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  • This American Fife
  • Jake Maynard (bio)

The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils. But give me the banjo.

—Mark Twain

In 2007, bluegrass banjoist Eddie Adcock did an ordinary thing at an extraordinary time. Robbed of his ability to make music due to involuntary hand tremors, Adcock opted for a risky procedure in which surgeons would install a tiny electrode into the malfunctioning [End Page 97] part of his brain. The catch was that to find the exact spot to stick it, Adcock would have to play his banjo while the doctors operated. Or, maybe, the doctors would play the banjo vis-a-vis Adcock's brain. I guess it depends on your perspective.

In the video of the procedure, Adcock, sixties and white, sits with a plastic curtain around his head. A banjo, emblazoned with an American flag on its own head, is practically useless in his hands. Behind the curtain, the surgeons drill and poke and zap the back of his head. All at once, Adcock goes from fumbling to dexterous, mountain twang rolling from his fingers. They move the electrode and the music stops. They move it again. The music returns.

The story made global news; Barbara Walters even covered it. It's easy to see why—an old white man, his loving wife, the feel-good convergence of culture and medicine. And then there's that banjo, that flag. It's hard to image the story being as quaint if he'd played a guitar.

Part of the charm, I think, is that the banjo doesn't seem like the kind of instrument you'd risk your life over. Nat Winston, a psychiatrist and musician from Nashville, wrote that the banjo was "an extrovert of musical instruments, nothing to be thought about, and certainly nothing to be loved except with the rough-em-up form of affection you might bestow on a friendly pup." Steve Martin said, "The banjo is such a happy instrument—you can't play a sad song on the banjo—it always comes out so cheerful." The most popular brand of banjo in America is appropriately named The Goodtime.

Maybe it's the banjo's appearance. Even the shape is comic: a drum on a stick. On a banjo, the drum is called the pot. The head of the pot is made of skin, stretched so tight that the banjo sings. Because the skin stretches with time and climate, [End Page 98] a banjo is always subtly changing its tone. Some ancient banjo pots were made from gourds. Today's are typically made of wood or metal. Occasionally, banjo pots are made from life's trash: salad bowls, hatboxes, the torque converters from 1950s Buicks. Regardless, the skin is what makes a banjo a banjo.

Banjos weren't mass-produced until after the American Civil War, but they quickly became America's most popular instrument. Compared to violins and guitars, they were cheaper and easier to make and repair. Because of the simplicity, a banjo can be disassembled into its constituent parts.

Despite the simplicity, banjos are expressive in design. Some banjo builders inlay silver or goal purfling into the fingerboards. Others are inlaid with detailed abalone images of flowerpots, or sparrows, or creatures from the medieval bestiary. I once played a banjo with a dragon carved along the back of its neck. Another one I played was inlaid with pearlescent spaceships and satellites: the past and future in your hands.

I once played a banjo carved mostly with a pocketknife so that it looked like it was made by a person who only owned a pocketknife. The banjo's owner was a forty-year-old man that I played music with for a few years. He lived with his wife in a tiny house on a long dirt road, past a Confederate cemetery in southern West Virginia. I would drive there in the summer to play fiddle tunes and drink beer on his porch. This was in 2014. They had an outhouse, thirty chickens, and a bellicose peacock. I'd just moved to West Virginia and I...

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