Inside his antiques-filled living room, Ed Taylor picks up a bluegrass-style five-string banjo and begins plucking away with the grace and elegance that only happens after decades of muscle memory.
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 ...
<!–Richie Dotson puts the finishing touches on a guitar repair. Dotson first started repairing stringed instruments out of a need to fix his own banjo. –>If you’ve got a sick banjo, Richie Dotson has ...
Early American banjo music is Black music. The banjo was created by enslaved African Americans, and according to the Smithsonian Institute, up until the 1830s, the banjo was exclusively an African ...
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 ...
"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 ...