Carl Sandburg, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly & One Legendary Banjo

Cover Photo Caption: The face of Nathan Hicks’ banjo, cut from walnut and covered with signatures. To the left of the strings on the inner circle, the names of famous performers such as Burl Ives, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie can be seen. American Folklife Center. Photo: Shawn Miller.

It was 1939, and friends gathered in the bohemian heart of Greenwich Village to toast the publication of a new book by one of their own. Frank Warner, a musician and folksong collector, arrived with a prized new possession in hand: a handmade banjo, fresh from the mountains of North Carolina.

Nathan Hicks had crafted this fretless, five-string instrument from figured walnut just months earlier, and Warner quickly customized it to his own style, adding frets and removing the drone string.

The banjo Nathan Hicks crafted in 1939, now with 260 signatures. American Folklife Center. Photo: Shawn Miller.

That evening, amid the good cheer and easy laughter, Warner impulsively decided on another alteration. He turned to Carl Sandburg, the famed poet, song collector and Lincoln biographer, and held out the banjo. Would you mind signing it?

Sandburg obliged, scrawling his name and the year beneath the bottom string.

That, as it turned out, was just the start.

Warner kept at it, collecting autographs of the era’s greatest folk musicians and scholars. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Odetta, Burl Ives.

Alan Jabbour, the founding director of the Library’s American Folklife Center. Robert Gordon, John A. Lomax, Alan Lomax, Benjamin Botkin, Duncan Emrich and Joe Hickerson — each the head of what’s now the Archive of Folk Culture, part of the American Folklife Center.

Soon, the signatures circled the banjo’s body twice and climbed the neck — some 260 in all.

For the next three decades, Warner and his wife, Anne, traveled rural America, from the Appalachians to the Outer Banks, from Tidewater Virginia to New England and beyond. Together, they collected over 1,000 traditional songs and stories. Frank played the banjo wherever they went, bringing old traditions to new audiences.

Today, the American Folklife Center preserves the Warners’ vast collection of audio recordings. The signatures on his banjo form a map of the artists and traditions they documented.

In 2018, the Warners’ sons, Jeff and Gerret, donated the instrument to the center, reuniting it with the foundational recordings their parents had entrusted there years ago — a unique chronicle of American folk music’s golden age.