Am I really listening to this stuff?
If you look at to the left, at the back, you’ll see the now rare banjo-mandolin (mandolin scale and stringing with a banjo body).
I’m running myself ragged trying to set up a course for the fall. It’s one of those writing courses, where the goal is to get young minds to apply fashionable theory” and, not inconsequentially, actually learn to write. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of room for actual reading, so I’ve been combing over each paragraph I want students to read. The general theme is using space as an element of conflict. It gives me a chance to assign River of Traps (memoir and photo essay of a New Mexican peasant–a greatly under-appreciated book) and Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene (it’s a story about a rational, scientific man–a typically Frisch character–coping with natural disaster and isolation). Other potential readings: Carl Sauer on settlement of the Western US; Doreen Massey’s “Is the world getting larger?“; and Böll, among other things.
A little reading: “Ukraine no longer silent about famine.”
Europe Endless 
June 5, 2008 at 12:48 am
There was a time when banjo bodies were attached to all sorts of stringed instruments: I’ve seen banjolins, banjo-bodied guitars, even a banjo-ukulele. My spouse, who knows much more about music than I, believes that it’s a pre-amplification fad, designed to make the instruments louder. This culminates in the National Steel Guitar, which was released about the same time that amplifiers became smaller and cheaper (thus making them almost immediately obsolete, except for afficionados, mostly blues players).
That was some amazing jug playing, though: I’ve never seen anything quite like that before.
June 5, 2008 at 7:16 am
So I’ve been told: banjo bodies and resonators compensated for volume. Lot’s of blues players used them in the 20s and 30s, and from what I understand, banjo hybrids were popular in Caribbean and African music, as well as what has become known as “Gypsy Jazz”. These instruments strike me, though, because they cut at what I think to be the essential features of each instrument. IMO, a mandolin is a picked instrument with a violin bridge. Otherwise, a banjo-mandolin is just a small, double coursed banjo. That may be different from a banjolin (with single string courses). (I once played a banjo-mando; it ‘felt’ different from a mandolin. I also played a uke/mando combo: it was strung different on each side, and you had to flip it over to switch instruments.) But obviously, one hundred years ago people did not make such rigid associations, and freely mixed elements of musical instruments together. Perhaps it comes from an era, as well, when people might still be expected to play homemade violins and guitars, converting whatever they had around them and stringing them up.