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Fiddlin' Sam Brown's WW II Banjo Adventure

Eighty-year old "Fiddlin' Sam" Brown has been a good friend over the years as well as an enthusiastic supporter of bluegrass and old time music. Accompanied by his wife Georgia, Sam can always be found performing or participating in jam sessions around the Tucson, AZ area. Although Sam is well known in these parts as a very talented fiddler, many folks do not know about his skill with a banjo.

A while back, I happened to send Sam an email containing a banjo joke cartoon. The cartoon depicted two men stranded on a desert island. One of the men sees a banjo case floating toward the island and exclaims, "My banjo made it!" The second man in the cartoon is obviously not pleased with that discovery. The caption of the cartoon read, "Just when you think things can't get any worse."

Sam's response to that cartoon described his experience with a banjo in the tropics during WWII. I found his story fascinating and asked his permission to share his story with you. He kindly agreed, so here is "Fiddlin' Sam" Brown's story of his S. S. Stewart banjo as he carried it with him in WWII:

"I was in the Navy during WWII and enroute for my first deployment overseas in 1943. While enroute to ship out, I bought an S. S. Stewart banjo in a music store in Mountain View, California, from a man named Louis Hirschbek, who was from Czechoslovakia. Mr. Hirschbek, the owner of the music store in Mountain View, was an organ maker who had learned that trade from his father.

I had seen a couple of banjos hanging on the wall of his store, and walked in wearing my Navy Blues.

I asked the price on the banjo and he said, "Fifteen dollars." I came back with, "I'll give you ten."  He said, "Listen, young man, THIS IS NOT THAT KIND OF A STORE. That is an S.S. Stewart banjo, young man, and fifteen dollars is its price."

Louis Hirschbek--who came from Czecholovakia--impressed me.

So I handed over the fifteen bucks and carried the banjo to the train depot where our outfit had a three hour layover and which we still had a couple of hours to go. I sat down, hit a few chords in the "A" tuning and got a sing-along going--which lasted until the train started loading--with civilians joining in on the songs that they knew.

I had seen sing-alongs like that among troops in the movies, but that was the first, the last, and the only one in a train depot that I ever got involved in.

I carried that S.S. Stewart five string overseas with me the first trip and it even went through the invasion of Vella Lavella, carrying that banjo ashore in my fond embrace.

Our invasion was unopposed by land forces. The only Japanese on the island were survivors of the Battle of Coral Sea which had happened not long before we made our beachhead. The beaches of Vella Lavella were littered with corpses of Japanese who had floated ashore. About ten of their guys were alive and without much in the way of weapons when we got ashore.

Our chief problems were bombs and strafings from a Japanese seaplane base on the Island of Gizo, which we could see on our horizon. We weren't a combat outfit, but our skipper wanted a star in his campaign bars, so we got one in ours too, and lost several friends due to the bombings and strafings.

We used to meet together in an empty 8-man squad tent for sing-alongs. Of course, I am glad there were no recordings of the lyrics of those songs, some of which no doubt had been 'composed' by prisoners in 'various states of awareness.'

We smoked cigarettes and told stories and passed the time as pleasantly as we could with the meager musical resources we had...one banjo and one harmonica.... in an outfit of 200 or so men.

I boxed up my banjo and mailed it home when I couldn't find strings for it and all the strings I'd brought along were gone. I carried that banjo overseas with me from April of 1943 through January of 1944.

Nobody complained about my banjo.  We sang and passed some time pleasantly.

The old banjo is a lot the worse for having been out in the tropics without a case to protect it. I've replaced the head, and it is strung up and playable. S.S. Stewart made a banjo that was about 2/3 to 3/4 the size of the regular banjo. The pot is about 8 inches in diameter.

My Stewart banjo originally had a set of genuine ivory pegs that got lost during the shipment home from overseas, so my brother replaced those pegs with a set of geared pegs which were given to me as a Christmas present in 1938 by an uncle. I first used those geared pegs on my original Sears Roebuck SILVERTONE five string banjo, which disappeared after my brother had removed those geared pegs and put them into service on my Stewart banjo.

At the time when I was playing rhythm banjo for public dances at school houses and gymnasiums around my home town in North Idaho, there were only three five-string banjos that I had ever seen and I was the proud owner of one of those three banjos.

In spite of my bravado, I am just a bashful guy who grew up with memories of what this country was like out in Idaho and Washington between 1923 and Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941, when everybody's activities and prospects suddenly changed."

"Fiddlin' Sam" Brown - Tucson, AZ