I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.
I didn't realize until I was older what a huge music fan my daddy really was, and actually that my grandma played banjo at one time, and I didn't even know that until a year or two ago.
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.
My dad also plays a little banjo and guitar, my mom plays the mandolin.
Can you tell the difference between them?
A gentleman is a man who can play the banjo, but doesn't.
Id be happiest standing at the back, strumming my little banjo where no one could see me.
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.
The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.
I just loved the guitar when it came along. I loved it. The banjo was something I really liked, but when the guitar came along, to me that was my first love in music
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.
When we moved back to the US, folk music was all the rage. So I traded in my banjo for a guitar.
When I was very young my mother sang to me at bedtime and my dad would often play the banjo or fiddle in the evening. I knew music was important and central to everything, most particularly it had a powerful healing value and created a sense of peace and security. This stood out to me as I always felt the world was precarious and dangerous, and music supplied those moments of real peace and safety.
The thing about the banjo is when you first hear it, it strikes many people as what's that? There's something very compelling about it to certain people.
I remember doing "As Cool As I Am" and Steve Miller, the producer, saying "I really hear a drum loop here. I want to play it for you." When I wrote it, I thought, "This isn't going to sound very folky. I don't think it's going to go with mandolins and banjos." Then he played the loop for me and it sounded right.
Grab a guitar, put some kind of strings on it, a banjo string, then a violin string, then a guitar string, tune it any way you want, and make some noise, and see what you get. And work on it until you get something that you think is interesting. That's all there is to art for me.
I was about 16 years old years when my father took me to a square dance festival in North Carolina. For the first time in my life, I found there was music in my country that you never heard on the radio, and you didn't hear on the juke boxes, and in theaters. I fell in love with it, especially the long-necked banjos.
My first banjo? My mother's sister, my aunt, lived about a mile from where we did, and she raised some hogs. And she had - her - the hog - the mother - they called the mother a sow - of a hog. And she had some pigs. Well, the pigs were real pretty, and I was going to high school and I was taking agriculture in school. And I sort of got a notion that I'd like to do that, raise some hogs. And so my aunt had this old banjo, and my mother told me, said, which do you want, the pig or a banjo? And each one of them's $5 each. I said, I'll just take the banjo.
Well I started out on guitar, so it is still the mainstay of my music. But I have recently been working very hard on my piano, and it is coming along to the point where it is taking more of the spotlight. It has been my plan to be able to make music well into my old age, and sitting down seems like a good idea. Also, I don't have to carry the piano on the road. I haven't been playing the banjo much of late because of the difficulties of travelling with so much gear. But maybe I'll bring it to Japan. It adds a different color to the musical palette.
She dumped me for the quarterback after she'd played my body like a banjo. So Sad." "I bet" "I'm serious. I was heartbroken." "For how long?" "A whole week." An eternity in the life of a teenage boy.
I'm into old-time music, I'm not very interested in modern, popular music at all. And if I'm really into some particular old-time musician, some fiddler or banjo player, I'm always dying of curiosity to see what they look like.
What I'm worrying about is what Tom is going to say when he starts talking." "Uncle Tom?" "I wish there was something else you could call him except 'Uncle Tom,' " Aunt Dahlia said a little testily. "Every time you do it, I expect to see him turn black and start playing the banjo.
I didn't grow up on the porch of a cabin looking out over the 90 acres that the mule was plowing with Paw-Paw playing the banjo. But I was always interested in folk music.
Things have been invented because of alcohol. Like the taser, okay? Yeah! The morning after pill, okay? The reach-around. Judge Judy. What has pot given the world? Hackey sack? YEAH! Hilarious ring tones? OH GAH! Ultimate Frisbee Championships? It sucks to be a champion at a sport that can't get you laid. It's an unneeded skill like, I dunno, being the best banjo player. Or a squirter.
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