James F. Bollman ’68

When James F. Bollman ’68 was four years old he started collecting old, burnt-out light bulbs. He kept them in cardboard boxes with separate compartments. “This was probably classic anal retentive behavior brought on by my adoption at infancy,” Bollman explains.

During his adolescence, he collected toy soldiers, coins, stamps, and complete runs of comic books and magazines, and as a teenager, sports cars. “There was some kind of order to collecting,” he recalls.

Bollman also had an interest in music. His musical journey started with the guitar, moved to the piano, and then to banjos, which sparked his interest most. “My mother found an old ukulele around the house, restrung it and tuned it for me - my first string instrument. She told me she played a banjo-ukulele in the ‘flapper’ era,” he says.

Bollman’s fascination with the banjo grew when his cousin bought an antique British“zither” banjo. He had to have the ornate and intricately designed instrument, so he traded his Dinky Toy collection, a brand of lead cars and trucks, for the banjo. At the time, he thought it was a great trade; however, today the banjo is worth nothing and the Dinky Toys are a valuable collector’s item. “Go figure,” Bollman laughs.

Nonetheless, for him the banjo was worth much more anyway. In fact, he devoted his life to researching, collecting, fixing and dealing them. Known in the collecting world as the go-to guy for 19th century open-back banjos, he even co-wrote a book with Philip Gura, a professor at North Carolina University, called America’s Instrument: The Banjo in the 19th Century. A vibrant book full of drawings, black and white photographs and color prints, the book received the ASCAP“Deems-Taylor” award in 2000.

This “go-to guy” first began his quest for old banjos in the late 1960s when he decided he wasn’t interested in going into the family business, a hat factory named George W. Bollman and Company in Adamstown, Pa.

Bollman and a friend would look for banjos at antique shops and auctions, fix them up and sell them at flee markets. His favorites were made during the “golden age,” between 1800-1910. These banjos were made with natural materials, natural wood and fancy shells such as mother of pearl.

In 1974, mixing business with pleasure, Bollman and several friends opened The Music Emporium in Cambridge, Mass., one of the oldest fretted instrument shops in the country.

Throughout the years, Bollman’s work on the banjo has been published in magazines, books and featured in museum exhibits in Massachusetts, New York, Washington, D.C., and universities all over the United States. In 1984, he was a major consultant and primary contributor to the first museum exhibit celebrating the banjo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Compton Gallery called “Ring The Banjar.”

But he’s not just a collector and historian. He’s also a musician. Bollman has played the banjo and banjo-ukulele in several bands specializing in American traditional mountain music called “old time.” “It’s sort of pre-bluegrass stuff; the rich fiddle traditions of Appalachia and other parts of the rural south, which had its heyday from the early Scots-Irish frontier settlers through the Civil War and pretty much ending by the 1930s and 1940s, except in isolated pockets of the south,” Bollman says. A member of the band Roustabout for more than 15 years, he plays at square dances and festivals all over the U.S.
Although he is recently retired from his work with The Music Emporium, Bollman is still buying and selling, trading and going to auctions in search of vintage instruments.

In an article “Blessed with Stuff and Friends” by Alice Gerrard published in The Old-Time Herald, Bollman reflects, “If I was the only one who could look at these things and enjoy them, and they were going to be worthless when I went to sell them, I would probably still put the time and money and energy into it because I love them.”

– Caitlin A. Scribner ’07