Bob Underwood, owner of Satellite Beach, FL’s Banjo Man’s Old Tyme Pickin’ Parlor (in the 1970s and ’80s), local bluegrass radio show personality, swimming pool builder (who built his own banjo-shaped pool), dancer, farmer, and patriarch of the Underwood family, died Wednesday, July 31, 2024, following a lengthy illness. He was just one month short of his 93rd birthday.
Consumed by numerous interests, Bob had a talent for turning his dreams into realities. First among his passions, Bob loved music. His business, Banjo Man’s Old Tyme Pickin’ Parlor, featured live bluegrass music performances, sold instruments and accessories, and offered music lessons.
Bob’s son, Leo, shared his father’s legacy.
“My father was born in Short Mountain, TN. There was a lot of old time music in that area, and his father played claw hammer banjo. He moved to Oak Ridge where he met my mother (his high school sweetheart), and they married in 1949. We moved to Florida in 1959, the year that I was born.
We used to go back and forth from Florida to Tennessee to visit my grandparents. In 1972, the town of Smithfield hosted the Fiddlers’ Jamboree on the Fourth of July. My dad took all six kids, and the whole bunch of us got hooked on bluegrass music. We would go every year. He and Mama traveled widely in a motor home to attend music festivals.
At the Jamboree, my dad hooked up with a man named James McKinney. He helped my dad purchase his first banjo. It was a Gibson Mastertone.”
Though he loved to pick, Bob avoided the limelight.
“He didn’t get out on the stage. We did a lot of front porch pickin’. Through the years, I picked up the mandolin and my brother, David, played guitar.”
Bob decided to share his love for bluegrass music in another way.
““Around 1975-76, my father owned a building for his swimming pool company. He renovated a section of it into a picking parlor with a seating capacity of about 50 and a really cool stage. All the woodwork was done with western cedar throughout the building. He had a house band and incorporated into the pickin’ parlor a retail store. The music store was in the front and the pickin’ parlor in the back. He sold instruments (banjos, mandolins, guitars, and fiddles) and accessories.
The house band that he had was a bunch of great pickers. One of the fellows was a banjo picker named Garland Shuping (who later passed away in 2000). He had played banjo with Jim & Jesse. He was a heck of picker. Dad hired him to run the house band. There was a fiddler, Eddie Kuntz; a guitarist/vocalist, first Rob English and then Bob Walters; and a bass player, Craig Kirk. Garland’s wife, Ruth, played tambourine and sang tenor. They worked out of the Pickin’ Parlor at Satellite Beach (playing 8:30-11:00 p.m. every Saturday night), and did a lot of gigs in the Melbourne, Florida area. He would hire them out.”
Garland’s former wife, elaborated…
“Garland and I moved down from West Virginia to Satellite Beach in September 1978. Banjo Man’s sold musical instruments, records, supplies, offered music lessons, and gave live performances every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night.
We were the house band. Garland was the manager. I worked the store and scheduled lessons. If bands were traveling through and needed a pick up gig, we had special performances. We hired Jim & Jesse, The Lewis Family, Don Reno, Alan Munde, and other excellent bands. All of our shows were always sold out. The acoustics were great.
Bob Underwood sponsored a bluegrass radio show on WYRL every Thursday night. He also sponsored a couple of television shows and a few bluegrass festivals. I remember Ben Eldridge was in the area one time and stopped by the store.
Banjo Man’s was a family-oriented experience. A lot of our audience was locals who were not familiar with bluegrass. They brought their families and came every week. Bob Underwood was the consummate host. He was an excellent dancer. He loved to clog. We sold soft drinks and snacks. We always had top notch musicians who gave lessons and performed with our band.”
Leo agreed.
“My father was a big promoter of bluegrass. He had things going on about every weekend. He had several big name bands there. He had The Lewis Family, Don Reno, Roland White, and some of the guys that played with Ralph Stanley. The city of Satellite Beach would never give Dad a permit to serve alcohol so it was a real family establishment. They sold popcorn and cold drinks.
A young man came with his parents to shows. His name was John Apfelthaler. John sat down in front of Garland and picked up everything that he did. Within no time at all, he became a tremendous picker as a little kid, and still is one today. For quite a few years, he taught lessons at Banjo Man’s. I am extremely honored for all the years that I got to play music with him.”
Apfelthaler recalled his relationship with Bob Underwood and how Banjo Man’s Pickin’ Parlor introduced him to a whole new genre of music.
“My family didn’t know what bluegrass was. Dad was a classic country fan. Our neighbor knew Bob and said we needed to go to Bob’s.
We went, and I was exposed to three-finger style banjo playing. I had only seen and heard Dixieland style. Bob MCed the show. We started going every week. I asked for a banjo and lessons from Garland at Banjo Man’s for my birthday. As I started to learn, Garland brought me up on stage as sort of a marketing tool.
Garland was going back on the road (to play music), so he started me giving banjo lessons at Banjo Man’s. I was 14. Bob was so encouraging. I taught there for seven years until the end of 1987 when I went to college.
I also took over banjo duty with the house band after Garland left. We changed the name to Banjo Man’s Bluegrass Review. After the music store closed, we continued to play and became Mill Creek.
While working for Bob, I got to meet lots of folks in the music business like Eddie Adcock & IInd Generation and Raymond Fairchild. I am thankful to Bob for all those opportunities. He was a wonderful man, always cheerful, always a smile on his face. He was always telling stories. He loved music and sharing it with others. Logan Lobdell bought Bob’s Stelling banjo. He played that banjo on Cutter & Cash’s recent tour.
