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The Last Banjo . . .

Sunday, January 12, 2025 @12:01:24 PM

I just sold - and boxed, wrapped, and mailed - my last banjo – well, the next to the last banjo in my personal arsenal, completing a Banjo Hangout Marketplace sale, which I presume will be the last act in 25 years of trafficking banjos . . .

I long ago emptied the inventory of personal five-string players.

By the end of 2010, after we moved to the Shenandoah Valley, I sold off the remaining big ticket electric power tools (planer, joiner, table saw, band saw, etc.) accumulated from the mid- and late 1990s on, and went to hand tools.

Probably about 2016 I sold off my stash of banjo parts, and went forward with the Banjo Hangout Market work to get the last remaining dozen or so banjos in my modest “collection” sold off.

During 2016 – 2018, I finished breaking up what remained of my (again, modest) collection of vintage American and British five-string banjos by either selling on eBay or trading the remaining banjos through the Hangout, or at Clifftop, or at the annual Banjo Collectors Gathering.

And in 2020, before we moved from Northern Virginia to North Carolina, I traded my woodworking tools for a pair of Mountain Banjos that I reserved for the twin grandsons.

Last month, before the close of 2024, I sold off my two remaining short scale banjos – five-stringers I had acquired through the kindness of friends to get me back into playing clawhammer after rotator cuff repair surgery had cut into my left arm’s ability to work the fingerboard.

The one banjo that remains here now – a Dobson Ladies banjo - is the last banjo I will possess (or . . . more likely, the last banjo that will possess me).

It occupies space in my home office alongside two fiddles, one a recent store-bought fiddle, and one that Dwight Diller gave me after nudging me to pick up a fiddle let him teach me what it might take to get started fiddling. Dwight rode that fiddle hard for 20 or so years, so it occupies a place of dignity in my much reduced arsenal of stringed instruments.

To my way of thinking, there’s nothing poetic, there’s nothing even prosaic, about this subject. It’s not a farewell of any sort; nothing about “mortal coils” here.

But it does put a bookend on a long march of time – 25 years repairing vintage banjos, the same stretch of years buying and selling vintage five-string banjos from the late 1800s – and teaching clawhammer from time to time in Northern Virginia and, later, in the Shenandoah Valley.

It does provide a station from which to look back on a brief flirtation with banjo collecting in the late 1990s through the first decade of the 2000s – focused mostly on British banjos from the late 1800s.

And it does suggest reason – to me – to think back on some festivals. Some jamming and trading tunes. Sporadic article writing for Banjo Newsletter (many times) and Old-Time Herald (once), and several years’ worth of presentations at the annual Banjo Collectors Gathering, a bunch of pieces for The Banjoists' Broadsheet ,a British publication.

After 2014, my time and attention shifted to writing a spate of books for McFarland and Company on Dwight Diller, Tommy Thompson, Wayne Howard, Jim Scancarelli, Tommy Malboeuf, Dan Levenson - and a work now in progress on Kerry Blech.

I still reach for the banjo from time to time, and I still try to play whatever fiddle Dwight Diller managed to teach me via phone, email, and Facebook messages in the last two years of his life.

And as a friend recently said, it's okay to play – alone – and just for fun.

Make great music,

Lew

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