An Homage to Will Key's Paramount
by Lew Stern
During the summer of 2003 I met Will Keys following one of his performances at the annual Smithsonian folk festival held on the mall in Washington, D.C. These are pretty informal sessions, so I strolled up to the stage when I saw him cradling his banjo, preparing to sheath it in its case, and told him that I though he did great music. I asked whether the banjo he had in hand was the plectrum he had converted into a 5 string, famed in song and story. Indeed it was, he told me, as he lifted it out the case, and handed it over to me in a supreme act of banjo generosity.
I cradled this banjo, inspected the fifth string peg he had fixed to the side of an old Paramount plectrum neck, admired the intriguing architecture of the Paramount pot, and gave it another once over with my eyes. I don't recall whether I strummed it or banged at the strings. I was less interested in the sound than the excavation on the side of the neck that accommodated a simple metal tuner. Unfortunately I don't recall much about the pip, though photos now mounted on BANJO HANGOUT homepage site belonging to Bill Keys, Will's son, show some perspective on both the fifth string peg and pip, and offer some views of the pot and the peghead, too.
Bill has posted some notes and recollections about his Dad that are readily available on his homepage, and are worth reading. Also worth reading is another web page labor of love by some friends of Will's: http://www.willkeys.com/html/about_will.html
In separate email correspondence in mid-2007, Bill told me that Will purchased his Paramount in 1971 at a music store in Bellflower, California while he was visiting his daughter, whose husband was stationed at the USN base in Long Beach. Will's daughter appears to have accompanied him to the music store. Imitating a modification he had seen on a banjo belonging to Carl McConnell, Will reconfigured the Paramount to accommodate the fifth string. Bill told me that his sister has the banjo, and that it remains at a family home in Gray, Tennesee.
It would be about 5 years before I developed a full blown case of Paramount banjo obsession, to the point of stockpiling parts and pieces, buying hulks off of eBay and keeping an inventory of projects, investing in some of the media and memorabilia and historical documentation about William Lange, amassing photos of banjos, seeking out like minded devotees, attempting to track serial numbers, and accumulating a record of his patents.
And it wasn't until late January 2008, about the time of my own 56th birthday, that I felt I knew Paramounts well enough to try this modification myself, and that I owed myself a birthday present.
