The Banjo: From West African Gourds to Bluegrass Rolls
Few instruments announce themselves like the banjo. One pluck and you hear it: bright, punchy, a little bit nasal, cutting through a room full of fiddles and guitars. It is often treated as a symbol of rural America, but its story begins much further away, and its sound comes from a design that is part guitar, part drum.
Here is where the banjo came from, why it sounds the way it does, and how to play your first bluegrass pattern.
West African roots
The banjo's ancestors are the gourd lutes of West Africa: instruments made from a hollowed gourd covered with animal skin, with a stick neck and a few strings. One close relative is the akonting of the Jola people of the Senegambia region, which, like the modern five-string banjo, has a short string that is played with the thumb as a drone. Other related instruments include the ngoni and the xalam.
Enslaved Africans brought the knowledge of these instruments to the Caribbean and North America, and early banjos built there followed the same idea: a gourd body, a skin head and a wooden neck. By the 1800s the banjo had been taken up widely, including on the stage of minstrel shows, a popular and deeply racist form of entertainment. Factory-made banjos with wooden rims and metal hardware became common in the second half of that century, and the instrument spread into string bands, early jazz and country music.
A drum with strings: where the snap comes from
The secret of the banjo's sound is its head. Instead of a wooden soundboard like a guitar, a banjo has a thin membrane stretched tightly over a round rim, exactly like a drum. Old banjos used animal skin; most modern ones use a synthetic plastic head.
A tight membrane responds very quickly and lets go of the sound quickly too. That is why a banjo note has such a sharp attack and a short sustain: a bright snap rather than a long ring. Many bluegrass banjos also have a resonator, a wooden back that projects the sound forward for extra volume. Open-back banjos leave it off, for a softer, mellower, more old-time tone.
The short fifth string
Look at a five-string banjo and you will see something odd: one string starts partway up the neck, at a tuning peg sticking out from the side. This is the fifth string. It is shorter than the others and tuned higher, and it is usually played open, by the thumb, as a ringing drone note between the melody notes. It is the feature that most clearly links the banjo to its African forerunners.
There are also four-string banjos. The tenor banjo, tuned in fifths, is common in Irish traditional music and early jazz, and the plectrum banjo is played with a pick. But when people say "banjo" in folk and bluegrass, they usually mean the five-string.
Open G tuning
The standard tuning for five-string banjo is open G. From the fifth (short) string to the first, the notes are:
Often written as gDGBD, with the lower-case g showing that the fifth string is the high one. Strum all five strings without fretting anything and you get a G major chord. That is why so many banjo tunes are in G, and why beginners can make a pleasant sound right away. Use a tuner to set each string, starting with the fourth string D and working across.
- 5th string: high G
- 4th string: D
- 3rd string: G
- 2nd string: B
- 1st string: D
Clawhammer and three-finger picking
There are two main ways to play the five-string banjo.
Clawhammer
In clawhammer (also called frailing), the hand forms a loose claw and strikes down on the strings with the back of a fingernail, while the thumb catches the fifth string. The rhythm has a lilting "bum-ditty" feel. It is the sound of old-time Appalachian music and pairs naturally with an open-back banjo.
Three-finger style
In three-finger picking, the thumb, index and middle fingers, usually wearing metal or plastic fingerpicks, pluck the strings in fast repeating patterns called rolls. The effect is a rapid cascade of notes in which the melody is woven into a constant stream of sound.
Earl Scruggs and the birth of bluegrass
Three-finger picking existed before him, but Earl Scruggs turned it into something new. When he joined Bill Monroe's band, the Blue Grass Boys, in the mid-1940s, his clean, fast, driving rolls became a defining part of the sound that came to be called bluegrass. His later recordings with guitarist Lester Flatt, including the instrumental "Foggy Mountain Breakdown", made the style famous far beyond its rural roots. Today the term "Scruggs style" is still used for this way of playing.
Your first forward roll
The forward roll is the first pattern most bluegrass players learn. Let all strings ring open (a G chord) and use this sequence of fingers and strings: T is thumb, I is index, M is middle.
That is eight notes, grouped 3 + 3 + 2. Say it aloud: "one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two". Repeat it slowly and evenly until it loops without a gap, then gradually speed up. Keep your hand relaxed; the speed of good banjo players comes from evenness, not tension.
You can hear the pattern before buying an instrument on the HarmonyHub virtual banjo, where the Q W E R T keys pluck the five strings. Try tapping out the roll and switching between the 5-string, bluegrass, open-back, tenor and plectrum banjos to hear how each one changes the character. The string instruments section has more plucked instruments to compare.
- T on string 3, I on string 2, M on string 1
- T on string 5, I on string 2, M on string 1
- T on string 5, M on string 1
Wrapping up
The banjo carries a long, complicated history in a small, bright voice: West African craftsmanship, centuries of American music, and the virtuoso rolls of bluegrass. Learn open G, get your forward roll even, and listen to both clawhammer and Scruggs-style players. You will quickly find which side of the banjo is calling you.