My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, bought a ukulele on a whim the other day. She was in Arlington Center, walking past Wood and Strings, and she thought, “I want to buy an instrument”, and went inside to explore her options. First the clerk suggested a mandolin, but SWMBT has some strength issues in her fingers, so that wasn’t a possibility, and then the clerk suggested a banjo, and SWMBT said, “Oh, no. My husband would divorce me.”
Lordy, how I hate the banjo. Most banjos sound terrible, even when played by good musicians, because the banjo is not an instrument that tolerates being manufactured less than expertly; a crappy guitar can be made to sound tolerable, but a crappy banjo sounds like a carnival barker with a very, very bad cold, even if Bela Fleck has strapped it on. And since most people who play the banjo – at least around here – seem to have decided to learn it because they’re bored, it typically does not go well.
My friend Jason Hunt, who decamped back to Nashville in the middle of the pandemic, sent me the lyrics a while back to a song of his called “I Can’t Play the Banjo Worth a Damn”. And I thought, well, Jason, the problem is that that’s true of most people who play the banjo. And since he had inspired me, and had also pointed me to a song which his wife was kind enough to think, momentarily, that I had written, whose music video featured a banjo, I was inspired to write a little country ditty about the instrument in question, whose first verses and chorus I will quote here:
St. Peter looked my name up
Before the Pearly Gate
Knit his brow, stroked his chin, said
“Son, you’ll have to wait
It says here you’ve been sketchy as they come
And the kind of folks you hang with
Well, limbo’s where they’re from
I’ve listened to your music
I’ve heard you play in bars
I’ve heard the scratch and growl
Of your custom-made guitars
It doesn’t sound like any hymn we’ve ever heard
And we’ve read through all your lyrics
Didn’t understand a word
Though there ain’t no skull and crossbones by your name
You’re gonna have to wait in limbo all the same
But Satan’s made an offer
And I implore you, weigh it well
If you can learn to play the banjo
He can get you into Hell”
You get the idea.
In any case, this was the first thing I’d written in a while, back in 2020, and I remain inordinately fond of it. And, of course, after I wrote it, I was bounding around the house, utterly delighted with myself, as is my wont. And I shared it with SWMBT, and it did not meet with what I would judge to be the appropriate amount of enthusiasm, because, it turned out, she likes the banjo.
But instead, she bought a ukulele. Am I the luckiest man in the world, or what?