I bought my first banjo, a Gibson RB-100, in August of 1963 when I was 16 years old. I had worked all summer at a day camp near the Great Swamp. They paid me $25 a week to maintain the pool and life guard. My older brother, Mike, took me to Roger Sprung's apartment (maybe it was his mother's) in Manhattan. Roger had each of Gibson's four models on a plush chair. The RB-100 was the cheapest and the only one I could afford. But Roger wanted $155 for the banjo and $40 for the case. My local music store, Gregory's, in Plainfield, New Jersey, sold the same banjo and case for $165 so I bought it there.
My first musical instrument was a plastic song flute that every kid in school in North Plainfield was given. At age 8, my parents bought me a Conn clarinet, which I played in the band and orchestra at North Plainfield High School and in the marching band at Columbia later. At the age of 12, I bought a harmonica. I went to a class. All the others were younger kids. I found that I could play the harmonica by ear with no instruction. But the discount coupon they gave out at the class helped. Later, I bought a Hohner chromonica, but that's another story.
When I was 13, I was given a Harmony ukelele. I learned to play it. I can still play “Blue Moon.” The first LP I ever bought, in 1962, was from the Newport Folk Festival. I probably bought it because Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl were on it. But it had four cuts of Flatt & Scruggs on it. I still have that LP. I wanted to learn to play like Earl. I bought Pete Seeger's book, “How to Play the 5-string Banjo.” I tuned the ukelele like a banjo so that when I did buy the Gibson, I could play a tune the first day, probably “Skip to My Lou.”
A few years later, I heard a rumor that Earl was working on a banjo instrucdtion book. I wrote him a letter. I got a reply from his wife and manager, Louise Scruggs. She confirmed that the book was not yet finished. Much later, I learned that Bill Keith had stayed at the Scruggs' house and put the book (I have a copy now somewhere) together. I don't think Bill got any credit for doing that.
I used to sit on our front porch for 8 hours a day working through Pete's book. I recall that he said in it that to learn bluegrass banjo, it was better to talk to his brother, Mike. I actually met Mike about three decades later, and we became friends. When I bought the banjo, I didn't know anybody else who played. However, I brought it to the day camp I mentioned, and one of the counselors, a guitar player, showed me a few things. I recall that on one Monday, he told me that an old friend had come to visit him the previous weekend. The friend's name was Bob Dylan, who was not so well-known in 1963. The counselor told me that they played outside and his neighbors complained about the noise.
When I started at Columbia in 1964, I brought the banjo with me. I recall that one day as I approached my dorm, Hartley Hall, a guy I recognized was sitting on the steps playing his guitar. It was David Bromberg, whom I had seen play at Lincoln Center for the Herald Tribute World Youth Forum. I didn't know David well, but in April of 1968, my friend Kathy Whelan suggested that we go see him with Jerry Jeff Walker at a club in Greenwich Village. Kathy had done art work for the cover of Jerry Jeff's first LP, and we were comped in. After the show, we went to David's apartment on the upper West Side. We smoked an interesting substance, and David played us some of his recordings. I think he had already played on two Bob Dylan albums by then. The next day, the Columbia strike started. I made the mistake of bringing my banjo to campus and left it in an unlocked room. When I returned, I had no banjo.
Once, at Columbia in 1966, I saw a few people in a bluegrass jam on South Field. One of them was Pete Wernick, later to become Dr. Banjo and play with Hot Rize. On guitar was David Nichtern, who wrote the song, “Midnight at the Oasis,” which was a huge hit for Maria Muldaur. My friend Steve Schneiderman told me he was in that jam, too. In fact, an absolutely gorgeous young woman in a peasant shirt walked up with her fiddle and joined us. It was Maria, who was then Maria D'Amato. About 35 years later, I was at a party at Eric and Suzy Thompson's house in Berkeley. Maria and I started playing Gaither Carlton tunes in the kitchen, and Suzy joined us. Maria had visited Gaither (Doc Watson's father-in-law) in North Carolina.
