Overall Comments

A few years ago, I suggested to a friend who was a major bluegrass photographer in the 1960s and 1970s that we put together a book about prewar Gibson Mastertones, a critter that we both have some knowledge of. We could arrange with noted banjo players for my friend to take photos of their banjos, I suggested, and he and I would interview the players and write the text. “No way,” said my friend, “We would not get access to them because they don’t know who we are” (or words to that effect).

Well, Jim Mills had the same idea, and, being Jim Mills, he does have access to the great players and their banjos. He recruited noted Nashville photographer Dan Loftin to take the photos, and the result is the book “Gibson Mastertone: Flathead 5-String Banjos of the 1930's and 1940's.” As testimony to Mr. Mills’s access to the great players, the book includes sections with descriptions of the prewar Gibson banjos played by Earl Scruggs, Don Reno, J. D. Crowe, Sonny Osborne, Butch Robins, and Steve Huber. It also includes detailed descriptions of a number of Mr. Mills’s own banjos and some other instruments. Anyone interested in prewar Gibsons should purchase a copy of this book – you will probably find it to be indispensable, right up there with Greg Earnest’s website and the Gruhn and Carter book “Acoustic Guitars and Other Fretted Instruments,” for which Mr. Loftin also did the photos. However, like most books it has its strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths:
As expected, the photography is outstanding, well worth the price of admission. And Jim Mills writes about the banjos with passion, with charm, and occasionally with humor. Furthermore, the text is full of interesting anecdotes, information, and opinions from Mr. Mills, who is one of the major collectors and dealers of prewar Gibson flatheads, and most readers will find that their knowledge about the instrument is greatly increased by the book. A particularly important feature, for example, is the section at the end of each instrument’s description in which the provenance of that particular banjo is detailed. It is remarkable to discover how much is known about the history of some of the banjos, and how little is known about others. Also scattered throughout the book are references to the mismatch often found between the hypothesized date of manufacture suggested by the Gibson “serial numbers,” and the verified date of shipping when shipping information is available. Mr. Mills makes the point that we will probably have to rethink our view of the actual chronology of manufacture of the different models, given the demonstrable inaccuracies arising from consideration of the “serial numbers” alone.

An especially enjoyable surprise for me is the book’s inclusion of the Hoke Jenkins RB-6. The dogma has been that Gibson never produced a 5-string version of the model 6, one of the high end Gibsons. Although model 6 aficionados have for some time been aware of reports of at least one original model 6 flathead 5 string, the only hard evidence for it has been the photo of Hoke Jenkins with Jim and Jesse in 1952 holding what appears to be an original 5-string model 6 (see the Bear Family’s box set of Jim and Jesse). As Mr. Mills points out, they weren’t making repro necks in the early 1950s. Mr. Mills has tracked the banjo down, and the book displays it in glorious photos and analyzes its characteristics and history in loving detail. For me, this banjo alone justifies the cost of the book.

Weaknesses:
The down side is that book contains a lot of mostly trivial errors that are, nonetheless, irritating and distracting. That is, the writing is not very professional, and there are lots of errors in punctuation and grammar. Furthermore, aspects of the text are annoyingly repetitive. For example, throughout the book there are multiple references to “my good friend” or “my very good friend.” No doubt Mr. Mills has many friends in the banjo world, but it becomes distracting for him to refer to so many people in this way. Now I can already hear the defensive howling in some quarters of BHO: “Mr. Mills is not a professional writer, this does not pretend to be a work of great literature, I can understand what he is trying to say even if the writing is not the best, not everyone is an English professor, good punctuation and grammar don’t matter,” and so on and so forth, blah blah blah. Some of this I won’t disagree with, but here’s the deal. This is a BOOK; it is not an e-mail message or a posting on BHO, all of which are ephemeral and ultimately discardable. The book is an important piece of work, a major contribution, indeed a scholarly effort, and it is part of the permanent historical record. Copies of it will be available in public libraries, and it ought to be found on the bookshelf of every person who is a 5-string banjo player or who is seriously interested in prewar Gibsons. Hence it should be as well written and as carefully prepared as possible. Mr. Mills and his publisher should have spent a little extra money on the services of a professional editor, who would no doubt have cleaned up the text considerably.

But these are minor quibbles, and no doubt most readers will either be unaware of them or not care at all. However, there is a major error in the book that will have to be corrected in future printings: The major error is that Mr. Mills consistently misspells Butch Robins’s name throughout! He adds an extra B, making it Robbins (sic) rather than Robins. This is embarrassing, to say the least. He also misspells Jim Smoak’s name (“Jim Smoke”). Good thing he got it right with Earl Skrugs, Sunny Osbourne, J. D. Crow, and Bill Kieth. Just kidding!

I note that the book makes another significant error in attribution or credit for the photo of J. D. Crowe on page 24. The photo says, "Courtesy of the Jim Mills Collection." The photo was in fact taken by, and belongs to, Ron Petronko. Ron took the photo in 1960, at the Ottawa Auditorium, in Ottawa, Ontario, and it has been on display in the International Bluegrass Museum. This too should be corrected in future printings.

Overall evaluation:
As noted at the outset, those of us interested in prewar Gibson flathead banjos of the 5-string persuasion will find the book to be indispensable. It provides detailed and extremely valuable information about a variety of representatives of the species, and the photography is positively stellar. The shortcomings in the presentation of the text can be overlooked, with the exception of the misspelling of Butch Robins’s name and Jim Smoak’s name, and the miscrediting of Ron Petronko's photo of J. D. Crowe. Once those glaring errors are corrected, the book will deserve the top rating of 10.

Overall Rating

10