The Life He Picked: Longtime 7 Mile Banjo Star Franny Green & His ‘Salad Days’
You need to be careful when you use the term “salad days” around Franny Green, the onetime banjo wizard who was a summertime music star at the Jersey Shore for the better part of 20 years.
Going by the strict definition of the idiomatic Shakespearean expression, “salad days” refers to a youthful and innocent time in a person’s life.
But that’s where Shakespeare and Green part ways. Green has been fortunate to have experienced two sets of salad days. Today, at age 70, Green has spent the past 15 years turning mountains of vegetables, pasta and potatoes into various commercial-sized salads that are sold in local supermarkets, delis and even casinos.
Save a one-night stand two years ago, Franny Green hasn’t played a music gig in 16 years, with or without his Banjo Band. He’s the owner and operator of a commercial food manufacturing business in Pleasantville called Salad Chef.
Fingers that once carefully operated a big crane on the Philadelphia waterfront, loading and unloading container ships – his day gig for three decades – and also picked out great songs on the banjo, now entrusted to a marginally healthier lifestyle by making all kinds of tasty salads.
He figured after 33 years as a dockworker and close to a lifetime in the music business, he needed a change of scenery. And even though a Philadelphia restaurant venture in the late 1980s proved less than successful, Green was somehow still attracted to the culinary world, which is how he ended up living a second set of salad days.
But we’re getting way ahead of ourselves here, because none of this would have been possible without the music of Franny Green and His Banjo Band, which was formed in the early 1970s.
As a young musician who could play banjo with the best in the business, Green – first working with a pianist, then with his seven-piece Banjo Band – became a wildly popular summertime attraction in the hot-spot barrier-island clubs mostly in lower Cape May County.
And for a dozen or so years, he ruled the musical roost at the Princeton Hotel in Avalon. He became such a popular and bankable fixture there that owner Phil Matalucci built him his own room – Franny Green’s Banjo Room – where he and the band could pack as many as 600 people a night into the joint.
Although he was synonymous, for a time, with summer entertainment in Avalon, it was actually just one of several career jumping-off points for the talented musician.
“I was really more of a Wildwood guy,” Green says during a break from creating a giant tub of potato salad.
The Wildwoods was where Green’s family vacationed when he was a kid. When he became a professional entertainer, he spent several summers in North Wildwood’s Angelsea section, where he and his banjo band were regulars at the old Red Garter nightclub.
People loved hearing and singing along to Green and his band. But it was the sing-along part of the gig that eventually caused Green to take stock of what he wanted out of his music career.
“When you have something like a sing-along band, you get tired of that real quick. I’m surprised I lasted there as long as I did,” Green remembers. “And Jimmy Kane, the owner of the Red Garter, he could see it, too. He knew I wanted to go a different route. I wanted to get into more Dixieland music, I wanted to do dance music, more up-to-date songs.”
Still in his mid-20s, Green discovered Avalon and Seven Mile Beach when some friends rented a summer home there. By this time, Green was dividing his time gigging a few nights a week at the Red Garter and a couple of nights at the old Longport Inn.
He remembers visiting his Avalon friends one Wednesday – his only day off – and they all ended up at the Princeton, where it was amateur night. That’s when he met Matalucci, and one of Green’s friends told the owner that Green played a mean banjo.
Matalucci asked Green to perform on amateur night. Green tried to beg off, saying it wouldn’t be fair for a professional musician with his skills to compete against arm-chair artists. But Matalucci persisted.
“One of the guys knew my banjo was in the trunk of my car, because I kept it with me all the time,” he says. “So, he got it and I got up (on stage) and played a couple songs and really got the place going crazy.”
Matalucci talked Green into working the Princeton on Wednesdays, his one night off each week. The rest became Seven Mile entertainment history and lore.
For a time, Green and the Princeton were synonymous. People packed the place every time he performed, which is when Matalucci decided to build Green his own room.
This would probably be a good place to mention that while music was a full-time job for Green, he also had his day gig. Green came from a long line of dockworkers, so when he was 16 he joined the union and signed on to work as a longshoreman on his native Philadelphia waterfront.
He eventually became a crane operator, and he remained at the Packer Avenue docks until he was permanently disabled by a shoulder injury, ending his waterfront career after 33 years.
