Tubaphone Deluxe banjo, serial no. 51577

By 1890, Boston had established itself as the manufacturing center of the highest quality banjos in America. Foremost among Boston banjo makers, the A. C. Fairbanks Company crafted some of the most technically innovative and finely decorated banjos of the Nineteenth Century. The Vega Company acquired Fairbanks after a factory fire in 1904 and five years later introduced the "Tub-A-Phone" banjo, the last in a line of successful, acoustically improved models including the Electric and Whyte Laydie. With its extensive engraved pearl inlays and ivory binding on the fingerboard and peghead, engraved gold-plated rim and hardware and a luminous Mother of Pearl cap on the bottom edge of the rim, the Tub-a-Phone Deluxe was Vega’s highest-grade non-custom banjo.


By 1923, when this Vega Tub-a-Phone Deluxe banjo was produced, the five-string banjo craze was over, and, with the emergence and popularity of jazz, four-string banjos had virtually replaced five-string banjos. Played with a plectrum and with large resonators to amplify the sound, four-string tenor and plectrum banjos were more suited to jazz bands than four-string banjos played fingerstyle. By the end of the decade, large body guitars in turn replaced plectrum banjos as a key rhythm instrument in jazz ensembles.


Whereas earlier five-string banjos were decorated with Victorian design motifs, the engraved decoration on this Tub-a-Phone Deluxe banjo is in the Art Deco style, a change in popular aesthetic that reflected the birth of the Jazz Age. (Peter Szego, 2023)