A Tangent On: The Banjo

The banjo has a bit of a limited reputation, often being associated, at best, with lighthearted silliness and, at worst, with an offensive brand of hillbilly stupidity. This is unfortunate not only because of its perpetuation of a particular bit of northern self-righteousness with respect to the south, but also because the banjo is a really beautiful, versatile instrument. Sure, it seems to be especially good, as Steve Martin has noted, at playing fast, happy music that puts a smile on your face, but the truth is that there are lots of different ways of playing the banjo and lots of different genres that it can contribute to and emotions that it can evoke. The banjo is also an important historical instrument, reflecting the paradoxical, yet crucial elements of multicultural collaboration, power, and erasure that have shaped American popular music since its beginnings.

Below, I have listed fifteen banjo songs that I think do a good job of representing the instrument. The first seven songs trace the history of banjo music, from its origins in the American slave trade through its use as a folk instrument and its role in the development of genres including old-time, jazz, and bluegrass. The second eight songs including some of my favorites from contemporary banjo players and attempt to show the diversity of ways in which the instrument is used today. 

1. Julie - Rhiannon Giddens

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people all over the world have been making instruments similar to the banjo for a long time — the concept of a stringed instrument with a drum for a body is, after all, pretty simple in its combination of already cosmopolitan designs. The American banjo, however, can trace its roots specifically back to the Atlantic slave trade and the musical traditions of enslaved and free black communities living in the Carribean and North America during the 1600 and 1700s. The early banjos made by these often unnamed and unrecognized musicians and craftsmen were made of split gourdes with animal skins pulled over them and had three long strings and one short string made of gut or vegetable fibers. This construction made for a much deeper, richer sound than that which is typically produced by modern wood-rimmed, steel-stringed instruments. Unfortunately, much of the banjo music from this time is either lost or buried and most the accounts we do have come through the explicitly racist lens of a white observer. Nonetheless, there is significant evidence of the instrument's importance in the religious ceremonies, dances, and acts of resilience and resistance of enslaved and free black communities from South American and the Carribean to as far north as New York City. Here, Pulitzer Prize winning musician and scholar Rhiannon Giddens accompanies herself in the clawhammer style that would have been used by the black musicians of this period while singing her song “Julie,” the lyrics of which are inspired by a story from Andrew Ward’s The Slaves War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves.

2. Dogget Gap - Unkown Players

For most of its history, the banjo was a folk instrument played almost entirely by enslaved and free blacks, and was only later picked up by the white Southern and Appalachian communities with which it is often associated today. The adaptation of the instrument by rural whites in the mid-to-late nineteenth century probably occurred through a mix of increased general interest in the banjo resulting from the popularity of minstrel shows (see below) and more organic exchanges between white and black musicians. Songs were learned by ear, swapped with neighbors, and played during community events or just to relax and have fun. Today, the diverse genre that these everyday musicians came up with is often called old-time music. Old-time combines elements of both European (especially Scotch-Irish) and African folk music, a feature which is reflected in the banjo as one of its core instruments. Unlike their African predecessors, the banjos developed by black slaves in the Americas had flat, European style fretboards and tuning pegs, in addition to the quintessentially African drum-like body and shorter drone string. Players in old time music typically play in clawhammer style, in which the player strike downwards on the strings with the tips of their fingers in order to produce a sound. In practice, however, the style in which old-time banjo is played varies by the musician. In this video, for example, fiddler and folklorist Bascum Lamar Lunsford plays with two unknown Appalachian banjoists, both of whom appear to be playing finger style.

3. Serenata Op. 15 - Alfred Farland

During the mid-to-late 1800s, the banjo began to spread out from the African American communities where it originated and to become an important piece of American culture more generally. Unfortunately, the vehicle by which this occurred was the minstrel show, an early predecessor to vaudeville in which white acters wearing black face would perform songs, dances, and skits that evoked an over-the-top, racist caricature of African American life in the rural south. Due to their association with rural black communities, banjos were often an important part of these acts, and it was at the behest of minstrel perfumers such as Joel Walker Sweeney (who it is said was the first to add a fifth string to his instrument) that the first modern, commercially produced banjos were made. In general, minstrel shows were considered low brow entertainment (though not due to the racism, as far as I can tell) and the banjo shared this reputation among urban elites until a few minstrel performers set out to make the instrument more “respectable.” Banjoists such as Alfred A. Farla did this by adding classical European music to their repertoires and developing a finger picking style similar to that used by classical guitarists, as demonstrated in this recording of Farla performing Serenata Op. 15. This seems to have worked, and by the late-1800s, the banjo was a common parlor instrument even among wealthy, urbanites. Meanwhile, a combination of the development of other musical styles that didn’t include the banjo and the instrument’s associations with minstrelsy and planation life wore away at its popularity in the African American community. All this would contribute to the banjo’s modern association with rural white communities in the South and Appalachia, who still used it for old-time music even after the urban banjo craze began to fade. The mostly white-controlled popular music industry would complete the erasure of the black origins of string band music through its insistence on a sharp division between so-called “hillbilly records” (string band and early country music) and “race records” (usually jazz or blues).

