Click here to watch a video of Made in the South artist Chuck Lee, narrated by G&G Editor in Chief Sid Evans.

Chuck Lee was enjoying a leisurely saturday afternoon in small-town Ovilla, Texas, when he heard the phone ring in the next room. He didn’t notice his wife Tammy’s excitement as she spoke into the receiver, and certainly didn’t believe her when she peered around the corner and exclaimed that Béla Fleck, arguably the world’s best banjo player and winner of thirteen Grammy Awards, was on the other end of the line. “At first I wondered who was playing a trick on me,” Lee says. “But then Fleck described one of my banjos perfectly, and I knew it was him.” Fleck was calling to see if Lee would make a custom banjo for him. “I thought his banjos had a big, warm, beautiful tone,” Fleck says.

Getting a call from a mega music star to make a custom banjo wasn’t always in the cards for Lee, who spent thirty years of his professional life as a plumbing contractor. But as fate would have it, a financially strapped plumbing customer changed all that in the nineties when he paid Lee with a banjo for fixing his kitchen sink.

“I’d always wanted to play the banjo but never took the time to pursue it, and here was somebody willing to hand me one,” he remembers.  Somewhere along the way, Lee also discovered clawhammer music, the old-time form of banjo picking with a distinct sound that hails from the Appalachian Mountains. “That was it for me,” he says. “I knew that was my music, my style.”

In 2000, Lee ordered a custom banjo from a prominent banjo craftsman in the Midwest, but two years later he was still on a waiting list. Undeterred, he realized the inconvenience was also a business opportunity. In a matter of months, Lee built a workshop and taught himself to make banjos one piece at a time. His first year out, he sold thirty-five. “We were shocked we sold any that first year,” he says. Today he’s constructed hundreds of banjos—and has a forty-instrument waiting list.

Each banjo takes three months of intensive work to create, with custom work starting at $1,800 and moving to upwards of $5,000, depending on the intricacy of the design. The first step—building the neck, where a musician’s fingers will work their magic—is critical. He uses cherry, walnut, and maple, carefully carving the delicate neck on a band saw. “I like the ways those woods smell, how they feel, their sounds,” he says. The rest is all handwork, including a final polish from Tammy, who buffs the piece with steel wool and wax to bring out the natural grain.