Plinkety-Plunk

A new sound in the air, and growing louder, is made by a musical instrument most young hipsters have never seen. Take a vellum drumhead with a fretted neck attached, string it with four or five strings, and pluck. Such an instrument worked for U.S. Negroes in the days of slavery, and its name may be derived from bandore or pandura (a lutelike musical device of North Africa). It is called the banjo.

Last week the National Association of Music Merchants was holding its convention in Chicago's Palmer House and talking about the banjo boom. "In the second quarter of this year we doubled the banjo sales of the first quarter," said Ted McCarty, president of Gibson Inc. Said Fred Gretsch Jr., president of the Fred Gretsch Mfg. Co.: "The guitar players in New York have had to get banjos to play the popular tunes. They've cleaned out the pawnshops. They've cleaned out the stores. They've cleaned out the attics. Now they're ready to buy new ones.*"

Heads Must Be Hard. The banjo died with an era in 1929, and the sweet and versatile guitar took over and stayed with the youngsters, who never knew what real banjo beat was. During World War II, manufacturers were not allowed to make banjos; afterwards they did not bother.

Then, in 1948, Bandleader Art Mooney used a banjo in a recording of the 1927 hit, I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover ("that I overlooked before"), and the tune was picked up as Senator Robert A. Taft's presidential campaign song. In 1954 came the Ames Brothers' record of Man with the Banjo, followed by Hey, Mr. Banjo and Banjo's Back in Town.

Heads--made of calfskin specially processed to make it extremely hard--are the bottleneck of the banjo business, and hard to come by. Manufacturers were cautious about ordering skins until they were sure the plinkety-plunk was here to stay for a while. They are sure now. Banjos have been invading TV-- notably on the Robert Q. Lewis Show and the Canada Dry commercials. Harvard and M.I.T. students have formed banjo groups, and the University of Wisconsin has hired Virtuoso Jose Silva to play a "History of the Banjo" series in the fall of 1956.

Happy Instrument. Banjo Teacher Walter Kaye Bauer of Hartford, Conn., whose big banjo band fills a 2,200-seat auditorium for its annual concert, believes the instrument is being better played now than in its heyday. "In the '20s a few of us warned that the professionals would kill the goose because they banged out nothing but noisy chords," he says. "Today, the professionals do more than that --they do filigree work, background and single-string playing that bring out the undeveloped qualities of the instrument." Concert Banjoist Jose Silva, whose educated banjo can romp through complicated pieces like the Hungarian Rhapsody and Poet and Peasant, loves his instrument for its warm humanity--about as far from the denatured ickiness of an electric guitar as he can get. "The banjo is a wild thing," he says. "You stroke it wildly, and that figure-eight gesture they used to use on it is fine for a banjo. People like the banjo because it's a happy instrument."

*At prices ranging from $35 to $600, though the additional cost of any banjo over $250 pays for decoration rather than musical quality.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.