4. The World is Waiting for the Sunrise - Ken Aoki

While Farla sought respectability with the European classics, other banjo players down in New Orleans were helping to develop a whole new kind of music - jazz! With this new music came a new kind of banjo, the four-string or plectrum banjo. As the name implies, four-string banjos differ from other banjos in that they lack a shorter, drone string, making them easier to strum with a plectrum. This was important because the picking methods encouraged by the drone string typically couldn't be heard over a jazz band full of winds and brass. Four-string banjos, on the other hand, were easily able to cut through with short, percussive chords played on strings that were traditionally tuned in fifths. When jazz was first being developed, drum sets and louder, electric guitars hadn't been invented yet, so the banjo was a crucial part of a band's rhythm section, strumming out the beat in a way that cut through to the rest of the band and kept them all together. As drum sets and guitars started to become more popular, a new generation of swing bands largely abandoned the four-string banjo and today, the instrument is really only used in bands that specialize in old-fashion, New Orleans-style jazz. In this video, Japanese banjo player Ken Aoki absolutely slays the banjo part on post-WWI jazz hit "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise." Notice his use of short, percussive chords and tremolo, a technique in which the player rapidly picks a single note to create a sustained affect. 

5. Foggy Mountain Breakdown - Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Kentuckey mandolinist Bill Monroe formed a five-piece string band called the Blue Grass Boys. The music that they produced was different enough from the old-time music it was inspired by that it spawned a new genre that was named after the band - bluegrass. Because of the genre's unusual origins as the invention of a single band, the styles in which bluegrass instruments are played, including the banjo, are heavily influenced by the members of the Blue Grass Boys. Earl Scruggs wasn't the first banjo player to join the band, but he was the one to develop the most common style of bluegrass banjo playing, which continues to be referred to as Scruggs style or three-finger banjo. In Scruggs style banjo, the player uses their thumb, forefinger, and middle finger to pick out a melody surrounded by repetitive, arpeggio sequences called rolls. Notes tend to be short, and phrases are swung and played rapidly, with various left-hand techniques such as rolls and pull-offs adding color and speed. Scruggs, along with guitarist Lester Flatt, would eventually leave the Blue Grass Boys in 1946, forming their own duo which continued to help develop bluegrass music. In this record, Scruggs performs "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," probably one of the best-known bluegrass banjo songs and an excellent example of his virtuosity with the instrument. 

6. Blackberry Blossum/Turkey in the Straw - Bill Keith

After a rock-and-roll induced slump during the 1950s, Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys started to gain popularity in the 1960s among fans of the urban folk revival. The same went for the banjo more broadly, as northern folk artists such as Pete Seeger started to incorporate the instrument into their music. Around this time, Massachusetts banjo player Bill Keith joined the Blue Grass Boys and developed his own style of bluegrass banjo playing that today is known as melodic or Keith style banjo. As the name suggests, melodic style banjo emphasizes linear scales and clear melodies instead of Scruggs style arpeggios. This style of playing allowed Keith to play what were usually considered fiddle songs note-for-note on the banjo. In this record, Keith shows off by playing two, especially challenging fiddle tunes, "Blackberry Blossum" and "Turkey in the Straw," using his melodic banjo style. 

7. Banjo Medley - Barney McKenna 

By the 1940s, the four-string banjo had pretty much disappeared from jazz music, but a slightly smaller relative, the tenor banjo, was at that point already starting to appear across the Atlantic in Irish folk bands. Tenor banjos were popular among Irish immigrants living in the United States and their use in Irish folk music appears to have started in urban dance halls frequented by that community. It wasn't until the 1960s, however, that the instrument was fully adopted as one of the most common instruments in the genre. Irish style tenor banjo is played with a plectrum, but unlike jazz banjo, it is almost never strummed. Instead, players typically pick out the melodies of what were originally written as fiddle tunes note-for-note, with the banjo's volume allowing it to cut through the rest of the band and be heard. In this video, Barney Mckenna, tenor banjo player for The Dubliners, plays a medley of Irish songs. Like in Aoki's jazz banjo playing, McKenna makes use of tremolo to play the longer notes of the first, slower song.

8. Clawhammer Medley - Steve Martin

Today, the banjo is usually played in either the clawhammer or bluegrass styles (which include both the Scruggs and melodic styles). I play bluegrass banjo and so most of the songs in this part of the list will involve players using that style, but since no list of modern banjo songs would be complete without at least one clawhammer player, I thought I would use it at as an opportunity to include a little Steve Martin. Notice how, in this video, Martin is playing an open-back banjo, while in most of the videos in which bluegrass is being played, the banjoist is using a resonator banjo. One can absolutely play either style on either kind of banjo (I learned on an open-back travel banjo), but typically, bluegrass players will use resonator banjos because they are louder and make it easier for the individually plucked notes of the bluegrass style to be heard over the rest of the band. Clawhammer, on the other hand, involves more strumming-type motions that allow it to be heard even without a resonator. Open-back banjos also tend to have richer, more melodic sounds, while resonator banjos are brighter and twangier.

