(FORTUNE Magazine) – Last February, John Cleghorn, chairman of Canada's largest bank, ended what one newspaper had dubbed a "meteoric rise to the top." The time had come, he told reporters, "to learn to play the banjo."

Nothing says "dropping out of society" like learning the banjo. For good reason: The instrument has remained true to its mountain heritage. Okay, for some that invokes images of inbred hicks plucking out Deliverance songs, but to others the banjo symbolizes a simpler, slower time--a musical version of a Norman Rockwell painting.

The craving for that sound is clearly growing. The soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, full of bluegrass and mountain tunes, was Amazon's top seller of 2001 and is still in the upper half of Billboard's charts. Attendance at the country's 500 bluegrass festivals is higher than it's been in years. And Deering Banjo, the largest banjo maker in North America, says it has nearly sold out its inventory through May 2002. "People are returning to family values," explains a Deering spokesperson.

The time has come, it seems, for us all to learn the banjo. Which is what drove me to a weeklong workshop run by Dwight Diller, a master player and itinerant Mennonite minister out of West Virginia. For the past year I've been trying my hand at clawhammer banjo--a way of playing that basically involves striking the strings with an open fist; it predates bluegrass' syncopated, three-finger style.

Diller, a small man who comes across as much larger, is at the top of the clawhammer field. He speaks slowly, with pauses so pregnant they extend into the fifth or sixth trimester. There were four of us at the retreat, at a house once owned by Diller's mother near tiny Marlinton, W.Va. The other students were a Toronto dietitian, a retired social worker from outside Pittsburgh, and a radiologist from a town near Melbourne, Australia.

The first night, Diller laid out for us the bizarre quilt--as he saw it--of old-time music, the music descended from the original Scotch-Irish settlers of Appalachia, which eventually took on jazz and blues influences to create bluegrass. Wholesome and pure? The old-time world was riven with intrigue and paranoia. "You go to the festivals or read the glossy music magazines, and you won't see any West Virginians in there," Diller explained. "The powers that be won't let me play my music."

He traced the problem to the folk-revival 1960s, when outsiders came into the state, learned the tunes from the old locals, then pushed them out--colonization by fiddle. Now that the outsiders were "in," believed Diller, they were introducing all sorts of foreign influences: music from Kentucky, Virginia--even North Carolina!

Around midnight, Diller asked me whether I was a sound sleeper. I told him yes. He said we'd be sharing a room--him on a mattress on the floor, me in a bed a foot away.

After a breakfast of bagels or cereal, we'd drag folding chairs into the front yard. Diller would back his chair up against a large white pine, and we'd circle around. Then the playing would start. Actually, "playing" isn't the right word. Diller's obsession is with the rhythm of old-time music. So with our left hands clenched lightly around the banjo neck to mute the strings, we'd wail away with our right hands, aiming to produce the t-t-taa beat that distinguishes the West Virginia clawhammer.

The best I could get was t-tun-tuh, categorized by Diller as "Manhattan wimpy-ass." He took my wrist and flicked it up and down. "Loosen up!" he barked. As I tried, he looked at me. "How old are you?" I said I was 28. "You don't know you're going to die yet."

By day three, we had started to play songs. Or rather one song--"Poor Ellen Smith"--endlessly. We'd play for a half hour with Diller leading on the banjo or the fiddle and the rest of us t-t-taaing along. Then Diller would put down his instrument and analyze what we were doing wrong or simply explain the Zen of old-time: "Just when you think you got it, it's gone." We'd all nod. Then, hello, "Poor Ellen Smith."

By Friday we had moved on to a second song ("Cluck Old Hen"), explored the paradox of Diller's aiding in the destruction of West Virginia music by teaching it to outsiders ("This was God's idea, not mine," he said. "If I refuse to teach, I have to answer to God"), and been warned to avoid the outsiders' beloved chukka-chukka rhythm. On my three-hour drive to the airport, as I tried to figure out what use Diller's lessons would have back home, it occurred to me that he had put me in touch with family values. After all, it's the rare family that doesn't spend much of its time fighting.

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