Alvin Keech, Banjo Ukulele Booster

And Some Bonus Content...

Last summer, Kilin Reece encouraged me to look more deeply into Alvin Keech, one of the people who claimed to invent the banjo ukulele. I always thought he was British, but it turns out that he was born in Hawaii. In the most recent issue of Ukulele Magazine, I wrote a short piece about Alvin and fixing up one of his banjo ukes. I got permission to post it here, as long as I also point out where you can find the whole issue and subscribe.

I thought it would be interesting to share some behind the scenes documents and photos that couldn’t be used in the magazine. So here is the plan: I will put the article below, then share a few things. Then the rest of the goodies will be behind the paywall. Lastly, next week’s post will be all for paid subscribers on the same subject. Here we go…

There it is, 8 months of my brain power set in three pages of text. That is how this writing thing goes and I am ok with it, for the most part. That is one of the reasons I am writing here, I want more people to see this work and experience it more deeply.

Last summer, I was on vacation with my family and started digging online about Alvin. My sister Sarah suggested that I look at Newspapers.com, which I had never used before. I did my first search for Keech in California around 1917 and was shocked with what I found. It’s not just that the texts of articles that are searchable, but so is the advertising! I was able to find ads for Keech’s banjos, mentions of him and his family in the gossip columns and even mentions in the business section. When I got my master’s degree, I was limited to the books in my university library, what I could order online, interlibrary loan and digital databases of journal articles. Scholars like John King and Jim Tranquada used to do their primary source work by reading/scanning every issue of a newspaper on microfilm for a mention of their subject…page by page…day after day, on location. Of course you can’t catch it all. Now that many newspapers are scanned and searchable, it is far easier.

The next day, my Mom grabbed my iPad, signed me into ancestry.com and started a family tree for Alvin Keech. With online genealogy work, you get lots of crowd sourced information about your subject after you make your page. Basically other folks have already done work on their tree and their information comes to you to revue. After months of waiting, nothing on Alvin came in. I called my Mom and she reminded me of a startling fact: Alvin had no children, Kelvin had no children and they had no other siblings. There just isn’t anyone on ancestry.com to research them because no one is claiming them as ancestors! This fact hit me in the gut. When I uncovered Alvin’s death certificate, I only felt worse, but we will talk about that next week.

Here is our first piece of important primary source material, an article from the September 1917 issue of Popular Mechanics. It doesn’t mention Alvin’s name, but it is clearly him in the photo and the design and construction of the banjo looks to be the almost the same as the British made one above.

This means that he at least had a prototype by September 1917, which puts him closer to Joseph Bolander’s banjo ukulele patent from June 1916. I have to assume that he and Bolander were thinking of the same thing around the same time, which is actually more common than most people realize.