A. E. Smith Banjo Company

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  • Mr

    I’ve been the proud owner of the Northampton #AES-255 since the mid 70’s. I purchased it from David Shepherd Guitar shop in Raleigh NC and it has been with me all of these years. I’ve had many other banjos over the years but this one has always been one of my favorites. I’d love to hear any information you have about it.

  • Pawn Shop

    I picked up AES #336 at a pawn shop many years ago where the seller had no idea what he was selling. I also had no idea what I was buying. Just today I was able to figure out that it Must be a A.E. Smith Northampton. I love this banjo and play it every day. Two drum heads, new pegs and about a thousand sets of strings and it still sounds sweet.

  • AES Northampton #131

    I’m the original owner of an AES Northampton, serial #131. I purchased her from a small folk music shop across from Old Dominion University by the name of ‘Ramblin Conrads’, in Norfolk VA. I could ill afford this seeming extravagance at the time but have never regretted doing so. I have not been as diligent in playing it as I’ve been in the last year but it has accompanied me through my life and always called to me. I recently had her refretted and new tuning pegs put on. We spend a lot more time together now and hardly a day goes by without a session in my workshop. Truly a timeless beauty with a sweet voice. Thanks.

  • Maple Leaf #222 original owner — still delighted

    AES222-2AES222-3AES222-4AES222-1

    My memory was spotty, but Kate’s record system filled in some of the gaps. Apparently it was 1977, and I’d negotiated my first real job for the following Fall. The anticipated bump in income meant that I could consider replacing the banjo I made for myself while still in high school (1965) by one made by someone who knew what they were doing. A small store (Sandy’s) on Mass Ave in Cambridge, MA had a selection of Arthur E. Smith banjos. Of the three basic designs, the Maple Leaf called to me. It rang out as I imagined it should. (The subtlety of the internal resonator was lost on me then. It also cost quite a bit more — a bargain for the work involved but a big step for someone still counting pennies.) Kate notes that on my warranty card it notes I said that the one I purchased was “absolutely delightful.”

    That was the only banjo I played for many, many years, only in recent times falling prey to a fascination with how banjos work and how they develop their individual voices. But the Maple Leaf remains absolutely delightful.

  • I need an original AE Smith case

    I just got back my birthday Arthur E. Smith Maple Leaf banjo. It is maple with fingerboard binding, diamonds in the fret board, a and a bacon-type tone system with no internal resonator. The dowel is stamped “Kathryn Spencer March 31, 1979.” Anyway, she came back to me without her original case. We had custom cases made by Harptone for our banjos: 11″ diameter, non-resonator cut down case with a 4″ outside depth. If anyone out there has a case in good condition that they would be willing to part with, I would be very happy. I would pay money or offer a trade of the new bump hardshell plus money.

    Thanks, Kate Spencer

  • A.E. Smith Northampton love affair

    I had never heard of A.E. Smith banjos, having only gotten into playing in 2013. I bought a Goodtime and once I was good enough to play a few tunes I started looking for another open back (not that the Goodtime is not a good banjo, it is!). I came to a realization that for the banjo of my dreams I was looking at at around $2k…which recently divorced and with three little girls…I did not have. Then one day on the BHO classifieds I noticed this ad from a man at a well known Banjo manufacturer selling an A.E. Smith banjo…thats not a their brand! Anyway the price was very, very reasonable and was sold as-is. I jumped on it within an hour of the posting. The seller finally got back with me a couple days later, I had thought by this point I had missed out. He said he was surprised by the number of people who responded to that ad so quickly offering full price…but I was first and if I would pay the full price (again…VERY reasonable) it was mine. I jumped on it. Now, since he worked at a well known banjo manufacturer he said he would have one of their guys set it up for me. I almost told him to not bother and just send it but it was very generous of him so I just accepted. Unfortunately the next time I heard from him it was to let me know it had shipped, but also that there was a problem with the neck and that their technician (he did not say luthier) had had to restet the neck..my heart sank…that just did not sound right, in the pictures it looked fine. Oh well, nothing could be done about it now. When the banjo arrived the neck rest was a bit of a hack job and the neck was wiggling, after taking it apart the issue was (and I believe was from the start) a loose dowel. In the mean time the Tech had not fixed this issue but had instead shaved a bit of the heel at pot attachment! The good news is that after removing the dowel (though loose it did not want to come out of the neck) and a little TLC and Titebond the dowel was aligned and solid with the neck. Remounting it to the pot showed it was a tiny bit off at a side angle….very, very minor and not worth shimming (pretty sure this is due to the small amount the “tech” shaved off the neck is the cause). I was a little concerned, but I needn’t have been the banjo plays like a dream. I was (and am) so exited and privileged to be able to play such a premium instrument. My Northampton by the way is serial #496 and I cannot imagine parting with it. I forgot to mention it also came with the original case and still had the warranty card (unfilled out) and neck tag. By the way, I was offered $1200.00 by one of the people who were a little slower in responding to the BHO ad…I said “Thanks, but no thanks”! Thanks for making such a wonderful banjo!

