Time is running out to purchase a ticket for a chance to win a very unique and historically significant custom banjo from the Pisgah Banjo Company! Raffle tickets for the March 6 live-streamed drawing on the Pisgah Banjo Company Facebook page are $20 each, and all proceeds will benefit the Arnold Shultz Fund, dedicated to people of color pursuing traditional old-time and bluegrass music. This year $10,000 of these funds will be designated for the Black Banjo Reclamation Project to support a gourd banjo building workshop. The goal is to sell 2,000 tickets and raise $40,000 in total. Last year the Pisgah Banjo Company raised $26,740 and exceeded their goal of selling 1,000 tickets.
Click here to purchase raffle tickets for the March 6 drawing.
The raffle prize will be a custom built Pisgah Banjo, made from 200+ year-old heart pine salvaged from Pleasant Retreat, a historical plantation located near Appomattox, Virginia. The plantation where this wood was salvaged is located half a mile from where Joel Walker Sweeney grew up. A banjoist and minstrel performer, Sweeney is known for popularizing the banjo in white culture in the early to mid-1800s and has credited his teachers as slaves on a nearby plantation (very likely Pleasant Retreat). Pisgah Banjos chose to benefit the Arnold Shultz Fund as a way to help reappropriate the history of the banjo. They hope this encourages the banjo community and beyond to discover the early American history of the banjo and folk music born on slave plantations and influenced heavily by early American Black culture. The heart pine was donated by Craig DuBose and was salvaged from the roof structure of the main living quarters at Pleasant Retreat.
Tickets are $20 each and there is an unlimited quantity. The more tickets you purchase, the better your chance to win. Tickets will be placed in a bucket and a name drawn via Facebook live.
Return to the March 2022 issue of The Cornerstone.
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