9. Cool It, Son - Circus No. 9

Circus No. 9 was one of the first bluegrass bands I listened to when I was just starting to learn the banjo and is still one of my favorites. Like many progressive bluegrass bands, they barrow extensively from other genres of music, especially jazz, and this is reflected in banjo player Matthew Davis' use of melodic style to perform jazzier solos, which tend to emphasis scales. Davis recently left the band to enter the seminary and I really hope he is able to find a way to incorporate the banjo into his ministry, because he's a really great player and I think that would be cool!

10. Shadows - Kitchen Dwellers

I heard about Kitchen Dwellers from a Montana-based botanist I was working with in New Hampshire last summer and still associate their music with weekly drives up to the White Mountains. The band is known for its unique brand of "galaxy grass," which combines bluegrass instrumentation and playing styles with elements of rock, jam band, and psychedelic music. "Shadows" leans a little more into the bluegrass side of things, but I think it does a good job of showing off how banjo player Torrin Daniels plays the instrument, with a mixture of rock guitar style rifts and arpeggio-heavy, Scruggs style solos that create a dazzling wall of sound. 

11. Lost in the Woods - Squirrel Butter

I came for the great band name and stayed for the wonderful banjo playing! Charlie Beck has a pretty interesting style of playing that includes more strumming than your typical three-finger banjo part, but what I really love about this song in particular is his use of harmonics. The term harmonics has a complicated acoustics definition that I don't completely understand if I'm being honest (I am, notably, not a physicist), but for our purposes here, it is sufficient to say that that harmonics are achieved on the banjo by lightly pressing down directly on top of one of a particular group of frets and picking the strings hard. The result is a beautiful, clear, high-pitched sound that is often referred to by banjoists as a chime. The technique is also famously used in the song "My Grandfather's Clock," in which the banjo player imitates a clock chiming. 

12. Passepied - Punch Brothers

Lest we get the impression that the banjo is only used in bluegrass-adjacent musical styles, here is the band Punch Brothers covering classical composer Claude Debussy's "Passepied." A lot of the melody in their arrangement is covered by the fiddle and the mandolin, but Noam Pikelny still gets some opportunities to show off his banjo playing in this especially unusual context. On a related note, if you really like music - in the sense that you are the kind of person who can't really settle on one genre as being your favorite - Punch Brothers are a really great band to listen to, as they use traditional bluegrass instrumentation to play both covers and originals in styles as diverse as neo-classical, jazz, folk rock, and of course, bluegrass. 

13. Alone - Trampled By Turtles

Here's a song that I can actually play, and it is a beautiful one! I'm not exactly sure what Dave Carroll's history with the banjo is, but I suspect that he might have come to it from the guitar. This is because, as you can see in the video, he plays his five-string banjo with a guitar pick, rather than the tradition finger picks used by most bluegrass players or the bare-handed technique used for clawhammer. As a result, Carroll's banjo parts tend to have some interesting, guitar-like qualities to them, including a lot more strumming (which I honestly don't know how he does so well on a five-string). They also tend to include more cases of picking the same string twice in a row, something that Scruggs style players usually avoid in order to help keep up their speed, but which is fairly common in guitar. 

14. Ebb and Flow - Larry and His Flask

At first blush, the banjo may seem like a strange instrument to feature in a punk band, but I actually think it works really well. Resonator banjos like the one used here by Larry and His Flask Banjo player Andrew Carew, are pretty load and, with a little help from some good mics, can still be heard over drums and electric guitar. Both bluegrass and punk are also defined by a driving feel that is complimented well by a nice, fast banjo part. As such, in the subgenre of folk rock, the banjo is a pretty common sight, with the Irish punk band Dropkick Murphy, for example, also using a four-string banjo in some of their more recent albums. Like Carroll from Trampled by Turtles, Carew plays a five-string banjo with a guitar pick and I do not understand how he is able to play so fast with it - it's just awesome! 

15. Your Baby Ain't Sweet Like Mine - Carolina Chocolate Drops

Let's end where we started - with some more Rhiannon Giddens, now with the best damn kazoo playing you've ever heard! And of course, we also have Dom Flemmons, coming in with that amazing, four-string banjo solo. Giddens and Flemmons are joined by Justin Robbinson on the jug in this Carolina Chocolate Drops cover of a blues classic. Founded in 2005, the band is part of a growing movement to reclaim and expand upon the rich, black history of string band music, including the banjo. They also do a really great cover of "Hit 'em Up Style (Oops)" by Blu Cantrell, which you should definitely check out if you haven't heard it. 

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And there you have it - my rant about the banjo is complete. Now, back to your regularly scheduled ecology.

This article was edited on February 3, 2024, and May 15, 2024, to provide a clearer, more accurate account of early banjo history, particularly its origins and geographic extent in the Americas, its role in the culture of enslaved blacks, and its spread into rural and urban white communities. To learn more, I highly recommend checking out Kristena R. Gaddy’s excellent book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History.