Greetings
from Banjo Bob
I’m the newest member
of Narrow Road,
having joined the band only about 10 years ago! Before
I took up the 5-string banjo, I played clarinet and oboe in the school band
and orchestra and sang in the church youth choir at St. Bernard Methodist
Church in Chalmette,
Louisiana, where I grew up. But at age 12, I mail-ordered a 5-string banjo from Sears
with money I made mowing lawns, and I was hooked. I
began performing with bluegrass bands in high school, in New Canaan, Conn., before we moved back to New Orleans, where
I graduated from O. Perry Walker High School. At Virginia Tech, where I majored
in Wildlife Management, I played and sang with the June Apple band, and was
a charter member of the Blacksburg Hoorah Cloggers,
performing at events throughout southeastern Virginia. At Iowa State
University, in Ames, I received the
MS in Wildlife Biology and the PhD in Animal Ecology, and played throughout
Iowa with
a band called Hybrid Grass. My wife, Diane, and I
started an exhibition clogging group there, called the Onion Creek Cloggers, performing throughout Iowa and in 4 neighboring
states beginning in 1977.
In 1982, I took my
first permanent job as assistant professor of wildlife ecology at Eastern Kentucky University,
in Richmond,
where Diane and I have lived ever since. Through the 1980s, I played with
a band called The Wilder Brothers, playing regularly in Richmond and Lexington night spots. Our son, Joey, was born in 1987, and Tessa came along
2 years later. Joey is now a mechanical engineering student at the University of Kentucky and is a coop intern with
Toyota in
Georgetown, KY. Tessa Lark is a violin performance major at the
New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Mass.
Diane works as a testing coordinator in Adult Ed. at EKU, and I am now Biological
Sciences department chair. I think it was 1998 when
I walked into a local music store to buy banjo strings, and a Narrow Road member
told me they “might be looking for a banjo player.” The
rest is history. Actually, it’s not history, because we’re still together
and going strong.
Besides banjo and singing,
I am also the web site manager for Narrow Road at:
Hope you enjoy our web pages. The personal web pages
for each band member, like the one you are reading now, are a new addition,
where each band member can edit and change their own pages as they wish.
Please don’t complain to me about the crazy stuff the other band members
may put on their own web pages once they post them, especially the links
John may post!
I also manage (but
not very often) the band’s MySpace Music page
at:
www.myspace.com/gospelbluegrassdotcom
I have my own little page at www.myspace.com/drbanjo,
and on Facebook I’m Dr. Five-String. Enjoy.