Words matter. These are the best Banjo Quotes from famous people such as Valerie June, Rickey Medlocke, Bela Fleck, Hank Williams Jr., Padgett Powell, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As I try to get around with a guitar, a banjo and a suitcase of high heels and dresses, I treasure that little ukulele.
When I was 3 years old, I was playing banjo on a country music TV show.
They think the banjo can only be happy, but that’s not true.
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 know about the sweet home. I went to school with ’em boys, what became Lynyrd Skynyrd; I knew Allen Collins, the skinny girl-beautiful guitarist. I put Allen Collins in every travel piece I do. Travel writing is harrowing, going to Bermuda with a banjo on my knee.
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 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.
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 had a ukulele when I was about seven. Then I started playing around with the mandolin and the banjo.
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.
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.
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.
When you hear a banjo through stutter edit, it’s the coolest thing you ever heard.
John Fahey, thought during his lifetime to be possibly more than a little crazy, was the author of some thirty albums of gnomically introverted droning guitar instrumentals, which I listened to heavily in my teens and twenties; I even produced an hour or so of banjo music in an imitative John Fahey style.
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 play banjo, and in Britain, it’s easy to get away with playing banjo because you don’t often see it on U.K. stages. In America, people know when you’re a good banjo player, so I was really nervous about playing out there. But we actually went down really well.
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.
The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.
We think the juxtaposition between banjo solos and songs about the future are really funny.
We never could have foreseen the success of ‘Babel.’ It’s not like banjo records were soaring up the charts, you know.
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.
You know, I only claim to play three instruments. My dad is a banker, but a drummer at heart; and my mom used to teach piano lessons when she was younger. So I can play some piano, play a little drums, and fake the bass – but banjo, mandolin, and guitar are my thing.
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.
The energy in the banjo, and the beef in the bass. They’re good tools to express yourself.
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.
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.’
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.
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 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’ll talk about the banjo all day long and the history of minstrel shows.
Uncle Dave Macon was a great balladeer and banjo player from the early part of the 19th century… He would take a social problem or something that he was looking at and make up a clever little song about it, you know, in a language everyone understood, a man of the people.
I’ve been using slide guitar, banjo, stuff like that for yonks. But if people haven’t seen me live on stage, they wouldn’t have heard me with these instruments.
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.’
