ERIC WEISSBERG,
1939-2020

Eric Weissberg, the Grammy-winning banjo player who scored an unlikely hit in 1973, died near Detroit Sunday of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 80.

Weissberg , a fiddler, mandolinist, dobroist and guitarist as well, had a #2 hit with “Dueling Banjos,” which appeared on the soundtrack to the 1972 movie Deliverance. The soundtrack went gold and Weissberg and Steve Mandell received the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance.

His own album, Dueling Banjos (Warner Bros.), went to #1 in March 1973 and spent half a year on the album chart. The follow-up, Rural Free Delivery, also released in 1973, barely cracked the Top 200; Weissberg did not release another album under his name.

Weissberg’s hit came after he had spent more than a decade as a member of the folk groups, The Greenbriar Boys and The Tarriers, and worked as a session musician in New York. He played guitar on Judy Collins’ “Pack Up Your Sorrows,” John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. He also worked with Talking Heads, Doc Watson, Jim Croce, Nanci Griffith and others.

“Dueling Banjos,” which is actually a guitar and banjo duet, was an interpretation of “Feudin’ Banjos,” a 1955 recording by Arthur Smith and Don Reno.

Weissberg also appeared on several important collections of banjo music during the folk revival of the late 1950s/early ‘60s: American Banjo Scruggs Style, Folk Banjo Styles and New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass, which supplied much of the Deliverance soundtrack’s songs.