THE BODKINS BOY'S BANJO
Every family has a host of stories waiting to be told.
An older lady came to me years ago with sheaf of handwritten family-type essays. Her daughter knew I had marketed a few such items in the past and asked that I discuss “writing” with her mother to encourage her to spend more time writing. I did so, and after typing them and editing some a bit, tried several publishers of such material but to no avail. She was pleased when we finally arranged for her stories to be published in her home town newspaper where she actually grew up, for which she was paid two dollars per story. Someday, someone will gather them from those pages and put them
in booklet form to sell to guests at the area's rather posh hotels as folklore.
One story stays with me, because it has to do with music, I suppose. She had a brother named Bud. Just “Bud”, too, and occasionally called “Buddy.” He liked country music.
The family had a cat, which is not unusual, but this was an exceptionally large, yellow cat. It stayed around the barn most of the time and the children knew of it's being better than the house-centered adults. One day the little girl missed seeing “Old Yellar” and , in time, wondering what had become of him she found her brother scraping yellow fur from a large pelt nailed to the back, sunny side of one of the numerous sheds on the place. Buddy Bodkin wanted a banjo and he had set about making himself one. His sister told me how he went about it.
He made two large hoops by wetting small branches,wrpped hem arund a keg He nailed them tight and when they had dried and he carved them thin until they looked like over-sized embroidery hoops such as those used to cross-stitch designs on pillow cases and tablecloths. One, you see, had to be slightly larger than the other, mind you, so when Bud wet them and the cat pelt again, actually soaked them for a while, he could then put the small circle down flat, lay the cat skin across it and then pound the larger ring over the smaller one and thus stretch the the skin to drum-like tautness. When it dried slowly, weighed down with bricks and stones to keep it level even to make it look a banjo drum had to be. Later, I'm told, he added a sturdy oak strip from the inside bottom edge and through the upper edge to a point well up into the neck almost to the fifth peg. That gave this five-stringer extra strength to keep it from bowing up from pressure of the tight strings.
I don't recall any mention of any “Old Yellar” cat gut strings, so I suppose he managed to buy a set of strings for it in time or, more than likely, he traded something for a used set from someone. Anyway, Bud Bodkin played that home-made banjo for the to his life. Self taught, and it took him no time at all to learn to play. He and his sister used to sing at family get-togethers, church doings, picnics and the like and he played dances all over the countryside with other musicians. By that time, his sister, who told me this and other stories, had married and moved away from the area.
Today, I know skilled artisans who actually fashion unique guitars, mandolins, fiddles, banjos and other such instruments, but they do it in a much grander fashion. Bud had little or nothing to work with but he had a desire to want to do such creative things. Yet, he made a life of enjoyment for himself and a multitude of people who heard Bud Bodkin's home-made banjo being picked so skillfully driven by impulses from the inmost heart and soul of a boy who came to be a man with self-sustained music as his lifeblood.
A.L.M. December 3, 2002 [c674wds]
