Cathy McGrath, Jim Clare and I run a little monthly music thing called Tunes By the Tracks in Clifton Springs, small village 30 miles south of Rochester. It's at the public library, formerly a railroad depot -- hence the name. Wednesday night Nora Starr and Jess Youngquest from Ithaca came over to do a short set, and Jess brought "Fred," his Martin harp mandolin. I'm sure many people have seen it on YouTube, and there have been other threads concerning it (though I'm too lazy to look 'em up now).
Jess says he bought "Fred" in the little town of Brewster NY, back in the '70's, for $75 in an old antique/junk shop. He had just broken his mandolin and was looking for a replacement. He states that it was made by Martin around 1899, and there is a "C F Martin" stamp inside under the soundhole. Jess maintains that only twelve were made by Martin, and that there are only two known to survive; the other's in the Martin museum collection in Nazareth, he says. Jess has the original wooden case as well, now held shut by a bungee cord.
"Fred" is quite possibly the weirdest looking mandolin I've seen, with the possible exception of Bernunzio's anchor-shaped "no-name" monstrosity. I'll post one of Jess's YouTube videos below so everyone can get a look at it. Jess plays it well, in an energetic, open-string, ragtime-slash-Celtic style. The instrument has a thin, trebly tinkle, belying its huge body, but rings clearly in an ensemble. We finished up the set with a Celtic jam on Wind That Shakes the Barley/Merry Blacksmith, played at breakneck pace, and "Fred" held his or her own against two whistles, guitar and my Eastman mandola.
The one thing that gave me a bit of pause, was that Jess has obviously played the tar out of it, and it shows lots of pick wear around the pickguard, scuffs and scrapes and scratches. The old case is pretty disastrous, worn and stained lining, wooden surface gouged. I almost never begrudge playing damage to an instrument; my attitude is that mandolins are tools to make music, not art objects to sit in a case. But when you have one of the only two in existence, made by one of America's premier instrument builders and something that many collectors would go well into five figures for -- well, if I owned it, it would be on display, not getting whupped in the meeting room of the Clifton Springs library on a Wednesday night. Just sayin'.
Anyway, I felt privileged to be close to a unique piece of mandolin history. I'll post one of Jess's videos below; it's not Mill Street Rag, which he played Wednesday night, but his video of that tune has him playing in a gas mask and wig, and that's just a bit much even for me. Definitely an eccentric, with a truly eccentric instrument. (Which I dearly wish I owned.)
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