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- Body shape: Round
- Top: Skin
- Back: Open or resonator
- Bridge: Floating
- Frets: Fixed
What you do is, you take a tenor banjo (many prefer a short scale 17 fret tenor, but that's not mandatory) and tune it down a full fourth to G-D-A-E, transforming its loud-n-clear tone to a deep and mellow growl. You can do this with standard tenor banjo strings, but I'd recommend some heavier ones. There are special "Irish tenor banjo" string sets available, but if you have to put a set together from single strings, you could try something like 040-030-020-012.
As far as I know, nobody (but me that is ;-) has actually played blues with this tuning. It's a relatively recent invention and has yet to caught on outside the Irish traditional circuit where it originated.
Hopefully that will change, though. The GDAE tuning is suitable for much more than jigs and reels and hornpipes.
For the blues musician the Irish banjo offers a mellow, growling tone (not unlike a plectrum banjo) and an extended bass range (only the guitar-banjo goes deeper).
And anything you can play on a standard tuned tenor you can do on an Irish tuned instrument too. You don't get as much volume, and the range is shifted ownwards, but for blues these might not be disadvantages - quite the contrary!