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As it turns out, I have four banjos on my workbench now, two of which were built by Bates Littlehales in the late 1990s.
Bates is the guy who taught me clawhammer, and then taught me banjo building and banjo repair – about two decades ago.
It made sense to me that these are the last two banjos on which Little Bear Banjo Hospital (LBBH) will work.
Apart from helping people with basic setup, installing skin heads, and doing other minor work (such as installing spikes), LBBH is calling it a day.
I’m finding that I need to carve out time for the editing, index writing and photograph work that the publisher of the book I have written is requiring. The working title of this project: “Dwight Diller and the Old Time Music of Eastern Central West Virginia – The Rhythm of Yew Pine Mountain.” I believe it will be out in late 2016.
There are also some spin offs from the book on which I’m working, including what Carl Fleischhauer and I hope will be an Old Time Herald article on Dwight’s field recording work, and potentially a series of articles on what I learned during the course of this long writing project about West Virginia music.
Several other old time musicians appear interested in getting their memories into book form. I’m considering those possibilities. I also have three musician “profiles” I’m working on for various publications, a clawhammer tutorial I have written – now being edited – and a eBook piece on my brief and undistinguished flirtation with collecting vintage banjos.
So, I’ve backed myself into a corner with projects, not necessarily a bad thing, but something has to give. I’m thinking, as these eyes age and reflexes alter, I’d rather put aside the razor sharp pointy objects, the hand tools and heavy machinery that have been my equipment for the last 25 years or so, before I start letting my blood flood onto the floor of my basement shop.
I just wanted to say I’m pleased I was able to work on two of Bates’ instruments. He was a delightful banjo teacher, and a careful, constructive helper, teacher, when it came to banjo repair and building methods. He opened up a whole world to me, showed me the unpredictable beauty of wood. He taught me the patience necessary to get totally immersed in a particular cut to the point that time and space contract, and there is nothing else for the moment apart from working that saw through the defined trajectory while enjoying the spray of sawdust, inhaling the sharp, sweet scent of pitch, and focusing on the intention of the cut.
So, I see these last 20 or so years as having come full circle now, that two of his first banjos wandered into my shop in the of the attention he taught me to pay to every instrument that was placed on my workbench. Bates taught me the democracy of banjo repair, so to speak: no matter whether these were high end tailored pieces of art, or simple Asian factory banjos, all banjos deserve respect and must get the same attention on the repair table.
And I took the best care I could of those fine banjos Bates himself built when he started out cutting wood. That was a delightful symmetry, for me, and a good time to close out this chapter and transition.
I’m going to keep posting to the Little Bear Banjo Blog – as the Little Bear Banjo Hospital website has been re-christened. The web address is still “Little Bear Banjo Hospital.” But the platform has been repurposed:
http://www.littlebearbanjohospital.com/
I will also post to my blog on the Banjo Hangout:
http://www.banjohangout.org/my/brooklynbanjoboy
So, thanks for coming along for the ride so far. Please stick with Little Bear. Where not going entirely into hibernation.
Play hard,
Lew
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