Photograph by Dustin Lucas
The St. Louis Jazz Club is having a picnic at the Concord Farmers Club. Or it was a picnic—until it rained. The beer taps are indoors anyhow, and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” are echoing from the dance hall.
“This is our loosening-up number,” St. Louis Banjo Club president Don Kincaid announces from the stage as he picks out the song’s final flourishes. “But I think that’s about as loose as we’re gonna get.”
The crowd itself has yet to loosen up, with the dance floor bare except for little girls in socked feet and pairs of women in their seventies and eighties dancing together because their husbands have refused to leave their chairs or abandon their beers. Several songs later, after those beers and a few more besides have been downed, they join their wives on the parquet for—what? A polka! In fact, “Roll Out the Barrel.”
“Jazz players don’t like to play polkas, but we try to play everything,” says Banjo Club musical director Bobby Grimm. Grimm is a veteran of the riverboats and Gaslight Square clubs like Your Father’s Mustache; he was there when the Banjo Club was formed in October 1969, when fellow banjo player Dan Bolt convinced Eddie “The Banjo King” Peabody to stop by The Banjo Palace on Tucker after his concert at Kiel Opera House (the two men had served together in the Navy). There were 30 banjo players waiting for Peabody, with instructions to launch into “Anchors Aweigh” when he walked through the door. They were too intimidated to pluck a string—till the King himself sat down and played. A month later, the same group met at a Shakey’s Pizza at Watson and Rock Hill for the club’s first official meeting. Meetings bounced from Slay’s Bar to the Idle-a-While Hall on Virginia Avenue to Uncle Joe’s Tavern at Taft and Louisiana, finally landing at the Concordia Turner Hall in 1972, where they meet to this day.
For gigs like the Jazz Club picnic, the club will dispatch old pros like Grimm, or treasurer Larry Dodd, who spent a year playing banjo down in New Orleans; they break up the songs like a chamber orchestra piece, with each player taking a section—lead, harmony, rhythm—on the basis of the type of banjo he plays and how he tunes it (Dodd uses “Chicago tuning,” which means he tunes his banjo like a guitar). It’s important to note, too, that these are four-string jazz banjos, not the five-strings used in bluegrass, so you won’t hear them breaking down “Rocky Top, Tennessee.” Though they deviate into polka or modern tunes like Banu Gibson’s “Radio,” the core is Tin Pan Alley and Dixieland, with members specializing more or less in one direction for spinoff groups like The Last Generation, When Pigs Fly, The Bob and Mary Ann Duo, The Banjo Cats, and The Dixie Banjos.
Though the club holds St. Louis’ best banjo players within its ranks, the Thursday jams at Concordia are democratic. “We project the words on the wall so everyone can sing along,” explains Kincaid. “It’s like the old Shakey’s Pizza Parlors.” And any dues-paying member with a banjo can sit in and play. (The night we were there, an audience member had even brought a harmonica and was honking along to “Mississippi Mud” and “Meet Me in St. Louis.”) The average audience member is about 70, while the club members range in age from 40 to 97, including 92-year-old Marion Bolt, Dan Bolt’s widow, who picked up her husband’s banjo and learned to play at 74, and Ida Mae Schmich, 93, who’s also a mean bones player. (Don Dempsey, who assembles the club’s newsletter, jokes that he took up the banjo at retirement because banjo players never die.)
“You can’t play a banjo and be sad,” Dodd observes, “but kids just don’t get into it nowadays.”
They did in the ’50s and ’60s, until electric guitars drowned them out: Clubs like Shakey’s, The Red Garter, and Your Father’s Mustache, meant to evoke the romance of the Gay Nineties and the Jazz Age, were so popular, lines formed around the block. As late as 1973, Shakey’s employed as many as 30 banjo players over a weekend, and Banjo Palace downtown was so popular people would leave ballgames early to get a table (and sometimes, later on in the night, would even dance on top of it).
To that end, the Banjo Club realizes that its mission has changed: Banjo players may live an awfully long time, but that’s not quite forever. To preserve the instrument and the music, member Ginny Luetje—who, by the by, also answers to “Banjo Ginny”—formed the St. Louis BandJos Youth Band in 2008, the first children’s banjo band in St. Louis since the 1930s. Dempsey’s also a part of that effort, meeting with the group at 4 p.m. on Thursdays—then heading straight to Concordia. “My wife knows she can never plan anything on Thursday,” Dempsey chuckles. They’re hoping these kids will discover the same thing that Marion Bolt discovered at 74: “It’s an itch you can’t scratch,” she laughs. “Banjo players just love to play.”
The St. Louis Banjo Club’s latest CD is Songs Remembered. They meet at the Concordia Turner Hall, 6432 Gravois, every second and last Thursday at 8 p.m. This month, in honor of their 40th anniversary, master banjo player Jack Convery plays on Thursday, November 5; call 314-842-3185, or visit stlouisbanjoclub.org for details. For more info on the St. Louis BandJos, contact Ginny Luetje at 314-822-9649, or email gluetje1@aol.com.
To see footage of the St. Louis Banjo Club jamming live at Concordia (including Ida Mae Schmich playing the bones), click here or here.
