Nate was a clawhammer player that had a sort of an ideal of himself and he used to lie like anything to keep it.
For one thing, whenever people would ask him how long he'd been playing the banjo, he'd say he always played it, and that there was never a time when he didn't play the banjo. Of course if you take that at face value, it means he played the banjo the day he was born; but when people would point that out to him, he would ask them how long they had been playing and they would say for instance, Thirteen years. And Nate would use that old trick and say they must be pretty tired by now, and they didn't have an answer for that; or at least it sorta distracted them from their question.
And so he always got away with this bald-faced lie and that made him more courageous in his lying. So then he would never admit that he learned a tune from a book. It was always some little old man in the mountains that he knew, that taught him. Or he learned it from an old barndance fiddler that he met in Sequatchie Valley when he was a boy; or whatever made a good story. Sometimes he would just make up a famous player, like Tommy Musselwhite, that he had once jammed with; and nobody ever heard of Tommy Musselwhite, but they pretended they did because they didn't want to take the chance of looking stupid. And so Nate got away with that one too.
But the truth was that Nate had plenty of books, that he kept hid in a closet in his house. And the truth is, he learned most of what he knew from all those books. Sometimes he played the melodic style, where you try to play every note a fiddler would play, note for note, even if you have to play some of them with your elbow. And people would ask him where he learned it and he would of course say he had always been able to play that way, and it just came to him out of the blue. But the truth was, he had spent long hours on stuff like
"Observe, how in the first triplet of the third measure, while the index finger is plucking the first string, the thumb is making a beeline for the second string, whilst the middle finger begins a short rasgueado (see Note 4, Diagram b), ending in a grace note on the third string."
And he even had a machine that would slow down the guy who wrote that. But when people asked him how he got all those notes, of course he would put on his best country accent and 'low as how There ain't no notes on it, you just play it.
Well, Nate played a pretty good banjo, and people probably wouldn't have really much cared about his lying anyway. But what finally did him in, was that he fell for a woman, and as it happened her name was Polly and he called her Pretty Polly, after the song. (I don't know if you've noticed but hardly anybody has been named Polly since about 1900 but at one time it must have been a pretty popular name.) And you know how when they're really up to their ears in love guys tell the truth, more often than not, at least for a while, and this was a whole new experience for Nate. And Nate told Polly his whole life story and showed her his books and his slowing-down machine.
Well, that was one big mistake. Polly was one of those women who always correct their men in front of other people, and she didn't know how much his lying meant to Nate's idea of himself. So of course when people would compliment Nate on his melodic playing and so on, and he would start in with his country accent and how it ain't got no notes on it, you just play it, Polly would chime in and mention all those Clem Perlmutter books in the closet and his slowing down machine and so on. And she told everybody the year he started to play the banjo and she never would tolerate any truck about little old men in the mountains or old barndance fiddlers.
I guess you know the rest. Polly ended up in the Kaw River and Nate ended up in the State Penitentiary up in Albany; but he made many a recording from that prison cell, and actually he was better off than ever, because there is nothing that gives you more image than making recordings from a prison cell; and people sorta believe everything you say then, out of sheer respect.
The moral is, tell the truth at least some of the time, and then you'll be used to it and you can taper it a little when you have to.