A Love Affair With a Banjo

 I've always been crazy about the banjo.  Its lack of pretension.  Its basicness.  A stick and a round thing and a few strings.  Apply two hands, and off we go.  The clear, crisp round notes sitting in the air, sitting in my ears like little gold balls.  The jangling cascades of confident notes, little choreographed bouncings.  Whoo-ee.

My science teacher was banjoist with the band that played for our high school dances, and one of my fellow teachers at the community college in Tucson played a mean banjo, even played at my last wedding, but somehow it never occurred to me until the second century of my life that I might play the banjo myself.  It was news to me, still is, that I might demystify this particular stringed instrument.

I bought a banjo on ebay, and a friend directed me to a terrific teacher, Jim Wood, who was kind enough to take me on.  I found that holding the instrument was tricky.  I tend to hang back sometimes; I don't really take charge if I don't catch on right away.  Displacement behavior sets in.  I spent a lot of time making and adjusting straps.  Making straps was easy.  I made a strap for every holiday.  Candy-cane straps were easy.  Shamrock straps were easy.  It was the simple bump-ditty that defeated me.

My neurons and muscles and brain don't train or respond as quickly as they once did.   I'm also basically erratic, and don't play every day.  I'm too easily distracted--with housework, meals, laundry, pets, friends, bills, sewing, exhaustion, sleeping, woolgathering, showering, brushing teeth, email, depression, elation, anything that makes up a life. My husband has noted many times that I don't prioritize.  He is a mathematician, and creates little algorithms for living.  Get out of bed, turn around, look.  If no one else is in bed, then make the bed.  If we get fresh lettuce, then throw the old lettuce into the compost bin.  If you use the kitchen, then leave it cleaner than you found it.

I never learned the Franklin Day Planner.  I am like the wood rat.  I see something, and I drop the thing I happen to be carrying to pick up the current thing that impinges on my retina.  I leave little piles of items around.  Also, things drop off my radar screen, disappear from consciousness, and too often it was my banjo playing.  Kind as my teacher is, I'd go to weekly lessons and humiliate myself.  At one lesson, he asked me to write why I want to play the banjo. At the next lesson, I handed in three single-spaced pages.  "How long did it take you to write this?" he asked.  It was much easier to write than to play.  I also showed him my array of straps.

I needed some catch-up time, a focus group.  So in February of 2007 I hied myself and my Gold Tone banjo over to Brasstown, North Carolina, to the John C. Campbell Folk School, where Mary Z. Cox of Tallahassee, Florida, was teaching a week-long course in intermediate banjo.  A wonderful teacher, a wonderful room, great people.  I have never met a banjo player I didn't like.  

Of about a dozen students in the class, I found I was the least intermediate.  Mary handed out songs in tab, and I realized it was sink or swim.  How could I drive back home?  I had just arrived.  I swam.  I learned to read tab, and I played along, although I heard many extra notes coming from others.  Some students had stuffed socks into their banjo heads to mute them.  I went back to my room for a sock.   Mary ordered the socks removed.  "I like to hear the voice of the banjo," she said.  For a week I heard the voice of the banjo, my banjo, and the voices of a roomful of banjos.  A glorious sound.  I absorbed the sound, and the philosophy crept in around the edges.

Mary brought in other banjoists to show us different banjos and different ways of tuning and playing.  Lo Gordon of Brevard, North Carolina, brought in some of the banjos he had made, and one of his dear inviting little unpretentious banjos whispered to me, "If you like me, then buy me."     

English professor Steve Harvey, author of Bound for Shady Grove (and banjoist with "Butternut Creek and Friends"), played and sang "Jimmy Crack Corn" and other tunes for us, and described his meditations on banjo.  

"Shady Grove" is one of the first tunes I learned on the banjo.  It is a simple, yet haunting, traditional Appalachian mountain song.   The E minor is sad and beautiful, and the eight measures loop around and around without ever becoming tiresome.  "Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall.  If I can't have little Shady Grove, don't want anyone at all," ditty, bump-ditty, "Shady Grove, my little love, Shady Grove I say, Shady Grove, my little love, I'm am going away," ditty, bump-ditty...  

In his book of essays, Bound for Shady Grove, Steve describes making a banjo from scratch (an animal skin is necessary, as is the proper wood), the qualities of banjo music, the history and character of old-time Appalachian music, and much more.  

  

"Next to writing, the banjo is the hardest skill I have ever learned," Steve writes.  I underlined that. 

He says, "A banjo is more like a wonder of nature than a musical instrument, in the same league as panther, lightning bolt, and tornado.  Like a mountain, it has no will of its own and succumbs to no one.  Like a creek, it makes the same noise over and over and never repeats itself.  Like the wind, it changes what it finds...

"It asks ears to bear all that fingers can do, and when the fingers stop and the banjo is safely back in its case, what it has done rings on in the ears, the limping and thumping of its clawhammer beat nestling deep in the body and, in due time, becoming one with the lub-dub and whoosh of restless and ailing hearts."

I composed a little banjo song on the way home, the banjo still thumping in my heart.