The banjo, as many historians have purported, did not begin in America. Its story reaches back to West Africa, where people made and played instruments with bodies made from gourds and skins.
Over generations, the instrument changed. So did its music. The banjo found its way into many corners of American life: plantations and porches, minstrel stages and medicine shows, string bands and country music. It became a companion to fiddles, guitars and voices—and eventually one of the defining instruments of bluegrass.
Bluegrass gave the banjo a particularly bright and driving voice. In the hands of players who learned to make rolls, runs and syncopated rhythms fly, the instrument became something you could almost feel pulling the rest of the band forward.
But the banjo has never belonged to just one kind of music. You can hear it in old-time music, folk music, country music, gospel, jazz, modern acoustic music—and places where nobody expected a banjo to turn up at all.
And that's where BanjoPalooza begins.
There's a lot to discover: the instruments themselves, the people who play them, the songs they carry, the places where bluegrass still brings people together, and the stories behind the music.
Some of those stories are old. Some are still being written. We're glad you stopped by for one of them.