5 strings. Same chord. Two completely different musical worlds.

Below: the 5 open strings of a standard 5-string banjo (tap to hear). The amber-highlighted 5th string is the high G drone — physically the shortest, attached at the 5th fret rather than the headstock. Then hit Play on clawhammer or Scruggs and watch which strings light up. Same five strings, totally different rhythm — and that drone rings through both.

Pure synthesis — a real banjo has a tightened drumhead, a brass tone ring, and a player's right hand applying micro-pressure on every pluck. What comes through clearly here is the rhythm: clawhammer is loping and weighted (long-short-short), Scruggs is a torrent of even notes with the high drone ringing through every other one. That ring is the instrument's signature.

The banjo is a West African instrument that walked off a slave ship

Long before there was a banjo in North America there were gourd-bodied lutes across West Africa: the akonting of the Jola people of Senegambia, the ngoni of Mali, the xalam of the Wolof, the halam, the ekonting, and a dozen related instruments. The shared design is unmistakable: a hollow gourd resonator with a stretched skin head, a long wooden neck, a small number of strings — typically three or four — and on several of them, a short high drone string sitting on the side of the neck. The akonting in particular has so much in common with the modern banjo, including a short high drone, that ethnomusicologist Daniel Jatta argued from the 1990s onward that it is the banjo's most direct ancestor.

The instrument crossed the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships. The earliest documentation of a banjo-like instrument in the Americas comes from Sir Hans Sloane's A Voyage to the Islands (1707), which includes engravings of "strum strumps" — gourd-bodied stringed instruments — being played by enslaved Africans in Jamaica. Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), wrote that enslaved African Americans on his plantation played the "Banjar," which he described as derived from an African original.

For roughly two centuries the banjo was a Black instrument played in Black communities. The historian and folklorist Cecelia Conway, in African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia (1995), traced the continuous Black banjo tradition through the South into the early 20th century, where it was largely written out of the popular story. Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops have spent the last twenty years putting it back in.

How the banjo got onto white American stages

In the 1830s, white American performers in blackface began touring with banjos copied from Black players. The most influential of them, Joel Walker Sweeney (1810–1860), is often credited — disputedly — with adding or popularising the short 5th string on the modern 5-string banjo, though the drone string almost certainly already existed in African American hands before he got there. What is not in dispute is that minstrelsy made the banjo a household instrument across white America: by the 1860s it was the most popular fretted instrument in the country, sold by the thousand in middle-class parlour catalogues.

The minstrel-era banjo is uncomfortable history that the rest of the banjo's story sits on top of. It is also the period in which the modern instrument was standardised — the open-back, gourd-derived shape gave way to the wooden rim with a stretched calfskin head, frets were added, the 5th string became the rule rather than the option, and the first commercial banjo makers (Boucher, Stewart, Bacon) set up shop. The instrument that emerged on the other side of the minstrel era is essentially the one you can still buy today.

December 8, 1945 — Earl Scruggs walks onto the Grand Ole Opry

By the 1920s the 5-string banjo was on its way out. Jazz had taken over American popular music, and the louder, sharper 4-string tenor banjo had pushed the 5-string aside. Recordings of old-time clawhammer continued — Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon, Dock Boggs — but the instrument was, in commercial terms, in retreat. Plenty of music historians writing in the early 1940s assumed it was finished.

It wasn't. On the night of December 8, 1945, a 21-year-old North Carolinian named Earl Scruggs walked onstage at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville to join Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. He was playing a Gibson Mastertone with three metal fingerpicks — thumb, index, middle — and he was not strumming or frailing. He was doing something nobody on a national stage had ever done: rapid, syncopated, three-finger rolls, eight or sixteen even notes per measure, with the high G drone ringing through every other note like a hammer. The audience reaction is well-documented. Within a few months Monroe's records were selling unusually well; within two years young men across the upper South were learning to play "Scruggs style"; within five years the genre that Monroe and Scruggs had effectively invented — bluegrass — had a name.

Scruggs left Monroe in 1948 to form the Foggy Mountain Boys with Lester Flatt. Their recording of Foggy Mountain Breakdown (Mercury, 1949) became the most-copied banjo instrumental ever made — used as the chase theme in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which restarted the bluegrass commercial cycle for a whole new generation. Every modern bluegrass banjo player on the planet learned Scruggs's rolls before they learned anything else. Earl Scruggs is to the banjo what Charlie Christian is to the electric guitar: there is a "before him" and an "after him," and the two sound nothing alike.