One more story about Maria fits here. In 1996, I was at a conference of the Folk Alliance in a hotel in Washington, DC, listening to a jam with Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard, Ginny Hawker, and Ginny's singing partner (Ginny's husband Tracy Schwarz was playing fiddle) in the basement. On my left was a woman named Kate Long, who had written a song called “Who Will Watch the Home Place,” that Laurie Lewis recorded. On my right was Peter Siegel, who had been in the Even Dozen Jug Band with Maria and a bunch of other musicians, most of whom became very famous. I asked Peter why Maria didn't sing much on their LP; my brother had given me a copy. Peter said that the recording engineer didn't think Maria's voice sounded good through a microphone. We had a good laugh about that. Peter incidentally did a lot of recording back then, including some of Hazel and Alice.
I went on to UC Berkeley to get my Ph.D. in chemistry and couldn't afford a banjo. But after I got my degree in 1972, I got a job at the US Postal Service in Oakland, and I bought a 1972 Gibson Mastertone at the legendary Berkeley music store, Lundgren's. I think I paid $750, and I still have that banjo though I rarely play it. I could have bought it for $400 on music row (48th street) in Manhattan, but the difference in price was about the same as the airfare. I started to play and sometimes perform with friends, usually at political events. I remember writing a song about Oman using a Palestinian melody; I was very actively supporting the liberation movement there at the time.
The political organization I joined in 1970 supported liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau, and later, too, Eritrea and East Timor. When Angola got its independence in 1975, I wrote a song, appropriately called “Angola is Independent (People's Power is Resplendant).” The UN had a conference on habitat, and the Mayor of Luanda, Angola attended. We hosted him. I remember that we took him up a mountain where he saw snow for the first time. We sang that song for him, and he insisted that we record it on a cassette that he took home with him.
One day, Robbie Osman, who then hosted a show on KPFA radio, announced a musical get-together after the show in a park in Berkeley. I went there with my banjo. There were only 5 or 6 musicians and a lot of listeners, who wanted us to play Beatles songs. But two of the people I met then are still good friends.
In 1982, I was working at the Institute for Food and Development in San Francisco. They had hired me to enter the text of a book on Nicaragua on a Radio Shack computer at Francis Moore Lappe's house in Oakland. I met Rodney Freeland, who had found the Magic Wand software that ran on it. Rodney showed me how to use it. Then there was an event at a house with music, and Rodney was playing mandolin there with friends. Rodney lived close to me but didn't have a car. So, he would phone me and ask if I wanted to go to a San Francisco Folk Music Club jam at Faith Petrick's house in San Francisco. Rodney would go into the basement to play old-time tunes. I'd play my banjo with people singing folk songs.
Rodney also told me about the monthly Fiddlin' and Pickin' potlucks, mostly held in Berkeley. The first one I went to was at Moe Hirsch's house in Kensington. I recall that it cost $.50 to get in, and they had a keg of Anchor Steam beer. I thought that was amazing, but they never did that again. I met lots of people at those potlucks. First, bluegrass people and later, old-time musicians. At one point, I became an organizer of the potlucks. My job was to recruit volunteers to set up and clean up.
In 1985, I started working at UC Berkeley. A friend of mine who also worked there, Jim Allison, was a bluegrass fiddler. He told me about a weekly old-time jam on campus. I brought my Mastertone there, but it was too loud, even when I took off the resonator and finger picks and stuffed a rag in the back. Soon after that, I bought my first open back, a Wildwood Troubadour, made in Arcata. At that jam, I met fiddlers Lani Herrmann and Moe Hirsch, mandolin player Bob Black, and a few other folks. Rodney occasionally dropped by, too. We didn't have a guitar player so they kept asking me to strum chords. I learned lots of tunes on the fly. Moe was a math professor, and we played a few events for his department. We also played for a potluck at Cowell Hospital (it's gone now and replaced by the business school) one year. I got a call afterward that one of the employees at the picnic had come down with hepatitis. So, all the musicians had to come in for a shot.
When I started going to the weekly campus jam, I was still playing in a three-finger bluegrass style. But that didn't seem to suit the music to me so I changed to a two-finger style of my own devising. I also tried to play clawhammer, but Pete Seeger's book had got me playing in a very weird down picking style. Later, I took three lessons from Jody Stecher to fix my clawhammer right hand.
