Banjo Trivia
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49 free Banjo trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Banjo trivia follows an instrument from West African gourd lutes to Grammy stages. Enslaved Africans built the first banzas in the Caribbean and American South from calabashes and goatskin; a Virginia minstrel named Joel Sweeney took the instrument on stage in the 1830s and is credited with the short fifth string; by 1866 New York had an estimated ten thousand banjos and the country was in the grip of 'banjo mania'. This quiz covers the etymology and the akonting, the minstrel, classic and Jazz Age eras, the difference between five-string, tenor and plectrum banjos, clawhammer versus three-finger picking, the reentrant tuning and the fifth-string capo, the resonator and tone ring, and the twentieth-century revival: Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe, Foggy Mountain Breakdown and The Beverly Hillbillies, Pete Seeger's long-neck banjo and its slogan, Dueling Banjos and Deliverance, Béla Fleck's Grammys, Steve Martin's prize, George Formby's banjolele and the tenor banjo in Irish sessions. Easy questions suit anyone who has heard a bluegrass roll; the expert tier is for pickers. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the banjo, its players and its styles, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Muppet plucks a banjo while singing 'Rainbow Connection' at the start of The Muppet Movie?
Kermit the Frog
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.
Q 02In which Stephen Foster song does the singer come from Alabama with a banjo on his knee?
'Oh! Susanna'
'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.
Q 03Which West African lute with a short drone string is a likely relative of the banjo?
The akonting
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.
Q 04Rhiannon Giddens's banjo opens which Beyoncé single, a 2024 chart-topper on the Hot 100?
'Texas Hold 'Em'
'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.
Q 05What fruit did early Caribbean players cut in half to make the body of the banza, a forerunner of the banjo?
A calabash gourd
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.
Q 06Which blackface performer from Appomattox is credited with popularising the five-string banjo in the 1830s?
Joel Walker Sweeney
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.
Q 07William Boucher of Baltimore, the first known commercial banjo maker, was already building which instruments?
Drums
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.
Q 08Which Founding Father noted in the 1780s that enslaved Virginians played the 'banjar', an instrument 'brought hither from Africa'?
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Q 09Which war spread the banjo across America, as soldiers heard comrades play it?
The Civil War
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.
Q 10Which Beatle learned his first chords on a banjo, taught by his mother, Julia?
John Lennon
John Lennon learned the banjo from his mother; she died when he was a teenager, a loss that marked his songwriting for years.
Q 11Which Grateful Dead founder began on the banjo and returned to it in the 1973 bluegrass band Old & In the Way?
Jerry Garcia
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.
Q 12S. S. Stewart and other 1880s makers pushed the banjo off the minstrel stage and into which setting?
The Victorian parlour
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.
Q 13Which two four-string banjos emerged in the ragtime and jazz eras to cut through brass and reeds?
Q 21What is another common name for the clawhammer style of banjo playing?
Frailing
Frailing is the older way to play; when three-finger picking took over bluegrass in the 1940s, old-time musicians kept it alive.
Q 22Which bluegrass banjo veteran won his first Grammy for singing 'O Death' on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack?
Ralph Stanley
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.
Q 23In whose band, the Blue Grass Boys, did Scruggs's three-finger banjo picking first reach a national audience?
Bill Monroe
Tenor and plectrum
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.
Q 14The four-string banjo is a relative newcomer but now a fixture of which folk tradition?
Irish
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.
Q 15Which metal part sits on a banjo's wooden rim, directly under the head?
The tone ring
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.
Q 16What is the plate on the back of some banjos that projects sound forward called?
A resonator
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.
Q 17Where does a bluegrass banjo's short drone string start?
The 5th fret
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.
Q 18What do many banjo players fix into the fingerboard at the seventh fret to capo the short fifth string?
Model-railroad spikes
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.
Q 19What is the most common five-string banjo tuning, especially in bluegrass?
Open G
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.
Q 20In clawhammer style, how are the main strings struck?
Downward, with the back of the fingernail
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.
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.
Q 24With which guitarist did Scruggs form his famous duo after leaving the Blue Grass Boys in 1948?
Lester Flatt
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.
Q 25Which Scruggs instrumental, recorded in 1949, was revived by the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde?
'Foggy Mountain Breakdown'
'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.
Q 26Earl Scruggs's duo scored its first chart-topping hit with the theme to which TV sitcom?
The Beverly Hillbillies
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.
Q 27Scruggs-style banjo is played with picks on which fingers?
Thumb, index and middle
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.
Q 28What are 'rolls' in five-string banjo playing?
Right-hand picking patterns of eight notes per bar
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.
Q 29Whose 1948 manual How to Play the Five-String Banjo taught many folk-revival musicians the instrument?
Pete Seeger
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.
Q 30Why did a famous folk musician add three extra frets to create the 'long-neck' banjo?
To sing in lower keys
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.