In spring of 1963, I had retreated to the elevator corridor in my dorm to practice on my Sears Roebuck banjo, because the abuse from my dorm mates had gotten unbearable.
Only one guy in my suite wanted to study, but it seemed everyone in the suite below was unaware of the folk revival, and banged on the on the radiator pipes with a Stilson wrench at first twang. After the prolonged banging, they would shout “Shut up, up there, you idiot,” then would bang again, to state with unintended irony, “folks… are trying up study down here.”
So I resorted to the sonic safety of the elevator corridor. One day I was twanging out “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine,” when a blonde kid with a New York accent stopped to listen, then got in the elevator and returned with a Goya guitar. We had about the same degree of ineptitude, so we played often in that corridor.
“Grit, you ought to get rid of that piece of Silvertone junk,” he said one day.
“Why don’t you buy a Martin guitar, Yank?”
Yank looked hurt, for in the days of folk craziness, his nylon string Goya was as desirable as a D-28. And all kinds of banjos were in vogue, too — as long as they were old and had five strings. But there was a prejudice against four-stringers of any age.
If you were a picker from the flats of North Carolina you knew Earl Scruggs played a Gibson five-string; if you were one from the mountains — and made banjo drums to match the size of your groundhog hide — you still played the five-string.
At our last hallway performance before spring break, Yank said, “There’s an old banjo back home in New York that my grandfather had. I’m going to bring it back and give it to you.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Nobody can play it, back home.”
I was outside the dorm playing the day after we got back on campus, when Yank brought it for me to see. I didn’t expect Yank to bring back much of a banjo.
“I haven’t even opened it,” he said setting down the nicest banjo case I had ever seen.
When he opened the case, I saw a banjo neck with ebony peg head veneer, inlaid with the word “Gibson” in script mother of pearl, a lot of pearl decoration, and a cover to indicate that it had a truss rod to keep the neck from ever warping. I could not believe he had brought such a wonderful banjo … until I looked down farther to see it had no … fifth … string.
“This ain’t nothing but a tenor,” I said and backed away without touching it. “We can’t use this.”
“Maybe we can trade it for a real five string,” Yank said as he closed the case.
So, a few days later, we rode out to see Honest Murph, the Banjo Trader at his small frame house on the edge of town. Murph brought out a five-string banjo, with a plain brown fingerboard, and no case.
When we showed him the instrument we brought for a trade, he remained poker-faced as he unsnapped its latches.
“A four-string,” he said, without expression, as he glimpsed the word “Gibson.”
Now if I had placed those two banjos side by side, and had discarded my prejudice against four-strings, I would have easily seen the banjo Murph offered was cheap, and the one we brought to trade was not. The banjo he had for sale had no binding on it at all, no inlay except for dots in the fingerboard, no truss rod to protect the neck, no back, and no case. The only thing the no-name had was the requisite fifth string.
If I had looked, I would have seen that the four-string Gibson had binding on the neck, pearl inlay on the fingerboard, and the word “MASTERTONE” near the spot where the neck met the drum. There were two white-black-white concentric rings inlaid into its back.
Murph walked quickly away from the Mastertone.
“That four-string is not much use to you,” he said.
“So how will you trade?” I asked.
Murph rubbed the spot where his beard was supposed to be. “I think I can offer you this Ludwig….”
“What’s a Ludwig?” Yank asked. “Didn’t they make drums? “
“Of course,” smiled Murph, “but they made banjos too — fancy ones.” He pointed out the brass escutcheons which decorated the sides of the rim.
“If you trade me your four-string — and the case,” he continued. “Give me 75 bucks, and the five-string is yours.”
“What do you think?” I asked Yank.
“It’s a five-string,” he said. “That‘s a four-string, go for it.”
I reached in my billfold for the $65 and added $10 from my lunch money to pay the trader.
Yank and I played happily until graduation intervened and the Elevator Boys went their separate ways. But over the years I came to realize that Murph had pulled some wool over our eyes, but I never knew exactly how much geetus he took from our pockets until last week, when I called a banjo trader and builder that I have known and trusted for 30 years to get more information.
“Hey Bill, what you up to?
“I’m in a tree,” he said.
I laughed.
“A tree stand,” he chuckled.
“Oh.” I said. “I got a banjo question for you.”
So I told him the story, and asked him what that four-string Gibson Mastertone would have been worth in 1964.
“That Mastertone comes from the era of the very finest Gibson banjos,” he said. “In good condition, and in the original case, I would say about $1,200.”
‘Wow,“ I said, then paused before I asked, “ What would it be worth today?”
”Between seventy-five and a hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “Retail.”
“So I got took.”
“You could say that,” he agreed.
“I thanked Bill, then left him to his outdoor pursuits, and began to count the cost: that if Murph had paid me half what he could have sold that Gibson for, at fifteen hours per week, that $600 would have been worth more than three semester’s wages to me. Not to mention the value it would have attained today.
When I see those two banjos in my memory, I realize that my mind was fogged by a lie; for I believed that every four-string banjo was worthless, and every five-string banjo worthy, and so I gave away a $1,200 instrument for a $75 dollar one, then paid Honest Murph $75 to boot.
I believed a lie, falling victim to the error of the present age, and paid dearly for the privilege. I hope not to be forced to learn that lesson again. If I ever run into Yank again, I’ll tell him what I learned.