Years ago, I took banjo lessons from a woman named Sally, who played her fine old Gibson Mastertone so that you could hear the mountains in it, as smooth as water over stones. When Sally propped on a tailgate and tuned up her banjo in the parking lot of a music festival, a mob would surround her, trying to keep her there playing all night.
I have never played well enough to draw a crowd—unless hummingbirds count. Five minutes after I settle down on the porch with my banjo, hummingbirds find me. They hover nearby, cock their heads like tiny, disapproving critics, and blur their wings. They seem to try and show me Sally's hands—hummingbird rapid and hummingbird light.
I am sure that Sally will be as grateful as I am for the work of Philip Gura. There is no better way to honor a thing than to study it thoroughly, with devotion, and that is what Gura has done. He has assembled, in painstaking detail, the entire pedigree of an instrument long overlooked as the flop-eared mutt of American music. For Gura, banjos are not merely objects for study. He actually plays them, surrounded by his children, handing down what he loves.
The banjo, as Gura reveals it, is an instrument of American individualism—a showpiece for extravagant self-expression, a gadget for mechanical tinkering, and a novelty for showing off. But it is also a sensitive and lyrical companion, native to story and voice. Slaves crafted early banjos out of gourd and catgut, and the instrument retains the character of its origins. It is adept with the haunted harmonics that lie between suffering and joy.
We heard this firsthand on the second day of July, when Doug Trantham and his children, Emily and Adam, came down from the mountains of Haywood County to help us remember Chancellor Michael Hooker. It may have been the first time that the leader of a major university, an institution representing the first rank of culture and learning, had been honored, in memorial, with music from a homespun string band—dulcimer, banjo, and guitar. When those angelic children and their father played "Wondrous Love," there were hummingbird wings in our hearts.
We dedicate this issue of Endeavors to Michael Hooker, philosopher, educator, and passionate servant of North Carolina, who also handed down what he loved.