Banjo

About the banjo

The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and in modern forms is usually made of BOPET, where early membranes were made of goat skin.

Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by African Americans and had African antecedents, and the instrument was strongly associated with black people. In the 19th century, interest in the instrument was spread across the United States and United Kingdom by traveling shows of the highly popular traveling blackface minstrel shows, followed by mass production and mail-order sales, including instructional books. The inexpensive or home-made banjo remained part of rural folk culture, but five-string and four-string banjos also became popular for home parlor music entertainment, college music clubs, and early 20th century jazz bands. By the early 20th century, the banjo was most frequently associated with folk, cowboy music, and country music.

By mid-century it had come to be strongly associated with bluegrass. Eventually it began to be employed occasionally and sporadically in various kinds or other kinds of popular music. Some famous American bluegrass players of the banjo are Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs.

Text adapted from the Wikipedia article “Banjo”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.