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Durwood Edwards |
An Excerpt from Friend of the Devil
(A chapter in my memoir)
I contend that I have always been somewhat off-center, and offer the following items into evidence:
I played bassoon — bassoon, for God's sake! — in my high school band and orchestra.
My first car was a 1952 Hudson Twin Wasp, large enough for a family of eight to use as their legal residence.
When all my friends, disoriented by the folk craze of the sixties, started playing guitar, I dreamed of playing the five-string banjo!
The innumerable hours spent listening to the Kingston Trio with Dave Guard on banjo, and later Bill Monroe with his encyclopedic parade of five-string icons filled me, with not only the music of the instrument, but also with anticipatory dreams of the imagined tactile sensations: The demanding weightiness of the banjo resting on my knee; the reflective cold of the nickel-plated brass fittings; the glossy smoothness of the long, free and narrow neck with its egotistical flourishes of iridescent inlays; the tautness of the sharp, steel strings insistently pressing the sculpted wooden bridge against the membrane of the head, creating small dimpled pools around each foot; the involuntary resonant ringing produced by the raising up of the banjo from the close, dark maroon embrace of its black coffin. The endocrine flush of my first physical contact with an actual banjo was as indescribably delicious as my imaginings.
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