  • AES 265

    “The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.”
    –Myrtle Reed (1910)

    I’m relatively new to the banjo. I started about 18 months ago, but it’s only after retiring last October that I’ve had the chance to devote substantial time to it.

    When I started out, I made a number of trips to the local music store only to be overwhelmed by the possibilities (tone ring, head, …). I also found that most of the instruments sounded very brittle to my ears. I ended up with one but the search continued.

    While I’m new to banjo, I’ve been playing (at) guitar for 50 years, so I know how it works for me. I buy, I sell, I buy, I sell, I buy, I buy, I sell…until eventually, if I get very lucky, the instrument that was meant for me lands in my hands.

    I’ve known Kate for about 10 years but heard about this blog only a few months ago. I’d known about AE Smith banjos, but they were always on the periphery since I didn’t play banjo. Now, reading the blog made me eager to try one. When I mentioned to Kate my regret that they were no longer being made, she told me that a used Shelbourne model (AES 265) just came into Maple Leaf Music and was in the process of being set up. I called the shop and was told that it would be back by next week. I thought we’d left things so that they would contact me when it was ready, but I decided to follow up just before the close of business on Friday of the following week.

    Good news: The banjo had come into the shop only an hour earlier.
    Bad news: There were two people coming to see it the next morning. Good news: Neither had placed a deposit on the banjo, so my Visa card was all it took to get the banjo shipped to me.

    I’ve discovered over the last 18 months that if I had to pick a banjo sight unseen (or, rather, tone unheard), I’d choose one with a Bacon tone ring. The Shelbourne has not only a Bacon tone ring but also an internal resonator. This should have been the happy ending to the story, except…

    Bad news: it didn’t win me over immediately. It didn’t sound particularly warm to me ears.

    I mentioned this to Kate who suggested swapping the Renaissance head for Fiberskyn and…

    Great news: That made all the difference!

    Like all hand crafted instruments, AES 265 has its own unique personality. The neck is on the narrow side (1-3/16” at the nut; 15/16” from the middle of the first string to the middle of the fourth string at the nut). However, my fingers find it to be the most intuitive of any neck I’ve played. My fingers are right where they need to be when they need to be there.

    The neck and pot are dark. I’ve been told that most AES banjos are blond. I know nothing about wood, so I can’t say if it’s the wood itself (mahogany?) or due to staining.

    It’s on the heavy side (just shy of 8 pounds), but one nice thing about old time music is that it’s invariably played sitting down!

    I wrote earlier that if I were to get very lucky, the instrument that was meant for me would land in my hands. Well, it did. It’s AES 265.

    Here’s a youtube of Christian at Maple Leaf Music in Brattleboro, Vermont. He is playing AES 265, just before it went home with Jerry.

    https://youtu.be/48MABvN_bEw

  • Where is this stained glass window?

    Stained glass window

    Hi to all,
    I made this lovely stained glass window when we first started the banjo company. I don’t know where it is! Maybe it accidentally got thrown out but I have a dim memory of loaning it to someone many years ago. Anyone out there know where this window is?
    Thanks so much, Kate

  • A comedy of errors

    I have a few banjos and not one of em is “just a banjo”. Each one sounds and plays differently than the others, and each has a story. For instance, there’s the Paramount Aristocrat model I got from a piano playing nun in Southern California. It had belonged to her grandfather. She told me that both her grandparents played banjo : ” ‘Roll Out The Barrel’  and all those old sh** kickers “.   I have a 1903 Windsor Grand Concert model that I got from an Irish ballad singer in Australia who got it from a young woman who had promised her grandfather, the original owner, that the banjo would, as he requested, be buried with him. After he died, that is. She found that she could not do it, and after some years she traded it for a guitar. It arrived at my door strung with 5 strings all of equal diameter (.014” if I remember right.).

    The story of my Arthur E Smith banjo is a comedy of errors. In February of 2014 I got an email message from an inventor I know, who had designed everything from camper shells to capos. Would I be interested in buying his AE Smith banjo? I didn’t need another banjo, that was for sure, but I was very impressed with the few Smiths I had played. The first one was around 1990.

    Kate Brislin and I were playing a house concert in Southern California, a foreign country with strange customs and inscrutable people. Our host offered to let us use his banjo, which he described as “the best banjo in the world”.  Right, more Hollywood hype. Sure, we’ll try out your ban….whoa! this is really good. I mean really really good. We were used to good playability, good craftsmanship, and good sound as being mutually exclusive qualities but this banjr had it all. Who did you say made this? Arthur Smith? The legendary Tennessee fiddle player? Or the tenor banjo picker from South Carolina who composed Feuding Banjos? He didn’t know. He just knew it was The Best Banjo In The World. We didn’t know if it was but it sure was a contender. About every 10 years after that I’d come upon another AES banjo and each was a bit different; all were excellent. Somewhere along the way I found out that Arthur Smith was a covered bridge in Massachusetts.

