Fred Van Eps - Patrol Comique (1907)

Banjo solo "Patrol Comique" played by Fred Van Eps on Edison Gold Moulded Record 2627 (1907).

Thomas Hindley composed "Patrol Comique."

This remarkable banjoist was born in Somerville, New Jersey, on December 30 1878.

On his father's side he was a descendant of early Dutch settlers in New York's Mohawk Valley. His mother's lineage began in America with the emigration in the 1600s of a man named Hansen from Bergen, Norway.

His name was erroneously given as "Van Epps" at the turn of the century by Edison's company.

Van Eps first studied the violin at seven after being encouraged by his father, John Perry Van Eps, who worked as a watchmaker. When twelve, he became fascinated by the banjo upon hearing it played by a conductor for the Jersey Central Railroad, George W. Jenkins.

The father initially rebuffed his son's entreaties for a banjo but his mother finally purchased one for him and engaged Jenkins to teach Fred how to play. Because the conductor did not read music, his instructional technique consisted of playing his repertoire of songs over and over while showing the boy where to position fingers.

Van Eps moved with his family to nearby Plainfield in 1892 and in 1893, as he reported later in life, heard his first Vess L. Ossman cylinder, "The White Star Line March." Uli Heier and Rainer E. Lotz's The Banjo on Record: A Bio-Discography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993) shows that Ossman recorded that song around 1896 for Edison and Columbia.

To improve his playing by ear, Van Eps listened closely to cylinders, which he avidly collected. He told Jim Walsh that he learned to play the banjo as a boy by buying and studying Ossman's brown wax cylinders.

Van Eps recalled during an interview with Walsh in September 1955: "...I bought a Type M Edison two-minute cylinder phonograph. It cost me $100--a lot of money then--but I paid for it the next week by attaching 14 ear tubes, taking it to the Fireman's Fair and letting people listen at five cents a play. I've got those tubes yet that fit in your ears. Lots of people came up who had never heard a phonograph before. Mine was the first in Plainfield, which even then was quite a decent sized city. To tell the truth, the machine was something of a nuisance because it was so much of a curiosity. People would come to my home and ask to be allowed to listen to it..."

The machine enabled Van Eps to make records for himself. He noted, "I got my blanks from the [Edison] people--20 cents each. All the machines in those days had a shaving attachment. If you didn't like the results you simply shaved them off and tried again."

After experimentation with home recording, Van Eps approached Edison's National Phonograph Company in West Orange in 1897. He was hired for regular Wednesday afternoon engagements at the studio and paid the standard fee for the period--$1 for each round, which was a sizable increase over the $16 a week he had been earning repairing watches at his father's business.