The Amazing Tommy Glynn(1872-1897)

Within the last week or so, it seems that I've been able to gather a heap more of information on that mysterious banjoist Tommy Glynn, and before delving into this new information we begin with a tintype:

This AMAZING  image came up when I did some digging on Glynn, and I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT THIS EXISTS! It's Glynn in the mid-1880's. 

It is for images like this that I always dig through every pile of cabinet cards and tintypes that I spot anywhere, because, if you're not looking carefully, you'll miss something as extraordinary as this. For all we know, someone will find a tintype like the one above from 1886 of Fred Hylands with a fiddle! 

Glynn was very similar to all of the other banjoists that he was in harsh competition with in the late-1880's, though he would have been practically a child up against 21 year old Vess Ossman and almost 20 year old Ruby Brooks, who were just as willing to win all the awards they could flaunt around on their silk coat lapels. Glynn's similarity begins with his talents sprawling from a young age, and inevitably turning him into a prodigy, much like Ossman, though Ossman had to go through some years of being a nomad banjoist to get to where he went. Glynn had earned a reputation it seems by 1890, and infamously, so did Ossman, but in the years before these banjoists(some of them) were able to be recorded by the major phonograph companies, Glynn reigned supreme as the future of famous banjoists, since he was writing legitimate music for the instrument by that time, at not even 20. It seems that since he isn't well-known particularly by modern banjo scholars, he must have been not nearly as flamboyant as Ossman, which must have earned him respect as a musician and man, but not exactly in terms of his success as a banjoist. He probably won many of the banjo contests that were so hotly spoken of in the early 1890's, but of course Ossman won over many of the judges somehow, even if Glynn before the contests was indeed considered the nation's best banjoist. But just as Charlie Judkins dropped on me, I seems very strange that they didn't bother to record the so-called "best" performers of their field, and Glynn would be among these unfortunately never recorded greats. Many of the early banjo contest competitors were recorded at some point, but most of them weren't, and sadly, Glynn wasn't chosen over Ossman to make records in 1893-94. It's ever more unfortunate that he didn't make records because he easily COULD  have. Wouldn't have done this for very long, but would have done it in the first place anyhow. 

It seems to be a curse of some kind that many of these amazing banjoists had, and Glynn was the prime example of this, where they died quick and suddenly, at the height of a career with astronomic potential. Glynn is officially the youngest to have died in all of these old recording studies I've done so far(after Glynn comes Banta by the way). Glynn died in May of 1897 after catching Typhoid fever, which is horrid, and really made my heart sink when reading that. Just as a factoid, to put that into perspective, Byron Harlan caught Typhoid fever in 1911 and almost died, but didn't, though it took several months to recover. It really is awful that Glynn caught it and died so quickly, perhaps right in the middle, or maybe even the beginning of an extremely successful career. 

Despite the competition, all these banjoists played each other's music and arrangements all the time, and the recordings that the few of them made are full of examples of this. Of course, now I find it a little strange that Ossman and Glynn were pictured together:

That seems a little strange now, and it seems like pairing them together for anything was asking for the chemicals to not mix right. The expressions on their faces alone can say something about them, and maybe that it probably didn't work as a duo for them. But maybe it did? It's hard to know, though Ossman was often hard to work with, and was infamous for such a thing. 

Of course there's no way we can actually hear Glynn play, but we can hear many of his arrangements played by his fellow contest banjoists, like Ossman, Brooks, Bacon, and even Van Eps. 

Speaking of Brooks:

Brooks is standing.(taken c.1894)

While writing this post, I've been listening to the few recordings that he made from 1897 to 1905, and his playing is very interesting to compare to that of Ossman. 

One thing about Brooks that makes you realise why he didn't beat out Ossman in those banjo contests, it because of the amount of mistakes he often played. Pretty much every one of the records of his out there have some kind of very audible mistakes, which isn't such a good thing when he played very quick. Brooks wasn't like Ossman, who always said "Banjoists much play metronomically", as Brooks clearly didn't learn to play the instrument in the same era or on the same terms as Ossman, and the evidence shows. His time was very pushy, and it makes the mistakes he played more often than they ought to be. Oddly enough, when Brooks made his Edison records, guess who his pianist was!

Banta. 

That's really hilarious if you think about it, because Banta was Ossman's official accompanist from 1892-1895ish. Banta is on most of( if not all) his recordings, and that adds a whole other level of awkwardness, with the whole Ossman thing. Brooks would have know this, just to make it ever more uncomfortable. 

Here are three fantastic examples of Brooks' recordings:

https://archive.org/details/CollectedWorksOfRubyBrooks

Glynn would have sounded much better than Brooks, in technicality, tone, and rhythm, he wasn't one of the best banjoists around for nothing. 

Hope you enjoyed this!