News Highlights

Lowell Schreyer: World-class banjo performer, scholar, author

2007-11-20
By Jean Lundquist, Special to The Free Press [published in The Free Press, Mankato, MN, 11/18/2007]

To many friends and acquaintances in southern Minnesota, Lowell Schreyer was a retired journalist who played the banjo.

In the “banjo world,” however, Lowell Schreyer was a giant. He traveled the world on the strings of his banjos, and his intellectual research into the role of the instrument in American history is legendary.

Schreyer died last week, but not before completing his sec­ond book, “The Banjo Entertainers: Roots to Ragtime.” His first book was a biography of the entertainer who introduced him to the banjo in the early 1940s on a radio show. “The Eddie Peabody Story” was published in 2000.

“He was absolutely crazy about the banjo,” recalls former Blue Ox Jazz Babies band member Jim Johnson.

“He wasn’t a really chatty kind of guy, until you got him talk­ing about the banjo. He found a lot of expression in his banjo.”

Schreyer, his wife, Margaret, and their family lived on a cul de sac, Johnson recalls. “He’d say they lived there because it was shaped like a banjo.”

Shreyer wrote on his Web site that as soon as he heard Eddie Peabody play the banjo, he ran downtown and bought a second-hand tenor banjo at the music store in New Ulm, where he grew up.

After four years of lessons, he still was unable to replicate the sound that Peabody plucked from his banjo.

Then, he found out there is more than one kind of banjo. While he had been playing the tenor banjo, the sound he was looking for came from a plectrum banjo.

According to his Web site, he went home, retuned his banjo, and played that until he bought a real plectrum banjo a few years later. Schreyer learned to play other types of banjos by ear. Schreyer united his background as a writer with his love of the banjo, and in addition to playing, soon became a noted scholar on the banjo.

Banjo player Paul Horrisberger of Mankato — a member of the Dick Kimmel and Company Band — recalls playing a gig in Minneapolis when a man came in with magazines from England called BMG, for Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar. He gave them to Horrisberger, who discovered sever­al articles in them written by Schreyer, who had become a worldwide giant when it came to the banjo.

In addition to the articles he wrote for BMG, he also wrote a column called “Banjo World” for the Fretted Instrument Guild of America publication, and authored chap­ters for two books about the banjo writ­ten as compilations.

His research into the history and back­ground of the banjo came because of his love of playing the instrument. He played on the riverboats Mississippi Queen and the Delta Queen in Louisiana.

“Lowell lived to play the banjo,” says Johnson. “He’d travel 12 hours out (to a gig) and 12 hours back for $30. He just loved to play the banjo.”

Schreyer was inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame, located in his hometown of New Ulm, in 1997. In 2002 he was inducted into the National Four­String Banjo Hall of Fame in Guthrie, Okla.

In the obituary Schreyer wrote himself, he said: “As much as he loved banjo playing, he loved his family more. As a result, he turned down offers to become a full-time professional banjoist that would have kept him away from the family overly long.”

His daughter Debbie is a banjo player. Son Ted plays tuba.

Together, they played as a group called Schreyers Banjos. Recalls Johnson, “ The Schreyers all have a world class musical ability. They are phenomenal.”

For more Free Press news go to www.mankatofreepress.com.

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