The Glory-Beaming Banjo

The 191-year-old Peninsula, Ohio, provided the backdrop to a parade of pedestrians making their way from station to station across the bucolic village for Music on the Porches on Saturday. Doug Unger (left) and Mark Ward playing tunes. Inside the close confines of Bronson Church , founded in 1835, a master and apprentice presented a free workshop on the art of instrument building. That master being the renowned banjo builder and artist Doug Unger and his former apprentice Mark Ward. Unger and Ward began the workshop by playing several old-time tunes, discussing their work and the music, and taking questions from the audience. Unger then invited the spectators to step up to the front to see the instruments.

Smakula Fretted Instruments has one of those websites that makes a vintage banjo enthusiast drool from both corners of his mouth. Proprietor Bob Smakula buys, sells and repairs instruments, with a focus on banjos, fiddles, guitars and mandolins. He started his business in 1989, when he moved to Elkins, W.Va., from Cleveland, where he worked with his father, the late Peter Smakula , at Goose Acres. It was his father who introduced him to the banjo and helped spawn his interest in old-time music. “My father was a respectable banjo player and played both old-time styles and bluegrass,” he says. “After a long day of work for a major corporation, he would come home and play banjo for at least an hour before dinner. Always hearing banjo music while growing up kept my interest. When I was about 10, I had my dad show me basic clawhammer rhythm on the banjo.” However, a lack of attention span caused a bit of a delay in applying those banjo lessons until the age of 15. That summer, in 1974,...