Looking Out: Beautiful banjo is a connection to fathers
Growing up and well into adulthood, my life was filled with my father’s music. He learned to play classical music at a young age, led down that path by his mother Grace. Then, as a teen, he discovered jazz. Poor Grandmother Grace.
He pulled a band together to play at high school dances. Poor Granddad. He was a teetotaling, non-dancing Methodist minister and educator.
In college, Dad and his friends continued to play the Dixieland, big band and boogie woogie jazz that was popular at the time. After going to medical school, Dad joined the Navy and spent a horrid couple of World War II years storming the Japanese-held islands of the South Pacific aboard a troop-transport ship. Somehow, he managed to commandeer an old piano and again formed a band. There were plenty of musicians aboard the ship, including vocalists, so it was a high old time in the heat and drudgery of shipboard life between the bloody terror-filled island battles.
My dad played the piano in our house at every opportunity. He could not walk past it, or any other piano, without leaning over and kicking out a tune or two, even if he didn’t have time to sit down. Even when he wasn’t playing, the record player in our house was in constant use, playing those same wonderful Great American Songbook tunes of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.
My parents entertained a lot, and always there were musically talented guests in our house, gathered around the piano singing the old songs.
One of dad’s long-time friends was a banjo player nicknamed Fingers. Normally, one thinks of banjo music as tied to bluegrass and country music, but as a jazz instrument? Wonderful. Fingers could strum accompaniment to the other musicians in the group. He could carry the melody. He could provide percussion.
Fingers made sure that his son Dave played music too, in his case, a trombone. Dave started playing with the group when he was about 15, so he, too, learned all those old songs.
Countless times in my life I enjoyed hearing that music played by that gang. Usually there would be the piano, the banjo, the trombone, trumpet, clarinet, drum, guitar, bass and vocalist. Maybe for added spice a tambourine or ukulele would add to the fun.
That was then. So many of them are gone now, but I still listen to that brand of music.
Not long ago, Dave told me he had his dad’s beautiful old banjo and wanted to display it in a case on the wall of his home. Happily, my dad’s old piano still lives on in my nephew’s house, so I understood and was very excited to hear about the beloved banjo. I immediately volunteered to build the display case for Dave.
Many times over the past couple of months I have gently lifted that heavy old banjo to carefully measure and figure out how to safely mount it in the vertical case, which will have a glass door when completed in a few days.
The case is made of northern white ash, which is a beautiful wood. Unfortunately, the invasive and lethal emerald ash borer has made ash trees victims of global trade.
No more ash trees, but like the old-time jazz, the old piano, and the old banjo in the lovely striped ash wood of the display case, they persist.
What an honor this project has been. Thanks, Dave.
Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: Beautiful banjo is a connection to fathers
