The word “banjo” usually isn’t synonymous with the American Dream. It’s more white picket fences than pickin’ parties that people want. Gary Filgate was different. All he wanted was to open up an acoustic instrument shop with guitars, mandolins and, of course, plenty of banjos.

Almost 10 years after it opened, Stratham’s Acoustic Outfitters Music Shop is expanding for the third time, and proving that passion and good old fashioned mom and pop charm still have a place in a Wal-Mart world.

Filgate is sitting amid paint cans and a little joint compound dust in one of Acoustic Outfitters Music Shop’s new music/teaching studios while we talk of beginnings. The space smells fresh and new, built to accommodate the growth of their music student clientele (at 100 students and climbing) and to host workshops and house concert style shows. Every first and third Sunday of the month from October through May, the shop has been hosting a casual bluegrass jam that attracts loads of people of all ages who come to play bluegrass, country and old time music. In the showroom, hundreds of beautiful, shiny acoustic instruments of every variety and price line the walls. Upright basses, fiddles, guitars, ukes—you name it. Usually you’d have to go to a city or big music town to find a store with such an impressive selection. It’s odd to think that such a thriving shop almost never happened.

“We went to a particular bank in Dover, and we had worked out a business plan,” says Filgate, who along with his wife Alison Magill approached some money lenders in 1996. “The fellow listened to us for about a half hour or 40 minutes, and then proceeded to basically ream me out for about 30 minutes about how he had six foreclosures on his desk and how it sounded like a pipe dream, how it was never gonna fly—they’d been in business since 1806, blah blah blah.”

Filgate grew up playing classical piano like his concert pianist mother, earning several awards on the instrument until Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway drove into his life. Their 1967 movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” with its banjo-filled car chase scenes, changed his life.

“The soul of the music just came out,” he says of hearing the banjo for the first time. “Every time I heard it, it gave me butterflies in my stomach. I’d say ‘Wow, there’s that sound again!’ I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t know what it was. I had never heard it before, and it just made me excited about the sound.”

Filgate is an easygoing fellow who, with his short blond hair and stocky build, still looks like the seasoned Coast Guard sailor that he was for eight years. After leaving the service, he settled into a job at Fiddler’s Choice, an acoustic music shop in Jaffrey. “I really liked it and I started hanging out there all the time,” he says. “Eventually they gave me a job.” After six years there, he wanted to run his own shop. When he was shot down by the banks, friend and fellow musician Brian Ashford believed in Filgate’s vision and put up the money to get the dream off the ground. It’s sweet vindication for Filgate now.

“I’d love to go back to the bank and show the guy our annual numbers,” he says with a laugh. “Crinkle that up, put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

Store manager Bob Valyou couldn’t be happier that the banker was wrong, either. Like Filgate at Fiddler’s Choice, Valyou is a customer turned store manager, going on five years now. The bespectacled 53-year-old stands in the back of the new performance room on Saturday, April 8, with his arms folded and a contented look on his face. There is a near-capacity crowd in the shop to watch and learn from finger-style classical guitarist Muriel Anderson, a world-touring artist with a slew of CDs and DVDs. The workshop/concert is the first of many that he and Filgate hope to host. Anderson takes questions from the guitar enthusiasts during the workshop, and they listen with rapt attention as she describes some technique or another in detail.

“It’s a great way to talk to people who do it every day for a living,” Valyou says. “Seeing these (performers) first hand and being able to talk to them is great.”

Valyou says the “grand opening” is a successful first step toward their vision of making the new space a “musical hub” for the region, a place for up-and-coming musicians to gather, play and learn from each other.

Valyou himself picked up the guitar for a second time in his early 40s. “I probably made more progress in that period than when I was younger,” he says. The ground he gained while older is something that serves his students now. He’s happy to see people pick up instruments, no matter how old they are when they do it.

“A lot of people are intimidated just to go into a music store anyway,” he says. “A lot of the people are older, and are kind of embarrassed about taking up (an instrument) at a later age because they don’t want to look foolish or inadequate.”

Valyou’s students range from students like Nottingham’s Karen Batchelder, who had taken guitar lessons in high school but only picked it up again when her husband Jeff decided to take piano lessons, to the rosy cheeked 10-year-old Ian Smith of Stratham, who sat in on the Anderson workshop.

“It was pretty fun,” says Smith, who sat in the front row with his own guitar on his knee, soaking up Anderson’s finger picking wizardry. “I’m used to normal picking though.” He’s studying rock and blues. “I’m just having fun learning different songs,” he says.

Other teachers include working musicians such as Grammy nominee and violinist/cellist Ward Dilmore, 95 North blues artist Bob Halperin, mandolin/ bouzouki whiz David Surette, and National Guitar Flatpicking Competition top five-er Lincoln Meyers.

“What we do here, is more like what music is,” says Valyou. “We’re not selling refrigerators and dryers here. We’re selling instruments of expression—passion.”

“When we first came to the plaza,” Filgate says with a smile, “we were a new business, and they told us about how most businesses go out in three months. Now we’re the second oldest tenants.”

Who says dreams aren’t made of banjos?