Word: banjo
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...young pugilists consider themselves conventionally compelled to profess. He makes his home in a Bronx apartment run for him by his sister, often drives to Herkimer for weekends with his mother, hopes to organize the nine D'Ambrosio children into a jazz band in which he will play banjo and clarinet. Last spring, one of his opponents died as the result of cracking his head on the ring floor. Since then, Lou Ambers has attended no prizefights as a witness...
...yielded to brass and reed, chiefly the saxophone. Then touring Hawaiians brought in the cheap, easily played ukulele, the steel guitar with its throbbing, swooping tone which home musicians thought glamorous. By 1928 radio had cut into the field, but, with jazz music at a noisy, amorphous stage, the banjo had a vogue of a sort. Currently the trade claims that home instruments are enjoying an upswing from which the guitar is getting the most benefit. The most respectable member of its family, this soft-toned fretted instrument was admired by many a classical composer, is played privately by Violinist...
Ella Wheeler Wilcox plays the mandolin; Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby and Edsel Ford's son Henry II, the guitar; William Randolph Hearst used to strum a banjo. Not any of these but 1,500 other adepts of fretted instruments gathered last week in Minneapolis for the 35th annual convention of the American Guild of Banjoists, Mandolinists & Guitarists. Convention manager and official host was Chester William Gould, 36, a big, loud-voiced banjoist, organizer of the 50-piece Gould Mandolin Orchestra, which this week was to perform a Mexican Fantasia in costume, and of the champion Go-piece Gould Banjo...
Conventioneers were promised prizes for the largest orchestra, the orchestra which had traveled the greatest distance. Likewise this week there were to be banjo, mandolin, hillbilly, Hawaiian, junior, electro-phonic and popularity contests. To be seen and heard in Minneapolis were the most famed virtuosos of fretted instrumentalism, some of them playing on instruments worth thousands of dollars. Tenor Banjoist Albert Bellson played, for the first time anywhere, Bach's famed Chaconne, which is ordinarily a sombre, magnificent violin showpiece. Rev. Adam F. Hunkler, O.S.B., self-taught Catholic priest, played the five-string finger banjo on the same program...
...tune Oh! Susanna as a national theme song. In the course of six days at Cleveland, bands at the Republican National Convention played Oh! Susanna 1,800 times by official count. Into a class with The Sidewalks of New York and California, Here I Come passed the old banjo ballad written by Stephen Foster nearly 100 years ago and first sung into U. S. tradition by the gold-rushing Forty-Niners...