Traveling Banjos

          This may not

be true – but assume for my sake that
          traveling string bands
usually don’t bother to bring
          a banjo along.
There will always be someone at the venue with a

          banjo to lend.
Old banjos are everywhere, once you start
          to notice them,

resting by couches in old dusty cases, or

          stowed in somebody’s
car trunk and forgotten, teleported from the mists
          of American time.

Wherever it’s hiding, it will hail from

          an indeterminate era –
”probably from the ‘twenties,”

          someone will say.
It might have a real hide head and a ridiculous

          number of brackets.
No two of those old banjos look alike – as if they

          weren’t built to
a template exactly, but just hammered together by
          players and other

hobbyists. Sometimes there’s a label,

          and sometimes not.
When the Foghorn band played the Wild
          Goose Chase Cloggers

weekend, they borrowed a banjo with a peculiar
          tiger-maple neck
and a drum about five inches thick.
          Sammy Lind played
it in the band’s repertoire workshop.
          The Foghorn band
comes from Portland, and whoever owns that
          tiger banjo lives
in Minnesota. But Sammy said that when he
          looked inside he
saw Made in Portland Oregon stamped on
          the head back