The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Before I fell in the love with the banjo, I was a book lover. I mean, I still am. But when I was in college, I took so many literature classes for fun that I amassed enough credits to earn a dual degree in English, along with my bachelor's in journalism.  I was raised in a house of reader parents. My mom is the kind of woman who checks out a stack of books at a time from the library. My dad also reads constantly, usually history or mystery, but at a much slower rate. My love of books developed slowly. My appetite for reading was sparked when I began collecting comic books in the early 1990s, then graduated to graphic novels, then my love for Star Wars led me to the Expanded Universe novels, and finally I began to read the almighty ...  LITERATURE!   From high school onward, I have never not been in the middle of some book. Naturally, when I became interested in the banjo, I not only began amassing a large collection of associated music, but I also started compiling a stac...

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...