By Fred Sokolow

GTS Skin Head I got my first banjo around 1960 when I was in junior high school, as they used to call it. I had a trio that played in the style of the Kingston Trio, the Limeliter and the Weavers, so I wanted a long-neck Vega like they all had. Couldn't afford it, so I got a Vega Folk Ranger instead. Naturally, it had a plastic head. Most new banjos did by the late 50s, as Remo (who also made heads for drums) came out with a mylar head in 1952 and advertised that it did away with all the fussing associated with skin heads. Skin heads, they said, respond to weather; they shrink and tighten up in dry, hot climate, and can even break if not loosened up. In wet weather they can loosen up and then the banjo loses its crisp, bright sound. But I never made a choice, it was just that new banjos came with mylar heads, you only saw skin heads on older, usually open-backed banjos like Stewarts that were often from the last century!

After I had been playing my banjo for about a year, I discovered bluegrass and Earl. I studied the picking of Ralph Stanley, Don Reno, Eddie Adcock and Alan Shelton too, but Earl was my God. I tried to play Earl's songs exactly as he played them, and my basic approach, when playing a song Earl never played, was to think: "How would Earl have approached this?" I heard that Earl had switched to a mylar head sometime in the 50s for the reasons just mentioned. However, he was still playing with a skin head on the classic Mercury recordings, including the original Foggy Mt. Breakdown, Pike County Breakdown, Farewell Blues, lots of my favorites, the tunes on which I cut my teeth, as they say. So, decades later, when I saw that someone was marketing goatskin banjo heads, I was interested.

That was about two years ago, and I was at the NAMM show in Orange County (right next to Disneyland), where music manufacturers show their wares. It's an amazing spectacle, and it's a cacophony because people are trying out everything in these cavernous rooms: electric guitars, drums, horns, synthesizers, keyboards. Thankfully, many of the acoustic instrument makers are in a downstairs room that's relatively quiet. I made a point of visiting Gold Tone because I had bought their economy-size (and price) banjo for my youngest son to start learning on, and because one of my students, Elijah Dittersdorf, had gotten together with Wayne at Gold Tone to design an electric banjo. Elijah is not your typical banjo player as he sports a Mohawk (sometimes green) and lots of piercings and tattoos. He performs with a banjo, playing rock, as well as Cripple Creek and Cumberland Gap. I wanted to see what Elijah and Wayne had come up with.

And I left with one of their goatskin banjo heads. Wayne saw me examining it and said "I'll give you one of these GTS heads if you promise to try it out." It sat on my shelf for a year since I was nervous about putting it on (I'm not real handy with stuff like that). As The next NAMM show loomed, I realized I couldn't face Wayne unless I had tried out that banjo head, so I got one of Southern California's best luthier/repair people to put it on my Stelling. That would be Larry Brown, who can build great instruments from scratch, as well as repair them. Larry is also a banjo picker, and he was interested in the head for his own banjo.

It took him way less time than he anticipated to put on the head, and Larry said it looked and sounded great. "Less time" because Larry thought he'd have to soak the hide in a bathtub for a few days and roll it into a fleshoop (aluminum rim). This has been the way you put on a skin head for the last hundred years, but the GTS heads are prestretched and have a crown. They're ready to put on, pretty much like a plastic head. The installation instructions that come with the head say "One crown size fits all, as simply wetting and stretching the head will increase crown size. It is pre-stretched, treated, and stays tensioned much better than a normal skin head."

Larry thought that head really opened up my banjo, and warmed it up, too. He wanted me to compensate him by getting him a skin head. "And get one for John too!" That's our mutual friend, John Schlocker, an excellent local picker. He heard and saw my banjo with the skin head at Larry's repair shop.

I know I sound like a commercial, but my Stelling sounds and looks great with the GTS head, warmer than before but still bright, so I'm sold. Larry's got one on his Mastertone. I realize the lack of weather in Southern California doesn't put my head to the test it might get elsewhere, but I have played it in Las Vegas and Sacramento, and on rainy days, for what that's worth, with no problem.

The Skin Head Story

A little research reveals that skin heads on musical instruments have been around for at least 4,500 years, going back to ancient Egypt, where animal hides were stretched over gourds and held in place with nails. If you try to trace the banjo back, some say it started in Africa and the Far and Middle East, where there were instruments that resembled drums with strings stretched over them. These instruments spread to Europe when the Ottomans conquered the Balkans, and when the Arabs conquered Spain. We know for sure that African slaves made banjos in the American colonies as soon as they were brought here. They were variously named the banjar, banshaw, banjil, banza, bangoe and bangie. As early as 1678 slaves in Martinique were seen playng the banza. Here's a famous quote from Thomas Jefferson, writing about the slaves in 1781: "The instrument proper to them is the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa."

