49 Fun Facts About Banjo

Which Muppet plucks a banjo while singing 'Rainbow Connection' at the start of The Muppet Movie?

Kermit the Frog sings it alone in his swamp; the songwriters modelled it on 'When You Wish Upon a Star' to show he had an inner life, and it earned an Oscar nomination.

In which Stephen Foster song does the singer come from Alabama with a banjo on his knee?

'Oh! Susanna' spread through blackface minstrel troupes in 1848 and launched Foster's career, though rival publishers pirated it and printed it under other names.

Which West African lute with a short drone string is a likely relative of the banjo?

The akonting is a folk lute of the Jola people; Gambian scholar Daniel Jatta saw a banjo on American TV in 1974, heard his father's akonting in it, and later made its case to banjo historians.

Rhiannon Giddens's banjo opens which Beyoncé single, a 2024 chart-topper on the Hot 100?

'Texas Hold 'Em' made Beyoncé the first Black woman to top Billboard's country songs chart, days after an Oklahoma country station refused a request for it and then gave in to protesting fans.

What fruit did early Caribbean players cut in half to make the body of the banza, a forerunner of the banjo?

A calabash gourd got a goatskin nailed across it and three strings of agave fibre, a former Saint-Domingue planter wrote in 1810; one Haitian banza built this way survives in a Paris museum.

Which blackface performer from Appomattox is credited with popularising the five-string banjo in the 1830s?

Joel Walker Sweeney learned the banjo from Black musicians near his Virginia home, is the earliest performer known to have played it on stage, and toured America and Europe as its first star.

William Boucher of Baltimore, the first known commercial banjo maker, was already building which instruments?

Drums gave Boucher his method: from about 1845 he built banjo bodies as wooden hoops with the skin fixed by drum hardware, so they could be turned out alike in quantity.

Which Founding Father noted in the 1780s that enslaved Virginians played the 'banjar', an instrument 'brought hither from Africa'?

Thomas Jefferson wrote it in a footnote to Notes on the State of Virginia, and called the banjar 'the original of the guitar' because its strings matched the guitar's four lower ones.

Which war spread the banjo across America, as soldiers heard comrades play it?

The Civil War threw Northerners and Southerners, city men and country men, together; soldiers carried the banjo and its minstrel tunes home, and many of those tunes entered the Appalachian songbook.

Which Beatle learned his first chords on a banjo, taught by his mother, Julia?

John Lennon learned the banjo from his mother; she died when he was a teenager, a loss that marked his songwriting for years.

Which Grateful Dead founder began on the banjo and returned to it in the 1973 bluegrass band Old & In the Way?

Jerry Garcia learned banjo as a boy despite losing most of his right middle finger in a childhood accident, and Old & In the Way's live album became one of the best-selling bluegrass records.

S. S. Stewart and other 1880s makers pushed the banjo off the minstrel stage and into which setting?

The Victorian parlour was the goal: to make the banjo respectable, Stewart and others pushed European-style technique and built small, pearl-inlaid models for young ladies.

Which two four-string banjos emerged in the ragtime and jazz eras to cut through brass and reeds?

Tenor and plectrum banjos dropped the short fifth string and were strummed with a pick to be heard over the horns; once guitars grew loud enough, they took the banjo's place in jazz bands.

The four-string banjo is a relative newcomer but now a fixture of which folk tradition?

Irish players pick out jigs and reels note by note rather than strumming chords, and Barney McKenna of The Dubliners is credited with making a fiddle-like GDAE tuning their standard.

Which metal part sits on a banjo's wooden rim, directly under the head?

The tone ring arrived when early builders found that stretching the head over a metal ring gave clearer, brighter notes; many older banjos were built without one.

What is the plate on the back of some banjos that projects sound forward called?

A resonator works as a sounding board and makes the banjo louder, which is why bluegrass pickers, who must cut through a full band, fit one while old-time players often keep the mellower open back.

