Okie Adams

Okie Adams (June 18, 1923 – November 16, 2007), born Carl Frederick Adams, was an American expert banjo maker, having provided unique, hand-crafted banjos to the likes of Doc Watson and Tom Sauber, among many others.

Okie Adams
Birth nameCarl Adams
BornJune 18, 1923
DiedNovember 16, 2007
Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, USA
Occupation(s)Musician

Career

Okie's banjos were entirely hand-made using his custom 'block pot' technique, which consisted of turning out a glued together ring of wood, usually walnut or maple, or a combination thereof. They are heavier than most, with a slightly wider neck (Okie claims this was favored by the guitar players he was trying to convert to banjo) and often the peghead is inlaid with a variety of shapes and symbols that are Okie signatures - a tall cowboy hat, claw hammer or double claw hammer, and a crescent moon with star.

Allen Hart uses an Okie Adams banjo on his "Old Time Banjo" album, playing in the claw-hammer style Okie favored and encouraged.

Okie was a consistent presence on the West Coast folk festival circuit, and his son Jim 'Okie Jr.' Adams plays and competes often, wielding his father's prized banjos. Always a teacher, Okie's generosity touched and inspired many musicians and banjo makers, among them Greg Deering, founder of Deering Banjo company who recently stated that he'd produced and sent out over 60,000 banjos from his workshop and "there was a part of Okie Adams in every single one." [1]

He was also an accomplished race-car component maker,[2] known for the Okie Adams "drop axle" he developed whilst working as a welder in 'blairs' automotive of Pasadena during the 1960s.

Death

Adams died at the age of 84 of smoke inhalation when his home in Eagle Rock, California, burned down on November 16, 2007.[3] The exact cause of the fire has yet to be determined conclusively.

gollark: Quite a lot.
gollark: > The Planck time is the unique combination of the gravitational constant G, the special-relativistic constant c, and the quantum constant ħ, to produce a constant with dimension of time. Because the Planck time comes from dimensional analysis, which ignores constant factors, there is no reason to believe that exactly one unit of Planck time has any special physical significance. Rather, the Planck time represents a rough time scale at which quantum gravitational effects are likely to become important. This essentially means that while smaller units of time can exist, they are so small their effect on our existence is negligible. The nature of those effects, and the exact time scale at which they would occur, would need to be derived from an actual theory of quantum gravity.
gollark: Oh, no, never mind, that's not it.
gollark: ... you mean the Planck time or something?
gollark: Actually, picolightyears sounds better as light picoyears.

References
  1. Stated during an open call for euloges at Okie Adams's graveside service, November 28th, 2007, Forest Lawn cemetery, North Hollywood, CA.
  2. Online reference at http://www.rodandcustommagazine.com/featuredvehicles/custom_1932_ford_roadster/photo_07.html
  3. local news coverage at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fire17nov17,1,567912.story?track=rss


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