My maternal grandmother's first husband, Fretless Roscoe Lee Ozum, they say wore out most of his muscles farming by the time he was sixty, but it didn't affect his thinking muscles and he could do three things when he was old, and that was fiddle, clawhammer and invent things. He clawhammered so much he developed a tendency to rake away from him and shovel towards him; and his inventions were a legend in all the square counties of Kansas. He founded the Square County String Band, a band of generous old geezers that gave each other plenty of time to get warmed up before they started to play seriously, and the audiences just had to wait or go somewhere else.
As for his inventions, he invented the first fretless banjo capo: all steel with no pad. He also made a record player for his car, with springs and gyroscopic stabilizers; a warped mute for warped bridges; and a washable fiddle. He also noticed that there were about a million songs about the moon, but none about Mars, so, they say, he wrote a song about Mars, which may be around here somewhere, I will keep looking.
Roscoe also was probably the first to use a steel finger pick to clawhammer with, because his banjo was too quiet otherwise to cut through his melancholy. He didn't think it was traditional so when he thought nobody was looking he would slip it on, backwards onto his index finger, and sorta hide it in his palm until he started to play.
But the one thing he tried to figure out all his life was how to combine a fingerpick with a flatpick, because he liked to flatpick the banjo on certain parts of certain tunes. (If you think changing keys drives an audience crazy, you oughta hear the effect of changing to a flatpick in mid-play.) At first he would put the flatpick on his knee, and when he came to the flatpick part of the tune he would fling down his fingerpick and grab the flatpick in less than a beat. But then the problem was, how to get the fingerpick on again for the next part. For one thing his band got kind of tired of having to cover for him while he looked for his pick, which was usually on the ground or on the floor somewhere; and for another thing, it made audiences notice the fingerpick, which he was sorta embarrassed about.
Then he tried holding the flatpick between his thumb and index finger, and frailing with the fingerpick on his middle finger. But of course if you're holding a flatpick with your thumb you can't use your thumb to clawhammer, without dropping the flatpick, which puts you back to square one.
And then he tried holding the flatpick between his index finger and his middle finger while he had the fingerpick on his middle finger. This gave him a popping sound you wouldn't believe; but there was no easy way to get the flatpick over under his thumb so he could flatpick.
Well, one happy day Roscoe hit on it. He was playing a gig at the County Fair and a magician called The Amazing Watkins told him that all he had to do was distract the audience while he made the switch. And Roscoe decided then and there that The Amazing Watkins was especially amazing on that day.
So ever after that Roscoe would come almost to the place where he wanted to change picks, and then he would gaze up at the sky for a few bars, as if he saw Jacob's Ladder coming down out of the clouds. And of course the audience would look up too, every man jack of 'em; and then Roscoe would switch picks, as casual as can be; and he would tear into the next part of the tune. And so without meaning to Roscoe got the reputation of being a sort of mystical banjo player. If he had lived long enough, he might even have had disciples from Hollywood.
Up to the end of his life Roscoe tried to figure out a way to distract audiences while he actually switched banjos, but he gave it up when his relatives threatened to put him into a home.
Some things get you a reputation for being a little eccentric, but they might be worth it.