Where does a bluegrass banjo's short drone string start?

The 5th fret is where its tuning peg sticks out of the side of the neck; being shorter, the string is pitched above the rest, so the banjo's highest string sits next to its lowest.

What do many banjo players fix into the fingerboard at the seventh fret to capo the short fifth string?

Model-railroad spikes are tiny nails with a lopsided head: the string slips under one and is held against the fret, because an ordinary capo cannot reach a string that starts partway up the neck.

What is the most common five-string banjo tuning, especially in bluegrass?

Open G gets its name because the strings are tuned to a G chord, so strumming the banjo without fretting a single note already plays one.

In clawhammer style, how are the main strings struck?

Downward, with the back of the fingernail, is also how West African lute players strike their strings, one reason scholars trace the style, and the banjo itself, across the Atlantic.

What is another common name for the clawhammer style of banjo playing?

Frailing is the older way to play; when three-finger picking took over bluegrass in the 1940s, old-time musicians kept it alive.

Which bluegrass banjo veteran won his first Grammy for singing 'O Death' on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack?

Ralph Stanley took his banjo to the session, then laid it down and sang the old dirge with no accompaniment at all; the 2002 award was the first Grammy of his long career.

In whose band, the Blue Grass Boys, did Scruggs's three-finger banjo picking first reach a national audience?

Bill Monroe's band gave bluegrass its name; he hired Scruggs in 1945 to replace a clawhammer player who rarely soloed, and with that change the genre's classic sound fell into place.

With which guitarist did Scruggs form his famous duo after leaving the Blue Grass Boys in 1948?

Lester Flatt sang lead beside Scruggs for two decades; they split in 1969 because Scruggs wanted to play newer music with his sons, while Flatt wanted to stay with traditional bluegrass.

Which Scruggs instrumental, recorded in 1949, was revived by the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde?

'Foggy Mountain Breakdown' runs under the film's getaway chases, and the exposure put the 18-year-old recording on the Billboard charts in 1968.

Earl Scruggs's duo scored its first chart-topping hit with the theme to which TV sitcom?

The Beverly Hillbillies opened with 'The Ballad of Jed Clampett', which topped the country chart, and the two pickers turned up on screen in several episodes as old friends of the Clampetts.

Scruggs-style banjo is played with picks on which fingers?

Thumb, index and middle wear the picks while the other two fingers brace the hand on the head; instead of brushing across the strings as older styles did, each finger plucks a string of its own in quick succession.

What are 'rolls' in five-string banjo playing?

Right-hand picking patterns of eight notes per bar let a player keep an unbroken stream of notes rippling around the tune, the sound that makes bluegrass banjo instantly recognisable.

Whose 1948 manual How to Play the Five-String Banjo taught many folk-revival musicians the instrument?

Pete Seeger, who left Harvard in 1938, learned his banjo styles from players in the Appalachian mountains before he set any of it down on paper.

Why did a famous folk musician add three extra frets to create the 'long-neck' banjo?

To sing in lower keys: he had a luthier cut the neck of his banjo and splice in three more frets, so that every string could be tuned a minor third lower than usual.

A folk star's banjo read 'This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender', echoing the slogan on whose guitar?

Woody Guthrie's guitar carried the blunter 'This Machine Kills Fascists' from 1943; his friend's gentler reply went onto the head of every banjo he owned from 1952.

'Dueling Banjos' was made famous by which 1972 film?

Deliverance used the 1955 tune without crediting its composer, Arthur Smith, who sued Warner Bros. and won a settlement along with his name on the credits.

Who managed Earl Scruggs's duo and steered it toward college campuses, television and folk festivals?

His wife, Louise, took over the bookings and pushed the band toward college crowds and songs by writers like Bob Dylan, which kept it thriving while other bluegrass acts struggled against rock and roll.

Which banjo virtuoso was named by his father after the composers Bartók, Webern and Janáček?

