Me…for 70 years.
Apparently, it started when I was an infant. I’d get on all fours in my crib, rock back and forth, and bang my head against the front panel.
The doctor told Mom this could be a sign of future musical ability and suggested trying an instrument when I got older.
At six, Mom asked, “How would you like to take banjo lessons?”
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t have much else going on. But can I finish Mighty Mouse first?”
Mom and Dad loved Dixieland music from the ’20s and ’30s. She didn’t like guitars, so my musical future had already been decided.
We finally found a banjo in a pawn shop. Even in the mid-’50s, people were hocking them. Today, you can hardly walk into a pawn shop without seeing two or three hanging in the back.
Apparently, plenty of mothers had the same idea.
By ten, Mom had signed me up for weekly half-hour lessons at $2.50 a session. I took the city bus—ten cents—from St. Matthew’s Grade School to Copp Music Center in South Bend.
After three months, it was getting boring. Other kids were listening to the latest ’50s hits. I was trying to perfect “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
My friends had rock ’n’ roll. I had their grandparents’ wedding music.
I wanted to quit.
Mom responded with my first entrepreneurial opportunity: she paid me a penny a minute to practice.
An hour earned me sixty cents. In those days, that bought a lot of Tootsie Rolls.
My musical passion suddenly returned.
I kept playing through grade school talent shows and high school bus trips. Once I learned the school fight song, “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” I had enough material to entertain a captive audience.
And on a bus, they really were captive.
Over the years, I learned a bunch of old Dixieland favorites, played parties, wrote and performed commercials, and composed company songs. One company even hired me to travel around the country entertaining and writing songs for their customers.
Mom’s penny-a-minute investment was paying off.
One of my claims to fame was writing and singing a political fight song for a congressional candidate. He was so impressed that he had me travel throughout the district performing it at rallies.
Then came Election Day.
He lost by the biggest margin in Indiana history.
I don’t put that one on my résumé.
At Notre Dame, I was cited for playing the Notre Dame Victory March across campus after a few too many adult beverages.
School spirit apparently had a volume limit.
In Germany, I got kicked out of the Hofbräuhaus for playing my banjo while the oompah band was on break.
The waitresses—the muscular ones who could carry eight mugs of beer at once—picked me up and carried me outside.
I continued my performance beneath an apartment window.
A woman on the second floor poured a bucket of water on me for waking up her kids.
My first outdoor concert came with a complimentary shower.
I’ve also played at dozens of assisted living facilities and nursing homes. My strongest market has always been the over-sixty crowd.
Unfortunately, my audience keeps dwindling.
And at seventy-five, I’m now part of my own target market.
But my most memorable performance had nothing to do with politics, beer, or buckets of water.
I was playing at a nursing home when I noticed the nurses were crying.
What had I done?
They told me one resident hadn’t communicated in any form for six months.
When I played “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” she started singing.
The song I’d been so bored trying to learn as a kid had reached someone nobody else could reach.
That one stayed with me.
Of course, I don’t always keep things quiet. Sometimes I go into my version of Rod Stewart—jumping around, singing, and leading the crowd through the Hokey Pokey.
After one particularly energetic performance, my sister’s high school friend asked her:
“Has your brother always been like this?”
I took that as a compliment.
After seventy years, I’ve heard every banjo joke there is.
“If you put a banjo and an accordion in a canvas bag and throw it off the Empire State Building, which one breaks first?”
“Who cares?”
Well, my banjo is still intact. It’s taken me across the country, gotten me thrown out of a German beer hall, helped a politician lose spectacularly, and brought a song back to a woman who hadn’t spoken in six months.
It’s been a real fun run.
And I still have a few Tootsie Rolls left.
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