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No, I did not buy a banjo on eBay this weekend…

I bought two banjos on eBay this weekend. This one – the first one arrived today.

Pretty little thing. Not much wrong with it. Mostly cleanup and a new head (yeah, I’m going goatskin shopping!).

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before — Britain is the Land of Goofy Banjos. Banjo was the first musical fad to cross the Atlantic and it caught on like wildfire here — first with minstrel shows (nobody likes to talk about these now, on either side of the Atlantic), morphing into a peculiarly British style known as Classic (not classical) Banjo. It was a black-tie-and-tails sort of thing and featured some of the weirdest banjo designs ever.

For the eighty or so years that ‘jo was all the rage, they were manufactured in attics and backroom workshops to some very peculiar designs. Many of them were not terribly well made, and many of the designs were impractical, so all kinds of wonderful instruments can be had for not much money. Many of them falling to bits.

This one is pretty orthodox, with a lovely (if thin) scrap of ebony fingerboard. A project for the approaching cold Winter nights.

Say, do any of you have any favorite site scraping software? I like to keep the original eBay listings for stuff I buy, and it’s a tedium downloading all the pictures and bits manually. I’d love to have a piece of kit that just sucked it all down for me in one go.

October 12, 2016 — 9:12 pm
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