Down a lazy river or an old mill stream, that's the way life ought to be. Did Kermit the Frog enter contests and do workshops? Were there jam sessions in old Appalachia?
You take a girl out in a canoe in the moonlight and strum the banjo to her; sing if you can. You do something nobody else can do, by dang. Keep up the illusion that you're the only mellow down-picker in the whole world, and never go near Mt. Airy. That's my advice.
You may want to re-think the girl. I took a girl out in a canoe one night on the Wakarusa River, back before they built the dam, and when we got far enough out to drift with the current I brought out my little English "Zither" banjo. She said Oh great. What am I supposed to do while you play that thing? I said Why, you're supposed to lay back and get comfortable and listen to the moon and look at me. (Girls get me a little tongue-tied.) Well, I guess I already knew there's no way you can lay back and get comfortable in a canoe, no matter how often you see it in all those pictures, without a few pillows, which I forgot to bring. And you know it's a proven fact that gals put out about 70,000 words a day each, and she put out most of her daily quota right about then. So I gave it up.
Next time I tried it by day and without the girl. Couple of pillows, banjo, and a partly clouded sky. Terrific. So here I am drifting downstream, like in the picture. In fact I felt like I was in a picture. But there's always something to puncture your picture.
The first thing that happened was that the canoe, being left to itself, somehow turned around. So now I am facing in the direction of movement. This was not right, but what the hey. After all, I could have been going sideways. I was playing "Time Draws Near" which I learned from a Cathy Fink tape, which I combine with an old Jean Ritchie song, "With Kitty I'll Go". Same tuning, mountain modal. I remember wondering once again why they say waltzes are hard to play on the banjo. Right about then I heard in the near distance the sound of a motorboat.
Motorboats make wakes. A canoe needs to meet a motorboat wake head on. Thinking fast, but moving too slow, I did not succeed in struggling out of the pillows, putting down the banjo, grabbing the paddle and reaching the stern in time to heave to, or whatever you say, before the wake hit me broadside. Amazingly, I didn't quite go over. St. Paucibus, who watches over down-pickers, must have been doing his stuff.
But as soon as I got settled again, guess what. Apparently on the tranquil river of life there is always another motorboat. Why me, O Lord? Why me, St. Paucibus? I paddled to shore.
Like the song says, the good times are past and gone. I've decided the natural habitat of the old-time banjo is the woods. That's what you see in all the pictures (the other ones). You play for the birds and animals. And they like it too. You can't prove they don't.