The 9 banjo types in working use

Eight of the nine still have the drone 5th string. The exceptions are the 4-string types (tenor and plectrum), which dropped it to serve jazz.

A few more exist on the margins: the cello banjo (bass-range, very rare), the bass banjo (rarer still), and the minstrel-era gourd banjo, which Rhiannon Giddens and a small group of period-instrument players are bringing back as a deliberate historical statement.

The short string — the one feature that makes a banjo a banjo

Pick up a 5-string banjo and the first thing you notice is the small tuning peg sticking out of the side of the neck at the 5th fret. The string runs from that peg, over a tiny nut, along the top edge of the fretboard, across the bridge, and down to the tailpiece. Its scale length is roughly 19 inches; the other four strings are about 26½ inches. It is tuned to G4 — a full octave plus a perfect fifth above the 4th string, which is the lowest pitched. In normal playing the 5th string is left open: you don't fret it, you just keep hitting it.

That constant ringing high note is the banjo's signature. Every traditional banjo style is built around bringing it back as often as possible. In clawhammer it lands on the off-beat of every cycle. In Scruggs's three-finger roll it lands on every other note. In Pete Seeger's "basic strum" it caps every measure. Take it away — as the 4-string tenor and plectrum did, to fit into the rhythm section of a jazz band — and the instrument loses its identity. It becomes a small fretted thing that sounds a bit like a snare drum. The 5th string is the one design choice that, once you've heard it, you can pick out of any mix.

The six players who decided what the banjo means

Two old-time, two bluegrass / fusion, one popular crossover, one who is reclaiming the instrument's African American origins. Tap a card to expand.

Clawhammer and Scruggs in plain language

Clawhammer (also called frailing, or "drop-thumb" in its more advanced forms) is the older style — directly descended from the West African and minstrel-era banjo traditions and still the standard in Appalachian old-time music. The player holds the right hand in a relaxed claw shape, palm facing the strings. The index or middle fingernail strikes downward on a melody string (this is the "bum"); the same hand brushes across two or three strings on the way down (the "dit"); then the thumb plucks the 5th-string drone on the rebound (the "ty"). "Bum-ditty bum-ditty" is the standard count. There are no fingerpicks. The whole technique is downstrokes — the fingers never come up through the strings.

Scruggs picking (three-finger bluegrass style) is what Earl Scruggs codified in 1945. The player wears three picks: a plastic or metal thumbpick on the thumb, and two metal fingerpicks on the index and middle fingers. The fingers move upward, not down — they pick the strings on the way back. The patterns are called "rolls": forward roll (T-I-M-T-I-M-T-M), backward roll (M-I-T-M-I-T-M-T), forward-backward roll, alternating thumb roll, and a few others. Every roll is eight sixteenth notes long, and on the basic G chord most rolls put the thumb on the 5th-string drone roughly half the time. The technique is fast, rhythmically dense, and depends entirely on having metal picks — bare fingers can't move quickly enough or generate the volume.

Both styles use the same five-string instrument tuned the same way. Both bring the drone back constantly. They sound nothing alike. That is what the widget at the top of the page is for.

Not the instrument?

Banjo-Kazooie — a video-game series first released by Rare Ltd for the Nintendo 64 in 1998. The title characters are a honey bear (Banjo) and a "breegull," a fictional red bird (Kazooie). Sequels: Banjo-Tooie (2000) and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (2008). Re-released digitally on Xbox and Nintendo Switch Online.

Banjo fitting — a hydraulic or pneumatic fitting (also called a banjo bolt) used in brake lines, fuel lines, and turbocharger oil feeds. Named for its shape: a round, hollow body with a hole through it, looking like the head of a banjo, with a bolt running through the centre. Unrelated to the instrument; not a typo.

"Dueling Banjos" — a 1955 composition by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, famously rearranged for the film Deliverance (1972). The arrangement is actually a duel between a banjo and a guitar, not two banjos. It became the best-selling country single of 1973 in the United States and is probably the most-heard banjo recording of all time, despite — or because — most listeners can't hum any other.

Banjo (coffee shop) — a small specialty-coffee chain based in Chicago, with locations including the Avondale neighbourhood. Unrelated to the instrument.

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