PRINTBuild-a-banjo
Local artisan shares his homemade hobby
Photo: Joon Hyoung Kim
In the past three years, Andy Smith has built about 10 banjos by hand. Using his engineer father as a sounding board for technique, Smith experiments with different materials that produce twangy sounds. Occasionally, he even turns requests from friends into custom gifts.
April 30, 2009 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Andy Smith’s fingers pluck the classic folk tune “Sally in the Garden” as sound reverberates from the belly of a gourd and drowns out three barking dogs in a closed back room.
Entangled in the Appalachian roots of northern Ohio, Smith, 24, was born with music in his blood. “Andy liked music always,” says his guitar-playing mother, Karen Smith. “He had this little Mickey Mouse tape player he would listen to every night before he fell asleep.” At age 5, he began classical violin training and eventually picked up the fiddle, guitar and mandolin. Smith would wander through the house playing music all the time. “That was one of the saddest things for me when he moved out for college,” Karen says. “It felt like somebody took the music away.”
As an undergrad at Kent State University, Smith first encountered handcrafted banjos at a folk festival in Ohio, but it was a desire to play and his dad’s engineering skills that propelled him into banjo production. “He had a good knowledge of how the tradition worked with building and what kind of designs to do,” Smith says of his father. Together, they would read from The Foxfire Book, a compilation of material from a 1960s magazine that teaches crafts from the Appalachian region.
Thomas Verdot, a local who’s made a career of making and repairing instruments, also tried learning the craft from books alone. “It’s like trying to learn how to bat a baseball blind,” Verdot says. “At some point, I decided to go back to school to learn from somebody else.” But so far, Smith is sticking with the books.
At home, in a dusty basement workshop, Smith builds banjos by hand atop a small table with a pocketknife, coping saw and file. He uses fallen branches and wood from local hardware stores and lumberyards to craft the neck and body. Goat or calf hide from a banjo supply catalog then is fastened tightly over the frame of the banjo. Smith has dabbled with a handful of styles.
The first kind he ever made was a block-rim banjo, which involves gluing together solid chunks of wood into a circle. The day he put the finishing touches on his prized banjo, a friend accidentally launched a pocketknife and, to Smith’s horror, punctured the freshly stretched animal hide. Luckily, Smith ended up repairing the blunder, and the banjo sounds as good as ever.
Gourd banjos are the speediest to make. “Gourds are more forgiving,” Smith explains. “There’s not a whole lot of woodworking involved, so it’s easier.” After failed attempts at growing large squash in his backyard, Smith has resorted to choosing ones the size of soccer balls — which produce a louder sound — from the farmers’ market.
The latest project: a bent-rim banjo. A thin strip of wood soaks in water for a week until it is pliable enough to bend into a circle — a tricky feat because the wood cracks easily.
Smith has covered a living room wall with banjos, fiddles and guitars. A hemp strap dangles from one banjo; twisted violet yarn hangs from another. Some have four strings for a sharper Celtic/Dixieland jazz sound. Others have five for bluegrass. There’s even a mounted banjo that belonged to Smith’s great-grandfather, who played a lot of Scottish music.
“Andy always had his instruments around, and eventually we just kind of coalesced and played together,” says Doug Underwood, Smith’s guitarist friend. Smith was part of an old-time string band last year, but it never went public. He continues to play casually with friends.
Summer should allow more time for friendly jam sessions with a break from grad school courses. Maybe it’s just Smith’s way of coping with the heat. After all, there’s no finer soundtrack to Missouri humidity than the tin sounds of bluegrass.
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