Bela Fleck and the Flecktones notwithstanding, Timothy was no particular fan of the banjo’s intrusion into jazz. In his view, it was best relegated to jazz’s Cajun cousin, zydeco — which he quite liked, make no mistake. It had (in his view) no place in New Orleans’ jazz palaces like Storyville or Snug Harbor. The first year he played ‘the season,’ from roughly Hallowe’en till the April Heritage Festival, he could ignore fellow buskers, twanging away. But in subsequent years, which were sometimes lean years, it was useful to add the banjo’s strings to your metaphorical bow.
It was probably in 1987 that he picked up a six-string banjo secondhand. A little grudgingly, he then devoted some precious daily practice hours to picking out the standard chords he might be asked to add to some band’s rhythm section. (That’s why it was a six-string version of the instrument. It saved having to learn entirely new fingerings and chord structure.)
Of all the things in Tim’s music closet, I assumed the banjo would be the easiest thing — emotionally speaking — to unload. That was before I remembered the cat stamp.
Tim, you see, styled himself “the cat on guitar.” His business cards, for much of his professional performing life, featured one of B.Kliban‘s most famous cats. I still have it on a coffee mug: a cat wearing shades, strumming a guitar, wailing:
“Love to eat them mousies, mousies’ what I love to eat. Bite they tiny heads off, eat they tiny feet!”
(I believe you can still find stuff featuring this splendid cat from links on the website EatMousies.com.)
I debated keeping it … for about five minutes. And then, remembering that the cat on the banjo is singing “Nyah nyah nyah nahhh!”, I thought Tim’s spirit would be relieved to finally see the back of it. So I took its portrait, balanced on my great grand-dad’s carved oak chair, and put it back in its case. And thence straight into the back of my car, with the books of guitar instruction for young beginners and the collected works of Rodgers & Hammerstein.