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Looming Deadline: Don't Miss Your Chance to Win This Pisgah Banjo

The short version of the story is you have until Feb. 28 to purchase a $20 raffle ticket for a chance to win a Pisgah Banjo. Buy tickets at the Pisgah Banjos website. 

That's the banjo----------------->
Here are the Banjo specs:
  • Scale: 25.5 inches
  • Rim: 12-inch walnut, wooden tone ring and heart pine rim cap
  • Neck: Heart Pine
  • Fingerboard: Persimmon
  • Peghead: Slotted, persimmon veneer
  • Head: John Balch goatskin
  • Tailpiece: Pisgah Hawktail
  • Bridge: Walnut/persimmon Mulheron
  • Hardware: Aged brass
  • Tuners: High-quality brass Gotoh
  • Strings: PBCO clawhammer medium gauge
The longer version of the story is that Pisgah Banjos is raffling off what company founder Patrick Sawyer calls a "very unique and historically significant custom banjo." Raffle tickets are $20 each and all proceeds will benefit the Arnold Shultz Fund.

The IBMA Foundation established the Arnold Shultz Fund in 2020 to support activities increasing participation of people of color in bluegrass music. Arnold Shultz (1886-1931) was an African American musician from western Kentucky who had a profound influence on Bill Monroe and the development of bluegrass. 

Pisgah Banjos has a goal to sell 1,000 tickets and donate $20,000 to the Arnold Shultz Fund. As of today, they are 100 tickets short of their goal. The deadline to purchase is Feb. 28. 
 
The prize is a custom-built Pisgah Banjo made from 200-year-old heart pine salvaged from Pleasant Retreat, a historic plantation located near Appomattox, Virginia. The plantation where this wood was salvaged is also located a half-mile from where Joel Walker Sweeney grew up. Sweeney was a banjoist and minstrel performer who was most known for popularizing the banjo in white culture in the early to mid-1800s. Sweeny claimed to have learned how to play the banjo from slaves on a nearby plantation, possibly Pleasant Retreat.

"Pisgah Banjos chose to benefit the Arnold Shultz Fund as a way to help re-appropriate the history of the banjo," according to a company statement. "We hope this encourages the banjo community and beyond to discover the early American history of the banjo and folk music, which was born on slave plantations and influenced heavily by early American Black culture. The heart pine was donated by Craig DuBose and was salvaged from the roof structure of the main living quarters at Pleasant Retreat. A notarized letter will be provided to authenticate the wood came from Pleasant Retreat."

Pisgah Banjos chose the month of February for this fundraiser to coincide with Black History Month. Visit the company's Facebook and Instagram pages for updates and to see photos and videos of the banjo in action. The raffle winner will be drawn on March 8 via Facebook live. 

Again, raffle tickets are available at https://www.pisgahbanjos.com/product/arnold-shultz-fund-banjo-raffel-tickets-20-each. 



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