At the potlucks, I made some good friends: Mike Gix, Craig Fixler, Mark Kartman, and many more. Mike and I used to drive to jams and some festivals together. Mike moved up to Vancouver, BC. I played with Mark until his shoulder stopped allowing him to fiddle.
Every summer, Lani would come home from the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington. She would play tunes she had learned there. I decided to go there in 1992. I announced at a potluck old-time jam that I was driving up and looking for someone to ride with me. A woman I didn't previously know, Susan Sullivan, said she was looking for a ride. So, we agreed to drive up together and did so. Her husband, Mark, drove up and picked her up at the end so I drove home down the coast on my own. I was so tired that I didn't even get out of Washington the first day.
Mike, Susan, and I started jamming together after that, either at my cottage in north Oakland or at Susan's apartment in San Francisco. Later, Mark Kartman and Bobbi Nikles joined us, and the jams moved to Bobbi's house in the El Cerrito hills with a panoramic view of the bay. All four of them played fiddle, but one would usually play guitar.
At one point, I suggested to the Freight & Salvage that they have some old-time jams on nights when there were no shows. First, I talked to director Steve Baker and to music director Randy Pitts. They each said it would be a good idea but that the other wouldn't allow it. So, I went to a board meeting, and they agreed to do it. I think there were only two such jams and then the Freight started having shows every night.
At one of those jams, a fellow named Michael Shames, whom I later got to know better at Sweet's Mill, let me play his fretless banjo. I found it very easy to play and decided to buy one. Lark in the Morning was selling a mountain banjo at their store in Mendocino. I didn't want to buy it without seeing it so one cold December day I drove 4 hours up there. They didn't have the fretless in stock, but they had a fretted model. The goatskin head had sunk down in the cold and I had to put it in front of a heater for a few minutes before it became playable. I liked it and ordered a nylon string fretless, which was shipped to my house.
Incidentally, Michael Shames, who departed us long ago, told me a great banjo story. He was at McCabe's music store in Los Angeles. I think he was working there. He was in a room with lots of banjos hanging on the walls. Someone he didn't know came in and asked him which banjo he would buy. Michael pulled one down and played it. The other person left the room. When Michael went up to the counter, the person there said, “Michael, that person just bought you a banjo.” It was the one he had demonstrated.
My banjo and I started traveling. At first, we just went to the CBA festival in Grass Valley and to Fiddle Tunes. I remember going a few times, too, to a festival in Fiddletown in the Gold Country. I also went to the Midsummer Bluegrass Festival, the Strawberry Festival, and to the Wolf Mountain Festival. We also went to the Solstice festival near Malibu in 1995-96. I met Bruce Molsky and Rafe Stefanini there in 1995. I also went to a New Year's camp in Malibu. Then I started going to the San Francisco Folk Music Club's New Year's camps in northern California and still go to those.
In the early 1990s, some friends of mine came back from the annual IBMA meeting back east and told me about a new Email list called bgrass-l that was started there by a fellow named Frank Godbey at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I was member number 12. That list discussed bluegrass and old-time music, and I met a lot of old-time musicians there. Chirps Smith, Brad Leftwich, and lots of others participated.
Somebody started a clawhammer newsgroup and one of the first things we discussed was what if we want to talk to fiddlers, too. So, I said that if nobody else volunteered, I would start an old-time newsgroup. There was an extensive process to go through to do that. First, I had to choose a name. I wanted to call it rec.music.old-time, but the gatekeepers for such groups said that in the UK, old-time music was music hall music. So, it was named rec.music.country.old-time. Then we had to have 30 days of discussion. The biggest issue was whether the name would have old-time or old-timey. We voted, and 80 percent wanted old-time. Then we had to allow 30 days for voting. The vote was overwhelmingly positive, something like 286 to 36.
As a result, I was then connected to old-time musicians all around the country. I was invited to a conference on Old-Time Music and Radio to be held in Mt. Airy, North Carolina before the annual June fiddler's convention. At that time, old-time music was mostly available on cassette tapes or LPs. There were very few CDs. Rounder Records had issued a compilation which was released in Mt. Airy.
