Long-Neck Strings

Last summer I went to get my banjo fixed by a guy in Wingham named Ernie King. Not Ernie King the store, in downtown Wingham, but Ernie King the guy. He's retired but he does some fixing for friends of the Blyth Festival and friends of folk musicians like Anne Lederman, and I'm both. I can't remember what the problem was. Oh yeah, I remember:
There's a scene in The Outdoor Donnellys where I'm narrating while running in the dark on that vast outdoor stage. We're coming up on the climactic scene and I'm introducing the primary villain with requisite energy and gravitas: My job is to run across the stage, leap up onto a little bench and pretend to be a stagecoach driver (for the primary villain) all the while narrating and holding the banjo and preparing to come in on time for a music cue. So. Usually the thing I had to watch out for was not hitting the primary villain (played by Brendan Wall, holding a guitar - a primary villain holding a guitar! it's inspired) in the head with the peghead of my slightly unweildy Deering long-neck. But one night I missed the lip of the bench as I jumped and it tumbled over and I sort of crashed onto my knees. I was trying to hold the banjo aloft but, as it turns out, the tailpiece whanged into the upturned bench and got bent all out of shape. I could not play it when the music cue came.
(And yes, I know that's no way to treat a banjo. I wish I was Uncle Dave Macon, what do you want? I wish I could toss it up in the air and twirl it, but the best I can do is 'running with banjo.' )

So I drove out to Ernie's the next day, and he bent my tailpiece back into shape, speculating all the while as to why Deering would put such a paltry tailpiece on one of their signature banjos. He recommended a Kershner, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. He said to me, "You know you've got the wrong strings on that banjo." I said, but they're D'Addario, Medium gauge. He said, "Well they're the wrong strings. You've got to get yourself a set of long-neck strings."

And then he showed me an item in an old catalogue for Vega long-neck strings. As far as I can tell, they don't make them anymore, and when I later asked about 'long-neck strings' at the 12th Fret, they told me there was no such thing and that the long-neck banjo took the same type of string as every other type of five-string banjo.

Well, today I cleaned and polished my banjo and finally, a year later, put on a set of long-neck strings, found individually at outlets all over this drizzly city. It sounded all jangly when I tried to play it after, and I felt some regret for wasting my time, but I think it was just adjusting to the new tension, esp since it had spent some time without any strings at all while I biked to that secret den of banjo-lovers, Heinl (to see if they had a Kershner tailpiece along with all these special strings, which alas they did not. They had the strings but not the tailpiece, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.)

Tonight I picked it up to play it again and it sounded like a concert grand, even with the shoddy tailpiece. But I'm not here to talk about the tailpiece.
The gauges are as follows: .010, .013, .018, .026, .010.
Thank you Ernie King.


PS yesterday you wouldn't have been imagining things if you saw a pic of the mouse hitting the cat with a banjo instead of a brick. It was removed from my site. I s'pose its maker felt I had no right to steal his image, though I do wonder how he himself managed to secure the rights to alter Herriman's. Of course maybe that's why he did it. Perhaps he didn't want his brilliant but illegal pastiche to get around.