NEWTOWN -- He's performed and recorded with musical giants ranging from Doc Watson and Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan and Guy Lombardo.
Several of his students went on to play with some of the best-known folk music groups of the 1950s and 1960s.
More than six decades after he first picked up the instrument, bluegrass banjo pioneer Roger Sprung, of Newtown, still displays the sense of humor that has made him an audience favorite at festivals and concerts where he continues to perform, along with the musicianship that twice during the 1970s earned him the title of "World Champion Five-String Banjo Player" in North Carolina and Virginia competitions.
Jazz and pop singer Kay Starr, who Sprung has also accompanied, used to say that the banjo was "a happy instrument," and Sprung, who last month celebrated his 80th birthday, is definitely a happy banjo player.
"I have a joke for everything," Sprung said.
Born and raised in Manhattan, Sprung, the son of a lawyer, started playing the piano at the age of seven, and developed a fondness for boogie woogie.
But that vanished in 1947, when his older brother took him to Washington Square Park to hear the folk musicians playing there.
"That was the end of the piano," he said.
He learned how to play the guitar, then the banjo, and within a few years, quit his job as a specifications writer for a radio tower company to devote full-time to playing and teaching music.
"I found out I could make twice as much money teaching music,' he said.
Among those who took lessons from Sprung were John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, Erik Darling of the Weavers and the Rooftop Singers, and Chad Mitchell of the Chad Mitchell Trio.
Beginning in 1950, Sprung began making yearly pilgrimages to the South, where he met with bluegrass musicians and developed the style that came to be known as progressive bluegrass. Full story.
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