PREV: Part 1 - The Boy

In March of 2025, my father passed away while working on a John Deere tractor in the front lawn of his home. Marty and I drove south to help my father’s second wife and her family deal with the estate. Upon arriving, I found the home full of activity. I believe this is in part because my step-family has an unenviable amount of experience with death, and they were doing, once again, the things they knew had to be done. Further, I’m confident they were trying to be helpful to me, who has thankfully little experience in these matters. 

The banjos I feared would be mine to deal with were not. A family friend, the same I would have called for help, had already arrived and was knee deep, literally from his seated position, in stacked instruments, cataloguing the collection to be sold.

I dashed a quick email off to the boy’s father, asking if his son was still playing the banjo or if he had discovered girls yet. No girls. All banjo. I said I may be looking for a home for the boy’s banjo and wanted to see if he was still interested. He was. I explained that it would not be free and that his boy would have to come up with, one way or another, one hundred dollars to buy the instrument. With a smiley emoji, the father replied, saying he was confident the boy could make that happen.

I pulled the select banjo from the line and said I had a buyer for this one. Oh great. Who? A family I met at IBMA a few years back. Excellent. How much are they buying it for? $5,000. A note was made in the ledger tracking the sale of the instruments. I was next asked when I would have the money. Later in the year, after I delivered it. And with that, the banjo’s fate was set.

When I wrote the father and told him his boy was on the clock to raise the hundred. The father said they travel quite a bit from their home in Oregon in support of the boy’s playing and could meet me somewhere closer to my home in Saint Louis. I said that would not be necessary and I would personally deliver it to him because I was going to be in the area later that year. It is true that I was going to be in the Pacific Northwest, but what I held back was that I was going to be there with the sole purpose of delivering the banjo to the boy. 

While sorting the collection of instruments, I learned two more things about the banjo. First, I learned that of all the banjos my dad had, this banjo, labeled #5 on the inventory, was his favorite of them all. He said, and others, including the boy, seemed to agree, that it was one of the finest bluegrass banjos you will ever hear. The second thing I learned is that it was priced high because my father didn’t want to sell it. This insight helps explain my father’s earlier offense at my suggestion that he give banjo #5 to the boy years ealier. 

NEXT: Part 3 - The Gun