Career
Okie's banjos were entirely hand-made using his custom 'block pot' technique, which consisted of turning out a glued together ring of wood, usually walnut or maple, or a combination thereof. They are heavier than most, with a slightly wider neck (Okie claims this was favored by the guitar players he was trying to convert to banjo) and often the peghead is inlaid with a variety of shapes and symbols that are Okie signatures - a tall cowboy hat, claw hammer or double claw hammer, and a crescent moon with star.
Allen Hart uses an Okie Adams banjo on his "Old Time Banjo" album, playing in the claw-hammer style Okie favored and encouraged.
Okie was a consistent presence on the West Coast folk festival circuit, and his son Jim 'Okie Jr.' Adams plays and competes often, wielding his father's prized banjos. Always a teacher, Okie's generosity touched and inspired many musicians and banjo makers, among them Greg Deering, founder of Deering Banjo company who recently stated that he'd produced and sent out over 60,000 banjos from his workshop and "there was a part of Okie Adams in every single one."
He was also an accomplished race-car component maker, known for the Okie Adams "drop axle" he developed whilst working as a welder in 'blairs' automotive of Pasadena during the 1960s.
Read more about this topic: Okie Adams
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
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“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)