The Glory-Beaming Banjo

When Lo Gordon decided he wanted to learn how to play the banjo, he didn’t stop in at his local music shop and pick one off the rack. Instead, he relied on his longtime passion for woodworking and built one from a kit. Now, he builds them for a living, and he and his wife, Mary Gordon, operate their own music store in Brevard, N.C. The Gordons moved to Brevard in 1993 after selling their wooden garage door business to start Cedar Mountain Banjos and open Celestial Mountain Music . Lo had been playing banjo for a number of years and had already built several banjos of his own. Peghead for Lo Gordon's S1 model banjo. “I knew that I'd build at least several for my own excursion into banjodom, and a kit would be a good way to start,” Gordon says of his first banjo. “In short order, I built a scratch-built fretless and one with a ‘White Layde’ tone ring. These were the instruments I learned to play on.” Gordon had always been inclined to build things on his own. If he wa...

Thus outfitted, they went on ahead of their things, traveling first to the little town of Brevard, where there was no hotel, only a boardinghouse. They left from there in the blue light of the hour before dawn. It was a fine spring morning, and as they passed through the town Monroe had said, I am told we should be to Cold Mountain by suppertime. --Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain * * *  When I read the above passage from Charles Frazier's National Book Award winning novel, Cold Mountain , an immense feeling of nostalgia overtook me. I only read the novel a couple years ago, which happened to be when I was getting into old-time music. The book found me at the perfect time. Frazier's 1997 novel about western North Carolinians during the Civil War is set primarily in the Appalachian Mountains and features a fiddler and banjo player as important supporting characters. References to old-time music are dappled throughout the storyline. But the reference to Brevard, N.C., struck...