Building on tradition: Instrument-maker Jim Huskins says, “I’m old enough to remember what it was like in family gatherings and community gatherings in the ‘50s and ‘60s. A fiddle and a banjo were ...

"My father was born with this instrument," Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta says. "This is part of our history." Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He's holding an akonting: a ...

In 1963, when the folk-music trend made a young Greg Deering want to learn to play the banjo, his mother said no. But he was obsessed, desperate to create the sounds he had heard on a Kingston Trio ...

Did you hear the one about the banjo player who got all the gigs? Well, it’s no joke, the banjo is back, and it couldn’t be more popular. A mainstay of trad jazz, bluegrass and folk, the banjo’s ...

Unless the room is ultra-hip -- meaning, its occupants know something about Don Vappie or Bela Fleck -- banjo gets a bad rap. The new PBS documentary titled "Give Me the Banjo," narrated by Steve ...

The loss in Aug. 2007 of the famed transplanted NH resident, Irish singer/songwriter and national folk hero of the Emerald Isle at 74, Tommy Makem, alerted me recently to a news photo of Tommy with ...

When putting together this top 10 of the most influential banjo players of all time, we needed to make a decision. Do we consider everybody that plays a stringed instrument with a drum for a body, or ...

CC0 Usage Conditions ApplyClick for more information. The banjo in American music was traditionally associated with bluegrass and old-time until the early 1970s when Tony Trischka spearheaded a ...

In this less than melodious celebration of the origins and history of the banjo, Dubois delivers a straightforward social history of the relationship between race and music. Drawing deeply on archives ...

Pop superstar Beyoncé released "Texas Hold 'Em" a few weeks ago and it features an instrument that she had never emphasized before. This hit song, on her new (and hugely popular) Cowboy Carter album, ...