Pre-Banjo Years
Music and playing music came fairly early in my life, but not on the banjo.
I vaguely remember taking a year of piano lessons in third grade and choking badly on my year-end recital performance of the “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” One good result of this early piano instruction was learning to read music (which I highly recommend to anyone interested in playing virtually any musical instrument or singing). I guess my parents thought I should have piano lessons since my brother Tony (his name was actually Alexander after my father) and my sister Pat both had taken years of lessons from a wonderful French Canadian concert pianist, Romeo Arsenault. He would travel by ferry and N. J. Central every two weeks to our house in Westfield from his home in Manhattan to give my brother and sister lessons, stick around for dinner, and then be taken down to the train station for his trip back into the City.
For 10 summers, from 1957 to 1966, my parents treated me to eight weeks at a really great summer camp in New Hampshire. I remember distinctly during the summer of 1960 I would pass a cabin on the way to the dining hall for dinner and would hear an absolutely wonderful sound coming from inside. I really loved it. It was a fellow, but older, camper playing what I learned later was a B&D #1 Silver Bell plectrum that had belonged to his grandfather. I don’t remember him pla