Not long before that, Henry Koretzky, who had participated in the newsgroup, told me that Bluegrass Unlimited magazine was looking for an old-time music reviewer, and he would suggest me if I were interested. He had read my posts in the newsgroup. The first two CDs I was sent to review were Marvin Gaster's Rounder CD and a CD by the Piney Creek Weasels, a California old-time band I knew well. I mailed in those two reviews from Mt. Airy. I met Bob Carlin there. I told him that I had described Marvin as a thumb lead banjo player. Bob said that Marvin, whom I had never seen, actually played index lead. I got it corrected before it went into print.
On the way to Mt. Airy from South Carolina, where I visited relatives, I stopped overnight in Union Grove. I was invited to jam by a fellow from Indiana, who was camped near me. He said his neighbor, who had won Fiddler of the Festival, was going to join us. It was Ralph Blizard. I had met Ralph at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley. He mistook me for someone he knew and came up to me to talk. The three of us played together for about an hour. Then several others, including Henry the Fiddler, joined us. Ralph became a good friend after that, and I played with him many times.
At the conference, I met lots of people, including Alice Gerrard, Mike Seeger, Ken Irwin (of Rounder Records), and many more. Alice asked me to write an article for the Old-Time Herald about the newsgroup I had started, and I did. I also became the keeper of the Email list for the Old-Time Music and Radio group. At the fiddler's convention, I think there were something like 35 people I knew from the internet. One was Gail Gillespie, who later replaced Alice as editor of the OTH. Gail introduced me to lots of people, including Mac Benford, whom we jammed with. Mac and I traded banjos in that jam. Chirps Smith and I had a nice jam inside John Hatton's setup where he sold recordings. I met a West Virginia fiddler named Doug Van Gundy, and we hung out together and jammed there.
There were a few other people there from California that year. I remember Jim and Amber Mueller from San Luis Obispo, whom I had met at Fiddle Tunes in 1982, and Barbara Reid from San Diego. I never saw Barbara again, but her ex-husband W. B. Bruce Reid later became a good friend.
When I returned home, I wrote an article about the trip for the CBA's monthly newspaper, Bluegrass Breakdown, entitled “Knocking on the Gates of Old-Time Heaven.” The Northern California Bluegrass Society asked to reprint it, and they also gave me their Alton Delmore writer's award that year.
I went back to Mt. Airy in 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2001. Some of the other people I met there who became good friends were Betty Vorn Brock and Billy Cornette and, though them, J. P. Fraley.
In 1996, I also started learning fiddle, but since this is about banjos, I'll let that lie. I brought my banjo many times to a small festival in Tennessee called Breaking Up Winter. In 1998, I went to the Appalachian String Band Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia for the first time, and I went to the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, WV right after that to study fiddle with Tom Sauber. But I jammed a lot on banjo and met Bill and Libby Hicks, Scott Prouty, Chris Coole, and others there. Six years later, I was sitting behind Sammy Lind in a jam at Grass Valley. He turned around and said, “Weren't you at Augusta six years ago?” So, I guess I first met Sammy there, too.
I'm going to skip ahead a long time since this is about banjos. For many years, I had two old-time banjos plus the Mastertone. However, one year at Grass Valley, a fellow showed up who was a strong old-time fiddler. I jammed with him, and he let me play his 1902 Whyte Laydie banjo. That was the finest sounding banjo I had ever played. I later learned from Al Hart that he had had two Whyte Laydies and sold that one to the person I was playing with.
In 2018, my mom died, and I inherited some money. I had heard that Eastman, a Chinese company, was making an excellent replica of a Whyte Laydie. Those of us who know a bit about old-time banjos know that the great Whyte Laydies were made between 1900 and 1906 when there was a fire in the factory. After that, they were still good but not as good. My friend Mel Durham, a southern California fiddler, told me that he had a 1902 Whyte Laydie with a bill of sale for $150, which was a lot of money in 1902. I never saw it, and I have no idea what happened to it after Mel died.
