Although the Banjo Rehabilitation Center is exclusively a “banjo shop”, our sturdy little CEO sagaciously promotes musical diversity to enrich the artful climate of the workplace. In the attached informal photo, the CEO gently instructs the grandfatherly BRC founder on the modal features of the Mixolydian scale by using the harmonica as a teaching tool. During this back porch tutorial, the CEO points-out that the harmonica (as played by Jimmy Fadden) was seamlessly merged into the Bluegrass ensemble as heard on the ground-breaking double album “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” released a generation ago. Because of his progressive commitment to staff education and respect for history, the CEO quietly reaffirms to all his richly deserved place in the BRC Hall of Fame and Book of Life.
Undaunted by tepid seasonal sales of our official T-shirt line, the BRC support staff is all smiles for the 2011 holiday photo. Our elf-like CEO (right front row in mother’s lap) used this opportunity to help his shop staff to de-stress, refocus, and energize for the coming year by recounting the imperative that the BRC goal is to maintain the banjo at the center of the Bluegrass music tradition- America’s home grown hillbilly jazz. To crystalize this sales strategy, our elfin VP of Sales (back row left in Grandma’a arms) invoked a marketing slogan for 2012:
“It don’t mean a thang,
If it ain’t got that twang.”
In recognition of this stirring and timely marketing catch phrase, our CEO promoted the VP of Sales to Senior Vice-President of Sales, much to everyone’s acclaim.
In this recent article (click to read) in the Wall Street Journal, the essayist wrongly asserts a disconnect between classic novelist Jane Austen and the banjo, and this inaccuracy must be politely rectified. The journalist declares, “The banjo is the musical equivalent of the battle ax: metallic, obvious, lethal and usually wielded by someone who has not read Jane Austen.” In the attached newspaper photo from the Bath Chronicle (September, 2006), the BRC founder appears dressed in seafaring costume at the 2006 Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England. Jane Austen, a musician who played the piano forte daily, was probably familiar with the banjo. In her novel “Mansfield Park,” one of the characters travels to the West Indies, a geographical incubator for banjo culture.
By ordinance in Martinique in 1654 and 1678, more than a century before Jane Austen put pen to paper, it was not permissible for slaves to gather and dance to the music of the “banza.” Although prohibiting the celebration African banjo music, this unfortunate statute is probably the first historical notice documenting the banjo’s original trans-Atlantic arrival in the Americas. The BRC founder and his spouse attended the 2006 Bath Festival dressed as Captain Fredrick Wentworth and Anne Elliot from the beloved Jane Austen novel “Persuasion.”
Our young Vice-President of Sales also generously serves as the walking tour guide of the BRC 5 String Museum as pictured. After answering visitors’ many questions about the permanent banjo collection on display, she closes sotto voce with the comment that the BRC Founder is affectionately known to her as “Grandpa Doc”. As the guests depart, the VP of Sales instructs them that the Board of Directors is planning a BRC Banjo Pickers Hall of Fame annex to the Museum. Nominations are encouraged and should sent to the BRC including a photo of the musician with banjo and accompanied by a brief bio. Self-nominations are welcome.
In the lake behind the BRC workshop, our Research & Development team initiated a pilot study to treat banjo rim-shaped cuttings of local timber with submersion to potentially develop a novel line of hydro-aged lumber. This natural process, known for producing hardened and resonant wood for musical instruments, was expected to potentially cultivate a fertile material resource for future BRC banjos pots and other emerging markets. Modern evidence strongly supports that master violin maker Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) chemically manipulated the woods he used in making his celebrated instruments, but it is unknown whether he submerged the wood in the Po River that runs through Cremona, Italy, where he lived and worked. Unbeknownst to our feckless R&D innovators, their immersion project was situated in the middle of a colony of turtles. Because of the underestimated ecological impact of this feasibility study, the R&D project was abandoned.