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Nine-year-old Jonny Mizzone can play the banjo! On fiddle, you hear his 12-year-old brother Robbie, and 14-year-old Tommy accompanies them on guitar. The song is Ralph Stanley’s “How Mountain Girls Can Love.” You can see more of the brothers at the YouTube channel Sleepy Man Banjo Boys. Link -via reddit
Image: Photo_History
[Flickr]
Tired of the Keyboard Cat? Perhaps you need this: Banjo Cat. And 'fess up - who hears the Dueling Banjo just now?
Via Panabasis (who has another Banjo Cat sighting)
If you’re like most Americans, you probably picture one of two things when you hear the banjo -Kermit the Frog strumming away in the swamp or the inbred boy from Deliverance. How can one instrument conjure up images both so sweet and so repugnant? The answer lies in the history of the banjo, which stretches from Africa to Hollywood, with an extended stop in Appalachia.
Centuries ago, somewhere in West Africa, the banjo was born on the knee of griots -storytellers who improvised their lyrics as they performed. Almost like forerunners to today’s hip-hop artists, griots interacted with their audiences using call-and-response patterns to liven up the crowd. Their instruments -strings and animal skins tacked across hollowed-out gourds- are considered the first banjos.
The earliest versions were easy to make and easily portable, so when Africans were forced aboard slave ships, they brought their banjos with them. Once in America, slaves had no trouble recreating the instruments wherever they went. The banjo spread across Appalachia, but it was quickly pigeonholed as a black instrument.
THE JIM CROW SHOW
Big changes were in store for the banjo, though. In the mid-19th century, the newest and most popular form of entertainment was the minstrel show. White men and women toured the nation dressed in blackface while singing and dancing in a manner that mocked black people. And because they were lampooning all aspects of African-American culture -particularly African dance and music- the banjo was at center stage.
Minstrel shows also meant change for the instrument itself. The early “minstrel banjo” was a fretless, four-string instrument with strings crafted from animal intestines. But metal strings soon replaced those, and then a minstrel named Joel Walker Sweeney (aka the Banjo King) popularized the fifth string, which became the defining characteristic of the modern instrument.
During the next 50 years or so, a strange thing happened to the banjo. Although minstrel shows poked fun at black people, they made the banjo immensely popular among white people in the process. In turn, African-Americans increasingly wanted to distance themselves from an instrument that had come to represent oppression and bigotry. In the early 1900s, the banjo only played a small part in new forms of African-American music, such as blues, gospel, and jazz. Meanwhile, it was becoming all the rage in white communities, especially in Appalachia.
HILLBILLY HILARITY
The 1930s saw the rise of the banjo in Appalachian country music, thanks to the Grand Ole Opry. A Saturday night variety show performed in Nashville and broadcast live on the radio, the Opry spread “hillbilly” culture over the airwaves. The banjo played a central role in this, accompanying the antics of comedians such as David “Stringbean” Akeman and Louis Marshall “Grandpa” Jones, both of whom became even more famous later on the TV hit Hee-Haw.
The banjo might have remained an instrument of redneck comedy forever if it hadn’t been for one man -Earl Scruggs. Born in 1924 in rural North Carolina, Scruggs grew up listening to the Opry and became convinced that the instrument could do more than accompany stage acts. By inventing the jangly, three-finger technique of banjo-picking -the trademark of today’s bluegrass music- Scruggs used his fast-paced twangy style to prove beyond a doubt that banjo pickers could be virtuoso musicians. Of course, the trend has lived on. Modern-day banjo masters like Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, and Bill Keith all play with as much technical precision as concert violinists.
Ironically, Scruggs also recorded the soundtracks for Bonnie and Clyde (ever wonder why high-speed getaway music is always played on the banjo?) and TV’s The Beverly Hillbillies. Both projects probably maligned the banjo’s image as much as Scruggs earlier work had innovated it, though not everyone in the music industry agrees. In fact, Julliard-trained banjo legend Eric Weissberg thinks the soundtracks brought bluegrass into the lives of many people who would have otherwise never heard it.
Until the 1960s, bluegrass wasn’t really played outside of Appalachia. And because it was considered regional music, record companies didn’t distribute it nationally. But in 1963, Weissberg recorded an album with his friend Marshall Brickman called New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass. The record didn’t generate much attention at first, but five years later, the hills came alive with the sound of banjos when director John Borman wanted the song “Dueling Banjos” for his new movie Deliverance. Weissberg happily recorded a new version with musician Steve Mandell, and it turns out the song shouldn’t have been called “Dueling Banjos” at all. It’s actually a duet between a banjo and a guitar, but listeners didn’t seem to care. The new cut was played as the background music in the movie’s radio ad, and all of the sudden, all over the country, disc jockeys were answering phone calls from people who wanted to know where they cold get their hands on the song. In lieu of a soundtrack album, Warner Brothers added two Deliverance songs to the material from New Dimensions and released it in 1973 as Dueling Banjos. Weissberg, Brickman, and Mandell became rich overnight, and Deliverance‘s depiction of rural Appalachian life -with that foreboding, nine-note banjo melody -was burned forever into the American psyche.
SIX DEGREES OF MARSHALL BRICKMAN
By the time Marshall Brickman received his $160,000 royalty check for Dueling Banjos, he’d already left the musician life to write scripts for The Tonight Show and Candid Camera. He began working alongside up-and-coming filmmaker Woody Allen, and together they wrote he Academy Award winning screenplay for Annie Hall in 1977. In Hollywood, Brickman became the missing link in the “Dueling Banjos”-to-Kermit-the-Frog axis of American pop culture. With his buddy Jim Henson, he wrote the script to a TV special that was later fine-tuned into The Muppet Show. In Brickman’s opinion, Kermit just wouldn’t have been Kermit without the banjo. “I try to picture it quickly -Kermit with another instrument- and I can’t,” Brickman says. “Not only figuratively, but literally, that banjo is nailed to his hand.”
__________________________
The above article was written by Robbie Whelan. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
A man in the Kansas City area was attacked with a knife and frying pan. He responded by swinging a banjo at his attacker’s head:
Police say the Monday banjo blow to the head stopped the assailant, who was treated for a cut and taken to jail.[...]
The two 21-year-old friends were drinking and arguing about a band when Hilton grabbed the kitchen weapons and attacked, police said.
The victim happened to have banjo in hand and used it in self defense, they said.
Link via MArooned | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user mahalie used under Creative Commons license
I firmly believe that a banjo can improve any kind of music. Even rock and roll. Behold, Guns N’ Roses re-made into bluegrass by the band Iron Horse Bluegrass. Won’t you take me home? Link
If you like this, then check out: Metallica Enter Sandman in Bluegrass, Cello, and Kazoo
Flight of the Bumblebee on a chromatic button accordion: YouTube Link
Previously, Neatorama reader Minnesotastan pointed out an amazing performance of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as played on an accordion by YouTube user AccCam.
Though that was fantastic, Neatoramanaut Frau told us of one even better: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee played on the chromatic button accordion by Alexander Dmitriev. Look at his fingers fly!
And while we’re at it, here’s Flight of the Bumblebee as played on a banjo by Ken Aoki:
Flight of the Bumblebee on a banjo: YouTube Link
