Andy Chase

There's a nice article about Pete Wernick in this week's Denver Post (linked for now, but it will probably be dead within a week or two), who is fairly well known in bluegrass banjo circles.

Part of the article talks about how, after earning a doctorate from Columbia, he pretty much turned his back on academia and has made his living playing, teaching, and writing about banjo ever since.

We Americans love our stories of people who have "left the rat race to pursue their passion", yet they always seem to be told with a jealous undertone:

"Don't you wish you were interested enough in something other than this week's episode of American Idol to want to quit your crappy job and pursue it?"

I'm sure a lot of these career sea-changes are not as spontaneous as they are sometimes portrayed; If you look far enough back in my employment history you'll see that I went from special effects shopmonkey to web designer in a single bound... but that was after several years of building web sites in my spare time for the express purpose of getting into web design as a career.

I am very, very interested in lutherie, but I'm not going to get manic and quit my proverbial dayjob anytime soon, if ever. The building of instruments is one thing... making a living at it is quite another. At the same time, I am not going to resign myself to a lifetime of pushing bits around because it's my most marketable skill right now.

Tagged:

• banjo
• lutherie
• career
• deepthoughts