Top 133 Banjo Quotes & Sayings

When I was 3 years old, I was playing banjo on a country music TV show.

A gentleman is a man who can play the banjo, but doesn't.

I'm interested in all kinds of art. I draw and paint and don't know how to play the banjo, but I do play the banjo.

A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't.

I'm working on a script right about Civil War re-enactors who go back in time to the actual Civil War. It's kind of a big, crazy Back to the Future comedy. So, of course, it's the Civil War - I play the banjo. I was just having a conversation with one of the producers about some of the material and he was like, 'You know, we have to work in a scene where you play the banjo. And I was like I'll get behind that.

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.

I didn't actually start playing the banjo until I was in high school.

In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do do comedy during that show. It'd be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.

I reside in a new colony for the Chinese-singing banjo player, with a population of one. At least I have something I have to do with my life.

We think the juxtaposition between banjo solos and songs about the future are really funny.

The energy in the banjo, and the beef in the bass. They're good tools to express yourself.

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.'

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

I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines.

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

I always loved the guitar, from when I was quite little. My dad had a G banjo at the house that he played. When he had parties, my sisters always played piano, and my dad played banjo.

When you hear a banjo through stutter edit, it's the coolest thing you ever heard.

Id be happiest standing at the back, strumming my little banjo where no one could see me.

Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?

I was 18, at art school, and saw this cute boy playing banjo. I was obsessed. I taught myself how to play. I listened to a lot of country and just messed around. The second song I wrote on the banjo was 'Good to Be a Man.' That what's got me signed.

Country music isn't a guitar, it isn't a banjo, it isn't a melody, it isn't a lyric. It's a feeling.

My dad also plays a little banjo and guitar, my mom plays the mandolin.

I play a replica of a banjo from the 1950s. It was the first commercial-style banjo in the United States so it's the first one that white people played.

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

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.'

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.

I'll talk about the banjo all day long and the history of minstrel shows.

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.

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.

The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils, but give me the banjo.

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.

The banjo am the instrument for me.

It's nice knowing we're putting the banjo, the fiddle, the steel, and the mandolin back out front.

They think the banjo can only be happy, but that's not true.

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

Woodrell's storytelling is as melodic, jangly and energetic as a good banjo riff.... Sammy Barlach's story is a tragedy, but the telling of it is a pleasure.

Nothing says 'dropping out of society' like learning the banjo.

I'm, I guess you could say, the Chinese-speaking, banjo-picking girl.

I started with the guitar around 12 years old but didn't learn the banjo until I was about 18 or 19.

Whenever a big white man picks up a banjo, my cheeks tighten.

I remember spending one summer being utterly obsessed with trying to get the legendary unreachable 'Ice Key' from 'Banjo-Kazooie.'

The bottom line is, between Sonny Osborne and Earl Scruggs, I better know how to play banjo. I had the greatest teachers in the world.

I happened to take a photo, and there was my wife, my dog and my banjo, all in the same shot - and I thought, "Oh, that's like a family portrait right there."

I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn't actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake. He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.

The thing about the banjo is, when you first hear it, it strikes many people as 'What's that?' There's something very compelling about it to certain people; that's the way I was; that's the way a lot of banjo players and people who love the banjo are.

English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.

This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.

I had a ukulele when I was about seven. Then I started playing around with the mandolin and the banjo.

I love a band that has a banjo, that does group harmonies and yells out the word 'Hey' or 'Woo.' I live for it.

When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.

We never could have foreseen the success of 'Babel.' It's not like banjo records were soaring up the charts, you know.

When we moved back to the US, folk music was all the rage. So I traded in my banjo for a guitar.

There's many a good tune played by an old banjo.

I also play fiddle, banjo and mandolin.

It's really funny how I've come round to classical music around the back door with my banjo in my hand, and I love it.

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.

My first banjo? My mother's sister, my aunt, lived about a mile from where we did, and she raised some hogs. And she had - her - the hog - the mother - they called the mother a sow - of a hog. And she had some pigs. Well, the pigs were real pretty, and I was going to high school and I was taking agriculture in school. And I sort of got a notion that I'd like to do that, raise some hogs. And so my aunt had this old banjo, and my mother told me, said, which do you want, the pig or a banjo? And each one of them's $5 each. I said, I'll just take the banjo.

My family making music was like a folk background, really: banging on tabletops, playing banjo and all kinds of things.

A banjo will get you through times of no money, but money won't get you through times of no banjo

As I try to get around with a guitar, a banjo and a suitcase of high heels and dresses, I treasure that little ukulele.