The early banjo heads, often called vellums, were made of hides from cats, possums, raccoons, sheep, foxes, even snakes. These were tacked with copper nails over a calabash gourd with the top third of the gourd cut off, or a wooden box. Or, how about a turtle shell with a groundhog hide? To paraphrase a former employer of mine, Jim Stafford, "Early banjos were invented out of love and hate: a love for music and a hate for cats." Later, hides were stretched over a hickory hoop. Sometime around 1865-1890 banjo makers started developing tensioning screws, eventually settling on the drum-like system with hooked brackets that we enjoy today. Calfskin eventually became the standard for banjo heads. It appears, by the way, that the early African-style banjos had drone strings (the fifth string), like the banjo we know and love. Also, clawhammer or frailing is probably an African tradition, as revealed many years ago in an article I read in BNL.

Speaking of animal hides stretched over gourds, and drone strings, the Indian instrument known as the sarod has boh of these. I first heard the sarod played by master musician Ali Akbar Khan, from whom my friend Jody Stecher, amazing bluegrass and old-time musician, took many classes. The sarod has a goatskin head. Its ancestor seems to be the Afghan rabab, a wooden Central Asian lute, covered with skin. Here's what Amjad Ali Khan, master sarod player says about the skin: "The skin makes the sound human-it's not wooden. It has flexibility, sensitivity and depth." Sarod makers get their hide from Calcutta, a place I would avoid if I were a goat.

Then there's the Shamisen, which looks like a long-necked, three-stringed banjo with hide from cats (the front) and dogs (the back). It has been popular in Japanese music since the 16th century, but probably goes back thousands of years in China.

There's a lot to be said about why a skin head is preferable to plastic, and some of the prose on the subject gets pretty flowery: "Skin heads are the only part of the banjo that can "open up." Just like in fine guitars or the violin family instruments, which have the fine carved woods that open up after playing a while. Banjos are made of mostly non-organic materials. Skin is a living, breathing membrane filled with life just waiting to come out. The more you play, the more you feel the relationship to the instrument." (---Tyler Jackson)

"Let's look at the "vibration diagram"… pick-string-bridge-head-resonator and then out the flange. If you had a piece of plywood instead of skin it would just reflect the sound out and rob vibration of the banjo, then the whole chain gets out of link! The skin… takes in all the vibration and gives just slightly." (Tyler again)

"I have been fighting plastic drum heads for many years. I would say the same about banjos. They sound better with calfskin heads. All drums do. And the banjo is just about my favorite drum. We have concentrated for too long on attack. We must turn our interests back to tone. The attack is the least interesting part of the sound of the drum. The tone and the overtones are most crucial elements in the alchemy of music." (---T-Bone Burnett)

And finally, these more down-to-earth words from Wayne at Gold Tone: "People are constantly adjusting, modifying, and replacing parts on banjos to get their desired tone… Very little is mentioned about changing heads… I compare a banjo head to the sound board of a guitar… a very important tone producing part. Earl Scruggs's recordings were done on skin… and many players search for that tone but don't even consider the head!"

In the end, I think the convenience of Mylar is far outweighed by the sound and look of the skin head. It's kind of humbling to realize that instrument makers have had thousands of years to choose, develop and refine the use of hide in musical instruments, it's not just something people came up with for convenience a century ago. If course the proof is in the listening and playing.

Just as a parting shot, I love this quote from aforementioned sarod master Amjad Ali Khan: (Yes, I replaced the word "sarod" with "banjo." Also note that Amjad Ali Khan says he's more a slave of the instrument than a master.)

"The banjo should have human expressions. The banjo should sing, should yell, laugh, cry-all the emotions. Music has no religion in the same way flowers have no religion. Through music---and through this instrument-I feel connected with every religion and every human being-or every soul, I should say."

About Fred Sokolow

In the 60s and 70s, Fred Sokolow played bluegrass banjo with Bay Area bluegrass luminaries Jody Stecher, Eric Thompson and Sandy Rothman, and played various and sundry bluegrass gigs with the likes of John Herald, Frank Wakefield and Jerry Garcia. He recorded on Jody Stecher's first three albums on Bay Records, and toured with Jody. In 1978 and '80 he recorded two Kicking Mule banjo albums, "Bluegrass Banjo Inventions" and "Ragtime Bluegrass Banjo," and toured with his own band. He also toured and played banjo and guitar for Bobbie Gentry, Jim Stafford and, a few years later, the Limeliters. More recently, he backs up Tom Paxton whenever he comes to Southern California.

Fred also did a banjo video for Hot Licks and wrote a dozen banjo instruction books. He has done many banjo workshops and seminars up and down the West Coast and has written articles for BNL and BU. He has been the subject of articles in both magazines, including a cover story in BNL. He currently teaches banjo classes at McCabes in Santa Monica. He has taught literally thousands of banjo students. Fred has played banjo on several movie soundtracks and commercials and TV show, and he is the official banjo player for the "Survivor" series. He recorded with Jim Silvers, the world's only rockabilly yodeling auctioneer, played banjo on the Tonight Show, won on the Gong Show, and has played banjo on countless children's albums and videos by artists like Greg & Steve, Dan Crow, Paul Stookey, Uncle Ruthie and many more. Buddy Ebsen danced, onstage, to his version of the "Beverly Hillbillies" theme. Just recently, I finished recording a bluegrass/old-timey CD with his son Zachary, who also plays banjo, and with fiddler/singer Brantley Kearns, longtime playing/singing partner.