A Quote by Rhiannon Giddens

The banjo is my chosen instrument - it's what I write my music on.

Rhiannon Giddens

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Banjo Chosen Instrument Music Write

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Rhiannon Giddens
American - Musician
Born: February 21, 1977

And then Earl Scruggs comes along and transforms the banjo into a virtuosic modern instrument. For the first time, the Southern banjo style becomes the identity of the banjo, and everything from before is wiped off of people's consciousness by the power of that explosion.

Bela Fleck

The banjo is such a happy instrument--you can't play a sad song on the banjo - it always comes out so cheerful.

Steve Martin

I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo - a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money, and I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, 'I could do that.' And I said to my husband, I said, 'Ben, can I buy a banjo?' And he's like, 'No.'

Mena Grabowski Trott

I think it is very ironic that most people think that the banjo is a southern white instrument. It came from Africa and even for the first years that white people played banjo they would put on blackface.

Bela Fleck

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.

Rhiannon Giddens

There are a lot of chapters to the banjo's history. Part of it are the roots in Africa, where it's a more primitive instrument. Then it comes to the United States where it morphs into the slave music that they created here, which was very African in origin.

Bela Fleck

It's horrible for someone to listen to someone learning any instrument - when I was first learning the banjo, I used to have to go out and sit in the car, and even in the summertime I'd have to roll up the windows. Because you just couldn't practice a banjo or a fiddle with other people around. Unless they're being paid.

Steve Martin

Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music - and then, through that, American history.

Rhiannon Giddens

When I got to NYU, I had applied based on playing folk music, and they said, 'You're the banjo girl,' so I thought ,'OK, I'm the banjo girl.'

Maggie Rogers

The banjo am the instrument for me.

Grandpa Jones

Earl Scruggs had this thing that it wasn't just the technique or even the instrument. It was him. There was this soulful quality that came through that made you - if you're somebody like me who was, I guess, supposed to play the banjo, it made you stop in your tracks, and you couldn't do anything until you got done hearing him play, and then immediately you'd have to go try and find a banjo.

Earl Scruggs

I told my father I wanted to play the banjo, and so he saved the money and got ready to give me a banjo for my next birthday, and between that time and my birthday, I lost interest in the banjo and was playing guitar.

Jackson Browne

The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.

Steve Martin

Well, you know, the original banjos were all handmade instruments. Gourd - it would be made with gourds and whatever, you know, materials would have been around. And, you know, first hundred years of its existence, the banjo's known as a plantation instrument, as a black instrument, you know?

Rhiannon Giddens

My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.

Carl Sandburg

I play banjo, and in Britain, it's easy to get away with playing banjo because you don't often see it on U.K. stages. In America, people know when you're a good banjo player, so I was really nervous about playing out there. But we actually went down really well.

Winston Marshall

A Quote by Rhiannon Giddens

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