I started with the guitar around 12 years old but didn't learn the banjo until I was about 18 or 19.
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 love five-string banjo. On an electric guitar, let's say a two-hour show, it starts getting heavy right across the neck and shoulders. And I like to be able to flip it off and grab the fiddle, and that's just the way I do it.
I guarantee you there's a bunch of the twentysomethings that don't know that, don't know I play banjo and bluegrass.
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.
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 suppose, counting back, if the Beatles had been influenced by music in the same length of time ago - you'd have to put that into better English for me, thank you - they would have been like a banjo orchestra. They would have been doing show tunes.
My family was always playing music; I always enjoyed it. My cousin, who is a little older than me, he started playing music, so I wanted to, also. I asked my dad for a guitar, and he got me a banjo, so that was my introduction to playing. I played it like a guitar. I had a few lessons, learned out a few chords, and figured it out right away.
It's nice knowing we're putting the banjo, the fiddle, the steel, and the mandolin back out front.
John Fahey, thought during his lifetime to be possibly more than a little crazy, was the author of some thirty albums of gnomically introverted droning guitar instrumentals, which I listened to heavily in my teens and twenties; I even produced an hour or so of banjo music in an imitative John Fahey style.
