When Not to Play the Banjo

Here are a few choice excerpts from Pete Seeger's charming How to play the 5-string Banjo, first published in the 1940s. The 2002 edition still has a few nuggets that are awesomely out of date. The text includes a lot of hand-written music and drawings and plenty of folky wisdom.


WHEN NOT TO PLAY THE BANJO

Obviously, when someone is trying to get the baby to go asleep. Nor when your neighbor, who has to be up at 6 AM to go to work, is trying to catch some much needed shut-eye. 

There are other times as well, in which a sensitive musical ear can tell you to lay aside the instrument. Some types of music, after all, were simply not made for it. This goes especially for certain types of slow songs, whose effect will be spoiled by the sharp punctuation of the banjo strings. 

The people I learned banjo from were mostly old farmers, miners, or working people of one trade or another, who had played the instrument during their courting days, and later kept it hanging on the wall to pass away the time of an evening...what they knew, they knew well, and the simple, rippling rhythm of their banjo had more art in it than many a hectic performance piece by a professional virtuoso. 

What I am aiming at saying is, that it it is better to know a few things well than attempt something flashy which sounds sloppy or grating. The tenor banjo was ruined, really, by exhibitionists who made an athletic exhibition out of each performance; after the piece was over the audience was amazed, of course, as at the circus, but it was not music which moved or delighted one. 

"...can I read notes? Hell, there are no notes to a banjo. You just play it."