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By John Saroyan My first summer working at the Lair of the Bear family camp, I noticed that all the cool guys played guitar. People listened to them. People sang with them. But, at the end of the summer, when I told my mom I wanted to play guitar too, she said, "They have enough guitar players. You should learn the banjo instead." And so it began. In January 1991, six months before camp would begin again, I bought my first banjo: a five-string, open-back, calf-skin-head Kay banjo for $180 and the price of a parking ticket for my expired meter. I had no idea what to do with it. I figured I would learn bluegrass banjo--at least I had heard of that. Unfortunately, my bluegrass banjo teacher always ate heavily garlicked food and reeked of cigarettes. Soon after I stopped my bluegrass lessons, I found a soft-spoken and kind old-time banjo teacher in San Francisco. Old-time banjo picking is also known as a clawhammer or frailing. I told him that I had to be able to play Comin' 'Round the Mountain, Mountain Dew, Tom Dooley, and The MTA Song, perennial favorites around the Lair campfire. He promised I would be able to learn them all, well before it was time to return to the Lair. In the beginning, singing and playing at the same time was out of the question. I spent endless evenings practicing, and rewarded myself by culling through the folk sections of used record stores on Telegraph Avenue looking for a Pete Seeger or Kingston Trio record for less than five dollars. Those recordings are fantastic. The sound of the banjo is clear, bright, and plunky. It has been called "that half-barbaric twang," but I was captivated. In June, I returned to the Lair in my family's 1971 Volvo station wagon, with a trunk full of clothes and my banjo. Almost immediately, I spoke with Mike Baker, an accomplished guitar player, and told him the few chords I knew. He thought for a moment and then said, "We can play I've Just Seen a Face, by Lennon and McCartney." And so, perhaps for the first time ever, a classic Beatles tune was accompanied with only guitar and clawhammer banjo. The campers really took a liking to my banjo (even though I wasn't playing the more familiar three-finger bluegrass style that many of them expected).
The sheer presence of the banjo put campers in the mood for the Hootenanny, the traditional Lair Thursday night sing-along. One of the greatest compliments I ever received was when someone called my playing "filled with nostalgia." By 1993, my fourth summer working at the Lair, I had finally worked my way up to music director. To add to the considerable musical talent of my fellow staffers, each week's campers, both adults and children, arrived with guitars, fiddles, mandolins, banjos, jaw harps, harmonicas, and their voices. The Pete Seeger and Kingston Trio albums paid off. I had learned songs that many campers had not sung or played since their college days. As a pre-med student at Cal, every year I wrestled with my choice to return to the Lair rather than bolstering my extracurricular activities with research work in a campus laboratory. Were my accomplishments in leading Kiddie Campfire sing-alongs and organizing Hootenannies really the best preparation for medical school? Little did I know that at the end of my interview at Tulane Medical School, the dean of admissions would ask, "Did you say that you play banjo? Clawhammer or bluegrass?" I was dumbstruck. I mailed him a couple of tapes I had recorded, and three months later he mailed me a letter accepting me into Tulane. My banjo playing flourished in New Orleans. I was the first Tulane medical student to play at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, I produced a CD, and during vacations I drove all over the Southeast to listen to and play with musicians who were raised on old-time music. Now, as a pediatrician working with gravely ill children, I still occasionally pick up my banjo, tune it, and sing many of those hits of the Lair of the Bear Kiddie Campfire. I'm sure I couldn't pass any of the exams in general chemistry, physics, botany, or biochemistry if I were asked to take them right now. But I do remember the words to I'll Be Working on the Railroad, Skip to My Lou, and This Land is Your Land. |
We invite alumni to write about their Cal experiences for “Recalling Cal,” California Monthly, Alumni House, Berkeley 94720. Contributors will be paid $100 upon publication.
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