The Glory-Beaming Banjo

This month sure has changed the outlook on my yearly goals for banjo and fiddle. While I'm able to keep up my playing at home, getting out to play with others this year has been interrupted. I only made it to one old-time session and one festival before Ohio was ordered to stay at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. Recent estimates show that we'll likely be asked to continue social distancing until May. That means no playing with others for at least another month, and it wouldn't surprise me if that lasted longer. The pandemic has changed my music-making activities in other ways too. Since I'm now working from home, I'm not taking my usual lunch break to play fiddle in the park. Instead, my playing time is typically relegated until the evenings, when everyone else has gone to bed, or other spare moments. The good news is that the weather is starting to warm up, and I've gotten to play outside on my porch a couple times in the last couple weeks. ...

Local old-time sessions have been canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and I suspect festivals will start feeling the effects soon as we move toward summer. For instance, organizers have recently announced that the John Hartford Memorial Festival  has been postponed until September. My local festivals don't start rolling along until July, so hopefully they'll still be able to continue. Chances are I won't be hauling my banjo anywhere soon. However, I did get chance the last two months to test my new Boulder Alpine gig bag . I lugged my banjo to the Lake Erie Folk Festival in February and to a local jam at the beginning of March before Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine closed local businesses and issued a stay-at-home order. Now, the only place I take my banjo is to my front porch. And I don't need a gig bag for that. In my two experiences using it, however, I was very pleased with the results. The Boulder Alpine gig bag is lightweight and comfortable to carry. There are a se...

Over the last eight years, Pisgah Banjo Co. has become one of the top builders of openback banjos in the United States. Founder Patrick Sawyer (formerly Heavner 1 ) started the company in 2012 with the goal of providing affordable, quality banjos with the old-time community in mind. The company’s stated mission on its website is “to create affordable, professional quality, handcrafted banjos using 100 percent native Appalachian hardwoods.” Aside from more common woods like maple, walnut and cherry, Pisgah also uses persimmon in its instruments. You won’t find ebony on the company’s fingerboards and headstock overlays. Instead persimmon and Richlite are used. Richlite is an eco-friendly paper-based composite material that has the look of ebony or rosewood and is far more sustainable. Sustainability is at the heart of Sawyer’s business plan. In addition to using local materials, the Pisgah Banjo workshop is entirely solar-powered. Sawyer studied renewable energy in college, and...