It’s generally accepted, I think, that folk singer Pete Seeger
originated the longneck banjo. I got to wondering a while back how, and why, exactly, he did that. So I contacted Pete and asked him. He very generously answered my questions. I thought I’d share the result.
The longneck Vega banjo became iconic when commercial folk music hit the mainstream in the late 1950s in what some wags refer to as, "The Great Folk Scare." That’s when Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio, Alex Hassilev of the Limelighters and soloist Bob Gibson all obtained their Vega Pete Seeger models, and were seen with them at concerts and on album covers.
If you, like me, were riding the wave of enthusiasm for folk music that swept across the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s, you probably wanted a Vega Peter Seeger model – or PS5, as they were called. Maybe you actually owned one.
That long neck was based on a practical need. At their standard neck and scale lengths, most five-string banjos were tuned to an open G Major chord. The addition of three frets between the nut and fifth-string tuning peg – now there were eight, instead of the usual five - extended the scale length, and meant that the instrument now could be tuned down to an open E Major chord, instead of G Major.
A lapsed Harvard student with an interest in music and social justice, Pete
discovered music, and, more important, discovered the banjo as a means for accompanying the songs he wanted to sing about the things that were important to him.
One of those songs was, "Viva la Quince Brigada," which Pete describes as, "One of the great songs of the Spanish Civil War." But the banjo tunings and chord positions available with a banjo neck of traditional length were insufficient for the way he wanted to sing that song.
He told me, "C Minor was too high for me, E minor too low, and if I'd slacked off tension on the strings, the strings would have buzzed. G tuning would not have worked for that song.
"So in 1943, on furlough in the U.S. Army, I got [famed New York luthier] John D'Angelico to add two frets to my banjo, a Vega Whyte Laydie, just so I could play and sing ‘Viva la Quince Brigada.’ Now, G-flat and even F, played as open chords, became possible."
This all worked so well that in 1955, Pete made his own banjo neck. This was three frets longer than standard, and was made of lignum vitae, the very hard, dense heartwood from a species of tree known as guayacan.
"It's like adding some lower notes to the piano keyboard. You don't use 'em often, but it's nice to have 'em. Normally my capo is three frets up, concert pitch," Pete said.
He mounted his self-built neck on what he describes as, "a Vega pot, model A, #100050, the hollow tone rim with eighth-inch holes every three-quarter- inch."
A classic Vega Tubaphone banjo pot, in other words.
The folks at Vega, the fine old instrument manufacturer based in Boston,
knew a good idea when they saw one, and began building Pete Seeger-model longneck Vegas.
By now, Pete had been on the road, and in record stores, with the Weavers, a quartet credited by many as being the vanguard of the ’50s folk movement. Pete and his longneck banjo represented a certain folk image, so a Pete Seeger-model Vega longneck is what Guard, Hassilev, and a generation of folk banjoists dedicated to moving forward with the folk-music torch, played.
How like Pete's own banjo was the Vega production instrument? It’s hard to tell, and moreover, it depends upon which Vega we’re talking about.
There were at least four iterations of Vega PS5s – and what follows is based on my memory, so please add a comment if I’ve got any of this wrong.
The first version, built in the late ’50s, used the classic Vega thick pot with 28 brackets, a bracket band, no through-bolts for the brackets, and a dowel stick. A second version used a thinner rim, 24 brackets with a bracket band and used through-bolts. A third version used those features plus coordinator rods in place of the dowel stick, and a fourth version used all those features, but with different styling and appointments.
This last version was built by C.F. Martin & Co., the famed guitar builder, after it bought Vega in 1970. Martin historian Mike Longworth (I think it was) told me that most of the instruments sold after the Martin purchased Vega, and before it sold Vega to an Asian firm in 1979, were built using a huge store of parts built by Vega and acquired in the purchase.
A fifth version of the Vega longneck is available from California banjo manufacturer Deering. It is, I’m given to understand, closer to the original than some of the earlier versions. But I don’t know – I’ve neither seen, much less played, one.
Vega also built a less expensive longneck model that was called the Folklore (thanks for the correx, MaineJohn) that used a plain five-ply wood pot with no tone ring. Other manufacturers, including Gibson, Ode and others, also built longneck five-strings.
When Vega began building its Pete Seeger model, Pete told me, "I gave them the dimensions of my neck, but I don't know if they followed them. Most people like a narrower neck than I do."
Indeed, all the Vega PS5s that I’ve seen seem to use Vega’s traditional neck profile, a profile that dates from at least the 1920s.
Today, Pete – well into his 80s - still plays the neck he built on its old Vega pot. He says that during the short time that C.F. Martin owned Vega, the folks at Martin gave him a Pete Seeger-model banjo.
"I gave it away," he says, and adds, "Now, except for a gourd banjo and a
Frank Proffitt banjo, neither of which I play much, I have one banjo. I don't collect."
I owned one of the Vega Pete Seeger models – it was from that second iteration, built, as far as I could tell, in the very early ’60s. I just didn’t much care for it. The finish was soft and it just didn’t seem to have the right tone – tone, after all, is the holy grail. I traded it off for a 50th anniversary Fender Precision bass – probably a pretty dumb thing to do, given the way these instruments have appreciated. Then I was lucky enough to find a longneck instrument that was built the way Pete built his. It uses a custom neck, built in about 1990 by Michigan luthier Bart Reiter, on a premium 28-bracket Vega Tubaphone pot built in 1922.
It looks good, plays easily and sounds terrific, just as a Vega longneck should. I’ll be hanging on to this one, and thanking Pete for figuring it all out.
-JFT
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