll use this space here to provide a bit of background on the mandolin and help us all understand what enabled it to end up in the hands of Tam Amber—historically speaking, at least.

Like other musical instruments through the ages, the mandolin comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. Collins provides on important clue as to the variety featured by Tam Amber. As the “tall, rawboned young man” was introduced by Maude Ivory, Tam Amber emerged from behind the curtain “strumming an instrument similar to a guitar but with a body more like a teardrop”. This is just one of three rather common shapes of the modern mandolin. The “teardrop” version of Covey fame is known as an A-style mandolin (photo below, right side), which is still commonly played by amateurs and professionals alike. This is a popular “beginner” mandolin for learners, especially due to its relative affordability.

More common for traditional bluegrass musicians is another form, known simply as the F-style mandolin (photo, left side). Professional models can run in the thousands of dollars and tend to be favored by serious musicians. The main identifying feature of the F-style mandolin is the wooden scroll shape on the top, which is entirely aesthetic and has no musical contribution from what I could discern. What both have in common is their flat-backed shape, which is favored by folk and bluegrass musicians in America and the British Isles. Also in common is their unique pairing of strings—eight strings, four pairs—with two strings each for the notes of G, D, A, and E. The strings and music for the mandolin happen to be the same for the violin or fiddle—of the type played by Clerk Carmine.

A third style is the “bowl-back” mandolin (see photo on left) which more closely resembles the instrument’s Italian predecessors and heritage. In any case, it probably makes good sense that Tam Amber has somehow acquired the simpler-shaped “A-style” mandolin. Showing up with one of Bill Monroe’s Gibson F-5 models would probably be somewhat out of place for the modest means of the Covey and District 12 in general, and would not fit with Suzanne Collins’ focus on early 20th-century cultural imagery. And bowl backs were rarely used in bluegrass bands. Still, could Tam Amber master it if he had one? No doubt.

The mandolin’s origins on the Italian peninsula may surprise some folks. How did this regional and rather obscure instrument migrate from Italy to the rural Appalachians to ultimately become one of the five top instruments of the bluegrass world?

In general, the mandolin as we recognize it dates back to the Italian peninsula of the 1700s. (Italy would not become a unified nation-state until after 1861). As a member of the lute family of instruments, the mandolin came in a number of diverse shapes and construction approaches by the mid-nineteenth century. The more recent Neapolitan, bowl-backed instrument was developed in Naples around the 1830s. A second similar though distinct variety of mandolin was developed and produced in Rome by the De Santi family (banjolin.co.uk). Thus, after the 1840s two prominent mandolin styles were available—those of Naples and Rome.

For purposes here, we can consider the Italian peninsula as the cultural hearth, or origin, for the modern mandolin. It actually generated quite a craze in Europe during the 19^th century, with performing groups featuring the instrument in a wide variety of venues and music styles. The mandolin’s popularity happened to correspond with the spread of the industrial revolution and factory production in Italy and Eastern Europe. For those who were displaced from their farms and could not find factory work, many took the risk of immigrating to the United States especially between 1880 and 1920. In a classic case of “migration diffusion,” enough of these immigrants brought their mandolins and playing skills with them to America. Not surprisingly, an ensuing wave of Italian mandolin musicians and teachers travelled across both the U.S. and Europe during the 1880s and 1890s and ushered in what historians consider to be the “Golden Age” of the mandolin. Entire mandolin orchestras were organized, and the quality of mandolin production improved markedly. (This is the stuff we don’t learn about in high-school history books).

At the same time, industrialization in America allowed for standardization of the instrument and its component parts, which could now be mass produced quickly and efficiently. Just like the Model-T and Model-A Ford automobiles being cranked out around this time, companies could not produce mandolins fast enough. By 1900 entire mandolin ensembles were performing regularly on the vaudeville circuit, and schools and colleges were forming entire mandolin orchestras. For its part, the mandolin gained popularity quickly and became “something of a phenomenon” (Ledgin 2004).

Even in the rural Appalachians, people learned about the mandolin from an influx of new information sources and through popular mail-order catalogs of the day like those of Sears and Montgomery-Ward. Those companies were somewhat like the “Amazon” of their day—anything to your doorstep, including entire house kits. Anyway, rural communities also encountered the mandolin through published instruction books, door-to-door salesmen, or traveling performances that visited their areas. In these ways the mandolin reached Appalachia and combined with the region’s ongoing folk song traditions and mountain string bands. These were the predecessors to the bluegrass bands of the 1940s and 50s.

So, to sum this up, the mandolin rode the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe, found its way into folk musicians of rural families and mountain string bands, and survived to be elevated to the status of “premier bluegrass instrument” (my words) by Bill Monroe and his counterparts around World War II. Some two or three centuries later in the twisted world of Panem, one of these “teardrop” shaped instruments would show up in the hands of the talented Tam Amber, indeed one of the “finest pickers” alive as we are told.

I can’t help but wonder if the mandolin will enjoy another minor comeback and become “something of a fad” if the eventual feature film’s creators see fit to provide the Covey with some serious stage time. It would not be the first time—nor the last—that Hollywood spawned national or global crazes for certain pop-culture trends.

References

Banjolin.co.uk. History of the Mandolin. Accessed 06 August, 2020.

Ledgin, Stephanie. 2004. Homegrown Music: Discovering Bluegrass. ABC-CLIO Publishing, LLC).

Mandolincafe.com. A Brief History of the Mandolin. Accessed 06 August, 2020.

Image Sources: Creative Commons. Feature post image of older mandolin (MHJohnston), F-style and A-style mandolins (pain_amp1013), bowl-back mandolin (GB_Teddy).