Thanks Debbie!

From all of us here @ RMCS...

While looking for gourds locally, I found the Alabama Gourd Society (http://www.alabamagourdsociety.org/). On their site they have several gourd growers listed. That's where I got Debbie's name. Thinking she was a grower, I contacted her about the gourds we needed for this project. Turns out she's not a grower, but rather an artist! and she happened to have a surplus of EXACTLY what we needed. Good job Debbie!

What we ended up with were Canteen gourds. Turns out they were grown in Arizona and therefore benefited from the increased heat and a longer, dryer growing season. Big deal....right? Well apparently it is a big deal. The result is some CRAZY thick gourds. Perfect for pounding tacks into when we get ready to skin them with the goat skin.

The thickest one was just at .5" thick. Normally gourds of this size would only be about half of that or around 1/4" thick.

So to begin, we put all of the student's names in a hat, took one gourd at a time, and drew the name of the student that it now belongs to.
Next, we marked each one with each name and picked which side would be the top and bottom of the gourd. Then I cut a clean-out hole in each gourd with a roto-zip and we emptied the seeds and pulp. Some gourds were worse than others....









Some of the class started decorating the back and sides of thier gourds. We'll use dye, ink and woodburning to personalize the gourds before we make them into banjos.

Materials...

Gourd banjos are about as primitive as it gets...
they're basically composed of; a wooden neck, a gourd covered with a goatskin, strings and violin pegs for the tuners.

Our instruments will be fretless, so they won't have frets like a guitar. They'll have a smooth fingerboard more like a violin or fiddle.

We're hoping to make our banjos using as much local material as possible, so I've picked up some Black Walnut to use for the necks and depending on what's available, we may or may not be able to use locally grown gourds. Gourds grow all summer and then have to dry for up to a year before they're ready to be used.

Getting Started...

Red Mountain Community School's 5th, 6th and 7th grade students will be building our own musical instruments.

This blog is being set up so you can follow along with us and follow our progress as we try our hand at building one of the more primative forms of the classic banjo; the gourd banjo.

According to gourd banjo maker David Hyatt (http://www.dhyatt.com/history.html) similar gourd instruments date back to as early as the 1600's in parts of Africa, then made their way to the West Indies and later up to the Americas as a result of the slave trade.

We'll hopefully explore these connections more in depth as we progress through the building process but our first steps include gathering materials, taking measurements from existing instruments and making templates.