Béla Fleck's father chose the names and then left when he was a baby; what drew the New York boy to the banjo was hearing Earl Scruggs pick a sitcom theme on television.

Which string band, formed in 2005 by three young Black musicians, won a Grammy for the album Genuine Negro Jig?

Carolina Chocolate Drops brought the Black string-band tradition to a new audience, and former members such as Rhiannon Giddens went on to lead what has been called a Black banjo renaissance.

Which comedian and lifelong banjo player created a prize for excellence in banjo and bluegrass in 2010?

Steve Martin played the banjo throughout his 1970s stand-up act, and in 2009 the man behind the novelty hit 'King Tut' released an album of his own banjo tunes that won the bluegrass album Grammy.

Which English comedian is the most famous player of the banjo ukulele, or banjolele?

George Formby strummed one through his comic songs and films and became Britain's most popular entertainer of the 1930s and 1940s; vaudeville players had wanted a ukulele loud enough for the stage.

Producer Glyn Johns had Bernie Leadon add double-time banjo to which 1972 Eagles debut single?

'Take It Easy' was already a strong song when Johns suggested the banjo; the band thought the idea odd, but Leadon played the part in a single take and Johns said it made the record different.

Which country star plays a six-string banjo, tuned like a guitar, on his records?

Keith Urban says he puts the hybrid on all his records, but it is no modern gimmick: Johnny St. Cyr was playing a six-string banjo on New Orleans jazz records in the 1920s.

On most modern banjos, what has replaced the animal skin once stretched over the body?

Plastic film, the polyester sold as Mylar, spares players the mounting and upkeep that real skin demands; some versions are even coated to look and sound like old calfskin.

Which British folk-rock band, with Winston Marshall on banjo, won the 2013 Album of the Year Grammy for Babel?

Mumford & Sons made the banjo a chart sound and then dropped it: the instrument does not appear at all on their 2015 follow-up, Wilder Mind, which turned to electric rock.

How does the short fifth string of a zither banjo reach the peghead?

Through the neck: the string runs in a small tube under the fingerboard and comes out partway up, so every tuning peg can sit on the peghead; the design caught on mainly in Britain and Europe.

Which 1929 jug-band tune by banjo player Gus Cannon topped the pop chart for the Rooftop Singers in 1963?

'Walk Right In' reached No. 1 for the folk trio 34 years after Cannon's Jug Stompers cut it for the 'race records' market, and the hit brought the old Memphis banjo man back before the public.

Earl Scruggs's banjo picking first reached a national audience on which radio show?

The Grand Ole Opry crowd made a sensation of the new picking at once: the warmest ovations went to the banjo breaks, and the weekly broadcasts carried the sound far beyond Nashville.

The melodic bluegrass banjo style is named after which player?

Bill Keith worked out how to pick fiddle tunes note for note, something the older Scruggs-style picking could not do, and the style took off after he joined a leading bluegrass band in 1963.

Banjoist Dave Guard co-founded which group, whose 1958 hit 'Tom Dooley' helped set off the folk revival?

The Kingston Trio were scorned by 'serious' folk musicians, yet their record sales opened the industry's doors to the performers who followed, Bob Dylan among them.

Which three-stringed Japanese lute has a skin-covered body like a banjo's?

The shamisen's small square body is covered with skin front and back, traditionally cat skin on the finest instruments; like the banjo it travelled, reaching Japan from China by way of Okinawa in the 16th century.

Which company made the Granada, the 1930s banjo Earl Scruggs played on his most famous recordings?

Gibson built it gold-plated; Scruggs got it from fellow picker Don Reno, had it rebuilt more than once over the decades, and in 2023 his family gave it to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Which Jamaican folk style, a forerunner of ska and reggae, uses the banjo as a lead instrument?

Mento put the banjo up front, strumming the rhythm and taking the leads, yet the instrument all but vanished from Jamaican music once ska and reggae arrived.