Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
They think the banjo can only be happy, but that's not true.
The banjo is my chosen instrument - it's what I write my music on.
I didn't actually start playing the banjo until I was in high school.
When I was 3 years old, I was playing banjo on a country music TV show.
My dad also plays a little banjo and guitar, my mom plays the mandolin.
I'll talk about the banjo all day long and the history of minstrel shows.
To learn the history of the banjo is to recover the actual history of America.
When you hear a banjo through stutter edit, it's the coolest thing you ever heard.
The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.
The energy in the banjo, and the beef in the bass. They're good tools to express yourself.
We think the juxtaposition between banjo solos and songs about the future are really funny.
When we moved back to the US, folk music was all the rage. So I traded in my banjo for a guitar.
It's nice knowing we're putting the banjo, the fiddle, the steel, and the mandolin back out front.
I started with the guitar around 12 years old but didn't learn the banjo until I was about 18 or 19.
I had a ukulele when I was about seven. Then I started playing around with the mandolin and the banjo.
If I have something inside me that I want to get out, I'll just beat it out on the banjo right then and there.
I'm interested in all kinds of art. I draw and paint and don't know how to play the banjo, but I do play the banjo.
I guarantee you there's a bunch of the twentysomethings that don't know that, don't know I play banjo and bluegrass.
It's really funny how I've come round to classical music around the back door with my banjo in my hand, and I love it.
We never could have foreseen the success of 'Babel.' It's not like banjo records were soaring up the charts, you know.
As I try to get around with a guitar, a banjo and a suitcase of high heels and dresses, I treasure that little ukulele.
The bottom line is, between Sonny Osborne and Earl Scruggs, I better know how to play banjo. I had the greatest teachers in the world.
I reside in a new colony for the Chinese-singing banjo player, with a population of one. At least I have something I have to do with my life.
When I got to NYU, I had applied based on playing folk music, and they said, 'You're the banjo girl,' so I thought ,'OK, I'm the banjo girl.'
Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?
In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do do comedy during that show. It'd be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.
I went to my room and packed a change of clothes, got my banjo, and started walking down the road. Soon I found myself on the open highway headed east.
I play a replica of a banjo from the 1950s. It was the first commercial-style banjo in the United States so it's the first one that white people played.
The first musical sound I ever heard was from a banjo. My father played, and I was an infant in a crib, and something just stayed with me from those early days.
English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.
I just loved the guitar when it came along. I loved it. The banjo was something I really liked, but when the guitar came along, to me that was my first love in music.
I was like, 'Man, bluegrass - that's like Roy Clark playing banjo on 'Hee Haw.' I'm a huge 'Hee Haw' fan. But I didn't know about bluegrass. It seemed like old people's music.
There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.
Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music - and then, through that, American history.
I always loved the guitar, from when I was quite little. My dad had a G banjo at the house that he played. When he had parties, my sisters always played piano, and my dad played banjo.
I didn't realize until I was older what a huge music fan my daddy really was, and actually that my grandma played banjo at one time, and I didn't even know that until a year or two ago.
Without a drummer, you've got that sort of running, chicken-chasing, rhythmic thing happening with the banjo in the top end - it's what gives our music a lot of its momentum, a lot of its energy.
The idea of old world instruments mixed with sci-fi, futuristic lyrics, playing baroque guitar on a song about a robot boy and a banjo solo on a song about white noise - that's our sense of humor.
My mom was sort of involved in amateur dramatics like Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, and played the violin. My dad played banjo and piano and sang as well, so there was all this music in my childhood.
I think it is very ironic that most people think that the banjo is a southern white instrument. It came from Africa and even for the first years that white people played banjo they would put on blackface.
I first thought maybe I'd do a banjo presentation record, where I'd play a couple of songs and get a bunch of other players to do the rest. Then I realized I had enough of my own songs to do an album of them.
I told my father I wanted to play the banjo, and so he saved the money and got ready to give me a banjo for my next birthday, and between that time and my birthday, I lost interest in the banjo and was playing guitar.
Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He's a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he's such an excellent banjo player that you almost don't wish you had a pair of wire cutters.
I love five-string banjo. On an electric guitar, let's say a two-hour show, it starts getting heavy right across the neck and shoulders. And I like to be able to flip it off and grab the fiddle, and that's just the way I do it.
Mind you, I've always been musical... Mother used to sit me on her knee and I'd whisper, 'Mummy, Mummy, sing me a lullaby do,' and she'd say: 'Certainly my angel, my wee bundle of happiness, hold my beer while I fetch me banjo.'
The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.
The artistic side of our family was very important because one person encourages the other. It was a vey enlightening place to be as a kid because of all the music and dancing, and my dad played banjo; my sisters played piano and sang.
I was 18, at art school, and saw this cute boy playing banjo. I was obsessed. I taught myself how to play. I listened to a lot of country and just messed around. The second song I wrote on the banjo was 'Good to Be a Man.' That what's got me signed.
I suppose, counting back, if the Beatles had been influenced by music in the same length of time ago - you'd have to put that into better English for me, thank you - they would have been like a banjo orchestra. They would have been doing show tunes.
The thing about the banjo is, when you first hear it, it strikes many people as 'What's that?' There's something very compelling about it to certain people; that's the way I was; that's the way a lot of banjo players and people who love the banjo are.