Leo elaborated on another of his father’s ventures.
“Dad started a radio program in Melbourne, the Banjo Man’s Old Tyme Jamboree. It was on a local FM radio station, WYRL. They called it ‘Big Y Country,’ and he would spin albums for an hour on Thursday nights (7:00-8:00 p.m.). It was really special for us. We were turning our friends onto that bluegrass sound.
My father also had a janitorial service called Red Cap Cleaning Service. I had a big building that I would clean after school, and it had the most awesome sound system. No one was there in the evenings and would always tune in my dad’s radio program. We had it blasting!
His radio program was a big hit in the ’70s and ’80s. My sister can remember our dad coming in and hustling to get all his records together to head to the radio station and not run late. One of the fondest memories that I have of my dad’s radio program was at the end of every program, he ended it with Bill Monroe playing Rawhide in the background, and he would say, ‘This is your old buddy Uncle Bob saying, Cut the cornbread, Mama. Uncle Bob’s a truckin’.’
He was an extreme lover of banjos. We were in the swimming pool business and he loved the banjo so much that he decided to build a banjo-shaped swimming pool. It was an on-going project. My mother didn’t care what shape it was, she just wanted a pool because we lived in Florida and it was hot! We went to work on it.
We used his Gibson Mastertone and scaled it out with a scale ruler. We turned an eighth of an inch scale into feet. It worked out to be 72 feet long. The resonator is 32 feet wide. Up where the tuning pegs would be is a spa. It’s all tile. The resonator part is one inch round white penny tile. The pool is 10 feet deep in the resonator. Where the neck is, it’s black tile with silver tile that makes the frets. It’s quite a unique pool. It’s the only one in the entire world like it. It’s been in quite a few different publications.
I can tell you I’ve seen airplanes fly over his house, and you see it circle around to see that banjo pool again.”
Banjo Man’s Pickin’ Parlor had a unique restroom, too.
“It was kind of comical. Garland came up with the idea. They used the copy machine of the pool company and they’d lay an album on the copy machine and print a copy. Throughout the entire bathroom was wallpaper of black and white photo copies of all these different albums. I thought it was right unique, at least in the men’s room. If you were standing at the urinal or sitting on the commode, right in front of you was a picture of Garland Shuping.”
North Carolina mandolinist, collector, and former band mate of Shuping, Tom Isenhour recalled…
“I played at Banjo Man’s Old Tyme Pickin’ Parlor one time in the mid ’80s. I knew he sold pool equipment, collected banjos and vintage cars. [He was a] nice guy. They had the coolest bathrooms. He Xeroxed bluegrass LP covers and then used them for wallpaper for all the walls in the bathrooms.”
The Pickin’ Parlor was finally overtaken by the pool company.
Leo explained…
“We have the space program right next to us. Brevard County started booming like crazy and the swimming pool industry was going bananas. We were building a lot of pools. My father felt the swimming pool industry was going to support our family more than the music. We needed the building space. He tapered the Pickin’ Parlor off in about 1988. He had it going about 13 to 15 years. We had a lot of fun.”
A pioneer and leader in the swimming pool construction industry, Bob was inducted into the Swimming Pool Hall of Fame in 1989. He also served many roles in the Rotary Club, and in 2024 was recognized for being a Rotarian for 70 years.
Former Banjo Man’s house band mate, Bob Walters, reflected…
“Around 1978-1979, I started working for Uncle Bob Underwood (as he was very affectionately known) as a member of the house band at his place of great music called Banjo Man’s Old Tyme Pickin’ Parlor. Initially, I was in the house band with Garland Shuping & Wild Country, and then for more years as Banjo Man’s Bluegrass Review.
The place he built was acoustically perfect! In the many years I worked for Bob, I respected him as a very kind, compassionate, and keen lover of our music, bluegrass. He loved to pick the banjo and would often kick up with his Tennessee two-step at our shows, which was a definite crowd pleaser. Bob used to broadcast our shows and interview us on his weekly radio show, Uncle Bob’s Bluegrass Jamboree!
I consider Bob a special friend, who took our group to play two shows at Opryland during Fan Fair. He later took us in the studio to cut an album called From Banjo Man’s to Opryland. I was thrilled to be a part of that effort which Bob afforded me with Banjo Man’s Wild Country, and to have our pictures taken at Banjo Man’s for the album cover.
Everyone knew and loved the Banjo Man, Uncle Bob Underwood. I was blessed to play at his home many times and get to know his beautiful family, and later play bluegrass with his two sons, David and Leo, in my band, Mill Creek, for many years. They don’t come any finer than this Tennessee Gentleman, Bob Underwood.
Rest in peace in ‘bluegrass heaven,’ Uncle Bob! You’ll be pickin’ and grinnin’ in the Angel Band! He’s with Althea now in Paradise.
Thank you Bob, my bluegrass friend! Gone, but never forgotten.”
As his earthly life ended, Bob was surrounded by his talented children and many friends. They sang and played music for him. Bob’s wife of 73 years, Althea Grant, preceded him in death in 2022. Survivors include six children: Robert Michael (Zilpha), Calvin Grant, William Albert, David Gregory, Leo Grant (Cindy), and Joy McKelvey (George); eight grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday Aug. 10, 2024, at the First Baptist Church of Indialantic. Memorial donations can be made to:
Rotary Club of Indialantic Foundation
P.O. Box 33134
Indialantic, FL 32903
…or online.
R.I.P., Bob Underwood.
