Clifford Essex Boudoir Grand

[Daniel Joseph Sobol]

Hello List--i just received a banjo purchase on Ebay from a seller in Memphis, TN. With the help of materials discovered on this list I have identified it as a Clifford Essex Boudoir Grand, all-wooden hoop, with rosewood neck and pot. The back of the headstock is stamped with the number 1552, which according to some sources here should date it to 1931-32, though others seem to disagree with that system.

It's quite a rare and special banjo, though there are many quirky details--clearly it has been modified a great deal over the last 90+ years. Here are some photos:

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As you can (I hope) see in these shots, the banjo has two bizarre features that I've never seen on a CE product: the coordinator rods in place of the usual dowel-stick (or perch-pole as you call it!), and that strange wooden flange. The outside of the pot had been routed for a bracket band, but instead of that there's this elaborate wooden flange-hoop encircling the area where the bracket band would have been.

I can't see a scar where the perch-pole would have gone, so that is a puzzle.a But there's some glue residue and damage to the purfling between the hoop and the tone ring section, so the whole thing may have been taken apart and put back together at some point, whether at the factory or later. Would that strange flange suggest the presence of a resonator, and if so what kind?

The tuners and tailpiece are also probably recent replacements, frets too most likely. There are four missing bits of inlay, three of the engraved diamonds and a section of one of the deep-sea creaturish things on the fifth fret. The skin head is an old Rogers, so possibly original, though after all that's been done to it otherwise it seems oddly delicate not to have replaced that too. Looking for input from the group about the banjo as a whole, and especially the eccentric features--how and why? Could some of these changes been made at the CE factory either before or after WWII, or are they likely the work of some shade-tree luthier on this side of the pond? What would be worth restoring, and how might one go about it?

Please no lowball offers in the "I'll take it off your hands for 50 quid" vein! That's not the help I seek...

Joseph

[Joel Hooks]

Okay, the rim is 100% not CE.  It looks to me like someone made it specifically for the orphan neck in attempt to somewhat copy the aesthetics.

While it might be a fine playing and sounding banjo, it is only a CE neck.