My friend, Harry Liedstrand, had an Eastman, but he was out of town. So, I decided to order one, which I could always return if I didn't like it. None of the well-known banjo sellers had it in stock, and I don't think they have been available since then, but I found a Florida music store selling one on Ebay and purchased it. I wanted a skin head on it. So, bought one from Bob Smakula in West Virginia, and I had my go-to banjo luthier, Larry Cohea, put it on. I recall that he phoned me to tell me that it was too tight and wouldn't go on, but when I got to his shop behind his house, he had managed to do it. Needless, to say, that quickly became my favorite banjo. I still have the Wildwood, but I don't play it often because it has a design flaw.
I should mention that I have seen about a dozen other Wildwoods of the same model, but they all weigh a lot more than mine, and they don't sound as good. Someone once said to me, “I hate Wildwoods, but I like yours.” When Jason Romero first started selling banjos—he was still living in Arcata—he told me he had worked for Wildwood. I showed him my banjo, and he said that maple comes in a wide range of densities, and mine is near the low end. Thus it has less mass and rings more. He also said that Wildwood had put bluegrass lugs on instead of old-time lugs. Many years later, I replaced those.
I had a fretless that I could play in G or C, but I wanted to also be able to play fretless in A and D, and nylon strings do not want to be retuned. A friend mine was making fretless banjos. He had one in A, but it had violin tuners, and I didn't want to buy it. Then I got an Email from Elderly Instruments in Michigan. They had a Kevin Enoch Tradesman fretless for sale. I had met Kevin back east, and he showed me his prototype Tradesman before he started selling them. At that point, he thought he could sell them for $500. Needless to say, they cost a lot more than that now. Again, I decided to buy the banjo in the knowledge that I could send it back if I didn't like it. Of course, I liked it a lot. However, it came tuned to G with Nilegut strings. I tried tuning it up to A, but it did not want to go there. So, I Emailed the people who sell those strings in the USA. They figured out the diameters of strings I should get to play in A and D. I ordered them, and they work just fine.
I left out another banjo I purchased in 2018. I had bought a ticket to the CROMA old-time festival in Colorado. My mom was living in Denver, and my plan was to drive out to visit her and go to the festival in July and visit her, too. However, she died in June. I decided to buy an RV and just managed to get it in time to drive it to Colorado. However, I was discombobulated by my mom's death, and this was my first trip in the RV. When I packed my car, I always packed my instruments in the back seat, but there was no obvious place to put two fiddles and two banjos in the RV. As I was driving over the Sierras, I realized that I had forgotten to bring a hat, but I knew I could get one in Colorado. But, halfway across Nevada, I realized that I had forgotten my instruments.
When I got to the festival, my friend, David Brown (not the one in California), loaned me his fretted Enoch Tradesman. He said it was OK to tune it up to A, and I did. I put it in the case. I saw a California friend playing in G and he invited me to join him. I took the banjo out of the case and one of the Nilegut strings had broken. David said he didn't have more strings or a capo. At the end of the festival, he told he had been wrong and had them. There was a luthier who had two Pisgah banjos he was trying to sell. However, they didn't suit my style. So, I bought an inexpensive Harmony banjo from John Hatton, which got me through the festival. I later donated it to the CBA's youth instrumen lending library.
I should also mention that I own a banjo uke and a banjo mandolin, that I bought to learn fiddle chords.
I have also judged a couple of banjo contests. In 1996, Peter Feldman, who was still running the festival in Goleta near Santa Barbara then, recruited me on the internet to judge banjo there. Much later, a friend recruited me and another friend, to judge what was billed as the California state banjo contest in Red Bluff. That happened only once, since the festival lost so much money. I was also recruited to judge a string band contest at the Golden Old-Time Festival in Yreka in 2005 and 2006. The first year only one band entered. The second year, there were nine. I was also asked to MC. They lost money, too, unfortunately. However, we kept the name. There were two Golden Old-Time campouts in Boonville. A few years later, the CBA recruited me to be its old-time music coordinator, and I organized six Golden Old-Time campouts at Lake Sonoma north of San Francisco. That campout is still going, though I passed on the torch and it has moved to another location.
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