Gourd Banjo

 Gourd  banjos are where it all begins. If you like an older style fretless  banjo, then this is your choice. The volume is comparable to the  minstrel banjo, but the gourd banjos have a deeper, more resonant or  mellow tone. From the 17th century on, reports from the slave routes  spanning theWest African coast to the Caribbean islands, we have  references to folk instruments resembling the gourd banjo. In 1689 Sir  Hans Sloane, a physician who thoroughly documented Jamaica's music,  noted that the island's Africans have "strum-strums... several sorts of  instruments in imitation of lutes, made of small boards fitted with  necks, strung with horse hairs or the peeled stocks of climbing Plants  or Withs." These he said, "are sometimes made of hollow'd Timber covered  with Parchment or other Skin wetted, having a bow for its neck, the  strings ty'd longer or shorter as they would alter their sounds." Such a  "strum-strum" was likely the same as what Adrian Dessalles describes in  his Histoire Genérales des Antilles (1678), called the "Banza," to  which the slaves on Martinique "danced in their own style". (Translated  and cited in Dena J. Epstein, "The Folk Banjo"). 

I am retiring to Arizona and giving up my shop. I will no longer be making banjos.