In my many miles of traveling each year, I sometimes stumble upon a jewel in the banjo world that I get excited about. I see so many places and so many people that it takes a lot these days to make a place stand out, but that¹s what happened last March when I got to the Mountain Music Shoppe in Shawnee, Kansas. Shawnee, a suburb of Kansas City, is (I would have thought) a pretty unlikely place to find a mecca of banjos and old time music. But that is exactly what I found.

Mountain Music is owned and run by Jim Curley and his mom, Betty. Jim seems to run the place, and Betty keeps after the business odds and ends. I think Betty has a hand in running Jim also. And Jim¹s wife, Jennifer, is likely to be on the scene too, as well as a young'un or two. It's not a large store by any means, but it has got the largest selection of banjos I have seen in one place in a very long time.

Go to next page