Pete Wernick and Steve Martin
Bruce Clark
Sule Greg Wilson
It's a rhythmic instrument. The banjo is a rhythmic instrument. [...] This banjo can do things that the guitar can't do. You can get these needle points of time, needle points like a star in the sky. And here's what a banjo does with a melody. You know there's thousands of stars out there, but you can pick out a constellation among them. So here you're hearing a lot of notes but somehow there's a melody to them.
~ Pete Seeger Interview with M. Fields, Beacon, NY;
August 2003
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| From the decks of slave ships and plantation porches… | To the minstrel show… |
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| From Fifth Avenue parlors… | And the vaudeville stage… |
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| And the folk scenes in Cambridge and Greenwich Village… | The banjo’s been part of the American soundscape since before the nation was born, and its history has some intriguing things to say about who we are and how we got that way. |