Greg Adams, Assistant Archivist at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, is a banjo scholar and enthusiast. Smithsonian Music connected with him to ask him about the history of ...

Béla Fleck, a 17-time Grammy award winner who has spent decades perfecting his skills on the banjo, is on a quest to make the banjo beloved. “If I had a mission statement,” Fleck said, “it would be to ...

I took a break from the late-night gigs and got a job at Werlein's music store. There were a couple of banjos hanging up with the guitars and it was my job to take care of them. As I was cleaning one ...

Noam Pikelny won’t be far from home when the renowned banjo maestro — a founding member of the Grammy Award-winning acoustic quintet Punch Brothers who now calls the town of Danby his home — brings ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. There could probably be no better evangelist for anything than the immensely respected Rhiannon Giddens, and the banjo is lucky to ...

Beyonce’s hit “Texas Hold ’Em” opens with a beat seldom heard on hip-hop tracks: the unmistakable clip-clop of a four-stringed clawhammer banjo. It comes via folk icon Rhiannon Giddens, who was ...

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 ...

It’s a well-documented fact that Tucson music fans crave new sounds and are willing to keep their ears, as well as their minds, wide open when it comes to inventive musical hybrids. So Tim ...

A new generation of artists have brought African Americans back to the forefront of the banjo scene. Take, for example, Rhiannon Giddens, whom you can hear behind me. Black musicians have been a part ...

After a lifetime of taking his banjo playing to new places, Tony Trischka is going back to the source of bluegrass banjo as we know it: Earl Scruggs. “It’s rare that one man defines a whole style,” ...

When he took the stage at Chapel Hill’s Nightlight a few weeks ago, Zeke Graves didn’t draw much from the moody electronica he crafts as Datahata or from the spectral electric guitar improvisations ...