Warner Bros. 2683
Producer: None listed
Track listing: Dueling Banjos / Little Maggie / Shuckin’ the Corn / Pony Express / Old Joe Clark / Eight More Miles to Louisville / Farewell Blues / Earl’s Breakdown / End of a Dream / Buffalo Gals / Reuben’s Train / Riding the Waves / Fire on the Mountain / Eighth of January / Bugle Call Rag / Hard Ain’t It Hard / Mountain Dew / Rawhide
March 17, 1973
3 weeks
By 1972, Eric Weissberg, onetime a member of folk group the Tarriers, had become a much in-demand session player known for his banjo and bass-playing. When he received a call to play a traditional bluegrass tune called “Dueling Banjos” for a film, he figured it was just another gig.
“They asked me if I could play that song and they wanted a guitar and a banjo, so I called Steve Mandell,” says Weissberg. “We went to this office and auditioned. We must have played it 25 ways — sad, slow, fast.” After passing the audition, Weissberg and Mandell were invited to go on the film’s location in Clayton, Georgia. “Then I found out that it was directed by John Boorman.”
Once on location, Weissberg discovered Boorman’s plan. “He wanted to shoot the scene to the music, because it was a pivotal scene in the beginning of the picture,” says Weissberg. The duo worked on the song on location with Boorman and the film’s cast for two days. Once Boorman had effectively choreographed the scene, Weissberg and Mandell traveled to nearby Atlanta to record the track. “We must have recorded 10 different closely related versions of the song,” says Weissberg.
When Boorman heard the completed tapes, he invited the duo to record the entire soundtrack for the film, an adaptation of a James Dickey novel called Deliverance. The film about four men on a canoe trip gone awry starred Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox.
“We went back to the studio the next weekend and did ‘Dueling Banjos’ 50 different ways,” Weissberg says. With the sessions completed, Weissberg moved onto other projects. “About a year later, I was doing a jingle session and one of the singers told me he heard my record on the radio,” Weissberg says. “And I said, ‘What record?,’ because it had been 10 years since I did my own record.” The singer reminded Weissberg of the soundtrack gig, but as far as Weissberg knew, it did not exist as a record.
After some investigation, Weissberg learned that “Dueling Banjos” had been pressed as a single to be used as a musical bed for live commercial spots for the film. In Minneapolis, one disc jockey began receiving requests for the song. Soon Warner Bros. decided to release the track as a single.
“When it was obvious that it was going to be a big hit, I happened to be sitting in my lawyer’s office and I told him that in three days I could record an entire album to go with the single,” Weissberg says. The attorney put in a call to Warner Bros. president Joe Smith. “All of a sudden his eyes got real wide. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘Joe says the album’s already out.’ I said that’s impossible. What album?” says Weissberg.
Quick to jump on a hot record, Warner Bros. added “Dueling Banjos” and “End of a Dream” to New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass, a 1963 album Weissberg had recorded with Marshall Brickman for Elektra Records. “Elektra was bought by Warner Bros., so they had the album in their catalog,” says Weissberg. “So they took off the first cut on each side and put both sides of the ‘Dueling Banjos’ single on the album.”
The single made number two, and Dueling Banjos hit the summit in its eighth week on the chart. Nonetheless, even to this day, Weissberg is still slightly annoyed. “They never told me anything about this, which really ticked me off, because one of the cuts they took off was a tune I wrote. I could have been getting publishing royalties for it.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of March 17, 1973
1. “Dueling Banjos” from the Original Soundtrack Deliverance, Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell
2. Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, Elton John
3. Lady Sings the Blues, Diana Ross
4. Rocky Mountain High, John Denver
5. No Secrets, Carly Simon