Most of the time he was doing that, he was playing gigs at the Jersey Shore or even along the Delaware River.
He and Matalucci parted ways professionally in the 1980s, when Matalucci – keeping up with musical trends of the day – decided disco could be more profitable than Dixieland. He turned the Banjo Room into a disco, and Green, who’d become familiar with the Avalon crowd, went to the opposite end of the borough and spent three years working at the old Concord Hotel.
But trends don’t usually last. As disco fizzled, Matalucci began looking to repurpose his nightclub.
“He called me one day and said he wanted to do something different with the [disco] room, and would I consider putting the [banjo] band back together,” Green recalls. “So, he turned it back over to the Banjo Room, and I stayed with him for two summers.”
After that second summer, Green decided to become his own boss. He bought a place in Philadelphia, named it Franny Green’s Restaurant and Pub, and began to learn the restaurant business.
Just to keep the rust away, he capitalized on the name he’d built for himself as a summertime star at the Jersey Shore by performing in his own joint.
He bailed on that business in the late 1980s, right around the time some friends grabbed the catering contract for a Delaware River cruise operation aboard a recreated paddlewheel steamer. They hired him to entertain during the 75-minute cruises, usually lunchtime trips with groups of seniors.
“So I’d start my day by going down to Packer Avenue (docks), get up on the ship, run the crane for two hours and then my partner would come up and relieve me,” he says, recalling the routine by rote, as though he’d just done it yesterday.
“I’d drive up to Pier 19, right up Delaware Avenue, go onto the Liberty Bell (paddle wheeler) and go into the gallery, change into my striped vest and straw hat and play a senior citizens lunch trip,” he says, adding one slightly ironic touch: “Most of the time, we’d [cruise] past the [cargo] ship I was working on. I did this hundreds of times.”
Sometimes, the Liberty Bell would also have a dinner cruise booked. So, Green would repeat the process twice in one day: two shifts on the crane, two banjo cruises on the Delaware.
Green hadn’t considered any of this would be possible when he first picked up the banjo when he was just 9. Learning the instrument, and later the guitar, was seemingly effortless. It came naturally to Green. There was one reason above all others that drove Green to succeed on the banjo: As a kid, he’d always wanted to march with a string band in the Mummers Parade on New Year’s Day.
As he began teaching himself how to play, he found himself hanging out with members of Fralinger String Band, who taught him some of their tricks of the trade.
In 1958, when he was just 11, Franny Green marched down Broad Street as an official member of the Fralinger String Band. Later that year, he accompanied the band on a tour of Cuba.
Green left his longshoreman job in the mid-1990s when he became disabled during an accident climbing down a crane ladder. Unable to work the crane, he decided to get back into music on a full-time basis. He put together a trio and began playing in the lobby of the Showboat casino. The trio turned into a Dixieland band, part-time turned into a full-time gig and he ended up staying with Showboat for eight years.
But in 2002, Green finally hit the musical wall.
“I got tired out of it, and I wanted to get out of the music racket,” he says. “But I didn’t really think of getting into the food business, because I really hated the restaurant business.”
But Salad Chef, which was for sale, held an intrigue for Green. It was a flourishing concern so, like practically everything else in his life, Green didn’t just stick his toes in the water – he took the full plunge and bought the company.
Now, Green thinking of calling it a career. He’s ready to put this second set of salad days in the past, and his Salad Chef company is for sale.
Musically, it isn’t likely the public will hear Green’s banjo any time soon.
“I’ve developed bad arthritis in [my hands],” he says. That’s a painful condition for the average person, let alone one who relies on lightening-quick hand motions to make a banjo sing.
But Green doesn’t seem to have many regrets about his interesting careers that have taken him from one of the nation’s toughest waterfronts to the sunshine and seaside playgrounds of the Jersey Shore, where he was a major summer star and played the best rooms on the islands.
Green seemed especially proud of his reputation as a musician and a bandleader who never dogged it on stage, played as hard as he could and expected that same dedication and delivery from the musicians he hired to be part of Franny Green and His Banjo Band.
“I was always known as a hard player, I [didn’t] let up,” he says, before adding with a sardonic laugh that there was a reason why some musicians didn’t like working with him:
“That’s because they knew were gonna have to play their [butts] off if they wanted to play in [my band].”
