Posted by banjo93 on Tuesday, December 3, 2024
1993 bought my first banjo up at Oz Music, an Odessa. That thing I carved, the picture you see in white (a negative reversal picture mod). The carving was pretty megalithic. Took all summer about 2002 iirc, with a little set of exacto knifes on the couch in my parents old house with no job, no one there but me and the friends who would pop in occasionally and the then girlfriend.
Ah summer days of banjo carving, of course I didn't play all summer since the whole thing was taken apart. I wonder what ever happened to it when I moved to Poland and left it there in one of my parents houses that they have now torn down (of course it was the house I lived in and built that they tore down to make some awful big extravagant place on that lot that belonged to my grandparents once long ago). My dad was always good at that sort of thing, making everything I did seem small. I was the only one who ever took care of his houses in those days, and all they did was give me shit about not having a fukcing career. I would have been better off uneducated and cutting up meat at the local meat selling store. I could have been a butcher.
Now I play synths, the Analog, the digital. It is so easy just touch a key and it makes the note. Set it up any way you want, but when you touch the key, it makes a note. Nothing as hard as playing the stringed stuff.
The carving of this Odessa included carving the wooden ring which was layered wood that must have been wetted to make it round like that. There were 10 or so layers iirc and they all went round the banjo and must have been glued together in southern china I imagine.
It was the heavy type of banjo. Perhaps they salvaged it before they tore that house down. I sometimes wonder about that. My parents were over 75 when they had it torn down.
If you ever see the banjo with the totem along the neck stained in dark stain (even if you tried you couldn't get that dark stain out of the deeper carving lines). You could make the carving into a line drawing if you were to sand the stain off what you could get to and restain it a lighter color. That would be cool. I would do that if I could get it back.
The ring was carved on the sides and bottom. Great carving. I was an ok player but haven't touched a banjo since leaving the USA. Not a great player, not a pro. But I liked to play and definitely had fun with it back in the 90s especially.
I was into that Bluegrass stuff then. Went all the way south to North Carolina for one of the Doc and Merle fests. Slept in the cold in my tent. That was before the days of sleeping in my car.
Used the Flatt & Scrugs banjo teaching book to learn how to play back in about 94. Good manual. Also learned the Clawhammer style before that. I would take the resonator off and play sometimes.
For a while I owned a Gariepy I picked up on a trip to Alaska ...just after I went to that Merlefest, I got the job by letter to work in one of the places there on the Bering straits. I was 22. Going to college, wasting time with some girlfriend who hated me. Basically it was hate. I guess I don't blame her since I weighed like 150 pounds back then. I was tall though.
Anyways the gariepy was always bottoming out under the 5th string frets, and some of the others. I sold it a few years later to Herb David himself for $100. (I only paid like 200 for it, but I didn't buy it in person, but I saved the music store's card and called after I got back from Alaska). When I bought that thing I went down south to Alabama and Mississippi with that Girl I mentioned. We got in a fight in New Orleans and left out over the Bayou at night, listening to CCR driving up on that highway north. In Mississippi the next day we got a flat tire. Fixed it up. Went back north, home.
That was in the 90s. What were you doing in the 90s? I bet you were going to raves and shit like that. I looked into some of that stuff recently. Lords of Acid. If you were there, you must have had fun, but one thing I heard is the women who sang for them, all shunned the life they lived later on. Lots of them had neg things to say about LOA band guys. 90s were a crazy white kid decade. Rap was rising though. I used to drive around friday nights listening to the Rap music on the college radio station and the dj was a girl from the city or something. She had all the hard hitting rap music of the mid 90s. Interesting stuff. Really gritty city stuff.
But we were playing acoustic guitars and I was playing the banjo. At the coffee houses mostly. Open Mic nights, played some in the streets. Usually guitar though. 90s. good times. Later on I woulda messed around with my new music interest which I had got into starting at the midway point of the 90s which was harder rock music. Of course that was also where I started out in early 90s as well. Back then though the music I was listening to was more like stuff you'd find on radio. Later it was more stuff you'd hear in bars or clubs.
Now I'm looking into buy a new banjo. Let me know if you want to sell me a banjo and ship it to Poland. Wouldn't mind a non resonator type. Clawhammer will probably be the style I go to nowadays. But I did buy a set of finger picks and have them here with me. I could play it either way. Would appreciate getting one of the Flatt and Scruggs Banjo learning books (what was the name of that thing?) so I can play "There's No Place Like Home" again. I will have forgotten most of their tabs to that one by now.
Used to play Jesse James, John Hardy, in the claw hammer styles...but mostly just jamming in the claw hammer and high and lonesumm. Some time towards the end the song I worked on most was that Doc tune as heard on Memories, "Ramblin Hobo".
Was always a fan of the tracks by Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain boys, (Ricky Scaggs I'm sure you have heard of him) In fact Scaggs was at that Merlefest when I was there.
So it's pretty hard to find a banjo out here, though there is a company in Czech republic that make some excellent banjos and mandolins but they are too expensive for me. I paid 350 for that Odessa, ca 1993. It was good and solid. Not liteweight stuff they sell cheap.
Well I did ramble on a bit ...
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