    My friend was so sure I’d want to buy the banjo that he offered to make the three hour drive to San Francisco to show it to me.  Um, OK. And he did. The banjo was lovely and much used. The frets were worn and parts of the flame maple neck below the lower frets were discolored with the finish worn away, and there were some odd holes in the dowel. The peghead was beautifully shaped, uniquely inlayed on the front side, with a backstrap extending down the neck on the back.  All the metal was clean. It had a Baconesque internal resonator and a very large tone ring that brought Yosco banjos to mind. Ooh, and look: The heel carving matched the vine design that was inlayed into the entire fingerboard — or used to be. The last five frets were gone and so was the inlay and most of  fingerboard wood. It appeared as though the “frailing scoop” was done by inviting the Hound of The Baskervilles to take a bite. Unlike the rest of the banjo, this crater was not tidy or elegant. Why did he do this? “I got tired of injuring my hand every time I played”. Ah. He holds the banjo at a steep diagonal angle when he plays and he does pack a wallop. OK, time to stop looking and start listening. I gave her a play. Oh, my goodness. This banjo combined clarity with depth. The lows roared without being woofy. The mids were clear without being thin. The highs never thinned out at the higher frets, of which there were only 17 at this point. I compared the sound with my favorite old time banjo, a Clifford Essex XX Special. The AES was very different and maybe better.  I calculated likely repair costs and I agreed to buy it.

    There were oddities and anachronisms in my friend’s account of how and when he acquired the banjo. Besides some small, slightly askew details he remembered buying it new in 1972 in a shop in Vermont, or maybe western New Hampshire, and that it was in a glass case behind the counter. Hmm. Didn’t Kate and Mark begin production at the end of 73 or start of 74? Whoa! Maybe there really was yet another Arthur Smith who built banjos (?). One by one I eliminated the possible shops that could have sold this banjo.  I contacted Kate Spencer via email. She didn’t remember the banjo! But she was visiting Montana right then and not in proximity to her written records about what got built 40 years ago.To complimacate the matter I went dyslexic on her and gave the serial number as 904 instead of 094. This caused her to speculate that my banjo was a very late Mark Surgies project, built after she left the partnership, meant to be 604 (she was aware of serial numbers into the 500s) but with the 6 stamped upside down. If it was really 904 that meant I had the only 900 series AES banjo in existence. I speculated that I had a perfectly wrought counterfeit AES, something that would really be an anomaly and which appealed to my sense of historical silliness.

    When Kate got back to Massachusetts she was able to consult her records and she got in touch, telling me that 604 was the 14th AES banjo built, and was the only Colrain model in existence. I think that’s even better than the only fake AES in existence. The Colrain had more or less the features of the Shelburne Professional, which went into production soon after. Her records showed that the banjo was finished on April 27th, 1974 and was sold to Tony Creamer at Fretted Instrument Workshop in Amherst, Massachusetts. The glass case! Of course. Tony sold it, brand new, to my friend on February 6th 1976, which is 38 years and 9 days before I bought it. So how can #094 be the 14th banjo? AES numbering started with 081. I asked Kate why. She said “Who would buy #1”?

    I put on new strings, a Will Fielding tailpiece, a new Elite head, and sent away for some nifty new tuner buttons. I gave the banjo to luthier Paul Hostetter for an overhaul, including refretting, filling the hole in the dowel where a clamp for a mic or pickup had been attached, and covering it with a lovely MOP dot, rebuilding the end of the fingerboard, replacing the neck binding, and, if he was game, to replace the missing inlay. But with what design? I wrote to Mark Surgies who Kate affirmed had done all the inlay. Did he have a photo or a “blueprint” of the complete vine? He wrote back promptly, saying that he had no record of what the bottom of the vine had looked like but that it was probably something like *this*. “This” was a drawing he had made of the complete vine, based on the extant part of the inlay and on his memory of what sort of inlay he would have done in 1974.  Paul said “I can inlay that” and he did. I sent photos of the restored banjo to both makers and they were very pleased with the results. You really can’t tell that the upper fingerboard ever resembled a bomb site.

    One mystery remained. What about the filled holes at the upper end of the dowel right beside the neck bracket/brace. Why would anyone put extra holes there?  Kate wrote back saying essentially “we did that”.  “More holes than necessary because we drilled it wrong in the first place- keeping in mind that 094 is a very early banjo. “

    The banjo has now been played at a number of gigs. No recordings yet.  Microphones like it, musicians and audiences like it. So do I, to say the least. I played this banjo at the Pacific Film Archive as the audience was filing in to view the preview of the new Yasha Aginsky/Mike Seeger film “Banjo Tales”.  I believe I spotted one AES banjo in the film, by the way. I played it at a wedding anniversary in Santa Cruz, and I played it at a “Very Jerry” Garcia tribute (we were in a band together in 1964). What do you suppose I sang and played first?  “Colrain and Snow,” of course.