G'day all ...

1/ Murray:

I must admit that I am the mouthorgan player that shared a mike (in a very primitive PA ... a six channel mixer for about 9 players ... and the leader kept 2 channels for his concertina!) with Ray Grieve for a few years and clearly turned his mind, sufficiently that he spent years researching ... and years more getting published the definitive book on mouthorgan players in Australia.

Mind you, Ray doesn't even play the dammed instrument!

2/ Banjos in Garbage bins.

My older brother (who, admittedly, already played the banjo ... a 5-stringer without the fifth string, but not supplied that way) found a very nice old English 5-stringer in his garbage bin ... not long before his wife left him.

3/ Really Rare Banjos

a few days after first reading this thread, I looked into a secondhand shop on City Road, Newtown (south of Sydney) where there are often interesting old instruments. Actually I pulled up to investigate the strange object that looked like a completely wooden banjo.

It was! A full wooden body, in rather flashy veneer, ... four strings and an electromagnetic pickup. The sign says that it was a Gibson EPB (Electric Plectrum Banjo) ... one of only 18 ever made. The neck was full 5-stringer length but had no bulge or plugged peg hole - therefore made expressly as a Plectrum Banjo.

An artifact of the meso-banjoic era when the banjo bands evolved into jazz bands (or were eaten buy them ... or some such Darwinian fate)?

Does life copy the Mudcat?

Regards,

Bob Bolton