STRING THEORY Banjoist Hank Smith nurtures the local music scene by SAMANTHA GRATTON photography by BEN MCKEOWN
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t all started in 1994, when Hank Smith received a pawn shop banjo for Christmas. He didn’t play at the time—but he couldn’t put it down, either. “It was something of an anomaly. I don’t have a musical family,” says Smith, who grew up in Florence, South Carolina. While everyone around him was listening to grunge, Smith was teaching himself how to pluck Nirvana songs on the banjo. And when a friend loaned him a Béla Fleck album, he knew it: this was the kind of music he wanted to play. He 68 | WALTER
slowly learned more traditional fingerpicking bluegrass-style songs, mostly through monthly jam sessions for the Southeastern Bluegrass Association, getting good enough to play gigs on the side as he moved through college and then graduate school. He moved to Raleigh in 2006, after commuting to play in jam band Barefoot Manner for four years. With Smith on the banjo, they created a modern bluegrass or, “newgrass,” sound. In the ten years since Barefoot Manner left the road, Smith has continued to live and work in Raleigh.
In 2015, Beer and Banjos was just getting off the ground as a weekly night of music at former Irish pub Tir Na Nog. Smith had completed leadership training with the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) and decided to pour his skills into the local music scene. When the pub closed that same year, he helped find Beer and Banjos a new home at The Raleigh Times, where you’ll find him every Tuesday, hosting new talent alongside the house band, The Allstars. Smith looks for up-and-coming artists, both locally and regionally, in anything