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Jamie Swearengin
Professional players and collectors will appreciate our availability of in-stock, high end banjos. We also welcome you to come to Wedowee, Alabama to our show room where you can choose from a huge selection of banjos to try out. Jam with owner and lifelong musician, Barry Waldrep. Please make an appointment if you need to meet with Barry, his schedule gets hectic.
We value our partnerships with all of these American companies. The Deering Banjo Company recently announced that we were their No. 1 Dealer in the World and we are truly humbled. We were their first Master Dealer many years ago and our partnership continues to flourish. If you are ever out in Spring Valley, California, we recommend stopping by for a tour.
Another maker you that we are proud to partner with is Tom Nechville of Nechville Banjos. He brings American Ingenuity to the art of building banjos and produces some of the most cutting-edge designs. He owns several patents and has even inspired new trends in the industry.
We go above and beyond to make sure our customers are getting the best deals on new banjos. Our banjos are priced at the minimum advertised price or MAP. This is the lowest that we are allowed to price them at. All banjos include free shipping to the Continental U.S. with competitive rates offered Worldwide and to Alaska and Hawaii.
Finance your banjo through Affirm and get low monthly payments. On each banjo model page, you can prequalify to your payment terms including interest rate without harming your credit score. Credit availability is subject to third-party credit check that we are not involved with. We do not save your personal financial information.
In addition to the lowest prices and free shipping, we offer free spiking. Every banjo we sell is professionally setup, tuned, and carefully inspected prior to shipping. When your banjo arrives, it is ready to play. The bridge is in the correct position, the head is at the proper tension, and the banjo should be in tune or very close. Not many shops have a lifelong banjo player available to play each banjo and listen for tone.
If you have any questions or there are any issues with your banjo, you can pick up the phone and talk to a real person. Excellent customer service is important to us and it is the reason we are still around after almost 20 years. We are a small family shop passionate about what we do. The positive comments and reviews we receive regularly put a big smile on our faces.
Fantastic banjos sold by fantastic people. I have bought two banjos from Banjo.com and about to buy my third from them. These guys are just great people to go business with; knowledge, banjo players themselves, and just super nice. I do business with them because they are not just looking to sell my any banjo. They provide great input based upon what I want and need; not just what cost the most. I would recommend them to anyone and everyone interested in getting a banjo.
Barry at Banjo.com helped me make a great choice on purchasing a new banjo. He answered my emails and phone calls promptly. After a few conversations I went with his newly designed Bish Line Coal Dust. I ordered it and he kept me updated on its progress. It arrived in perfect condition and it's even nicer than he described. I will keep Banjo.com at the top of my list for any future purchases and would highly recommend them to others. Thank you again to Barry and his staff.
I recently purchased a Deering Sierra mahogany open back banjo from Banjo.com. Since I live in north Georgia, only two and one-half hours from the home of Banjo.com, I was able to visit the Banjo Barn where Barry give me the opportunity to "test drive" several banjos and he assisted me in narrowing down to my final choice. I must say, I couldn't be more pleased with this lovely instrument and the customer service I received from Barry and Banjo.com. Thank you!
The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, in modern forms usually made of plastic, originally of animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by African Americans and had African antecedents.[1][2] In the 19th century, interest in the instrument was spread across the United States and United Kingdom by traveling shows of the 19th-century minstrel show fad, followed by mass-production and mail-order sales, including instruction method books. The inexpensive or home-made banjo remained part of rural folk culture, but 5-string and 4-string banjos also became popular for home parlor music entertainment, college music clubs, and early 20th century jazz bands. By the early 21st century, the banjo was most frequently associated with folk, bluegrass and country music, but was also used in some rock, pop and even hip-hop music.[3] Among rock bands, the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead have used the five-string banjo in some of their songs. Some famous pickers of the banjo are Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs.
Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in Black American traditional music and rural folk culture before entering the mainstream via the minstrel shows of the 19th century.[4][5][6][7] Along with the fiddle, the banjo is a mainstay of American styles of music, such as bluegrass and old-time music. It is also very frequently used in Dixieland jazz, as well as in Caribbean genres like biguine, calypso, mento and troubadour.
The modern banjo derives from instruments that have been recorded to be in use in North America and the Caribbean since the 17th century by enslaved people taken from West and Central Africa. Their African-style instruments were crafted from split gourds with animal skins stretched across them. Strings, from gut or vegetable fibers, were attached to a wooden neck.[8] Written references to the banjo in North America and the Caribbean appear in the 17th and 18th centuries.[8]
The earliest written indication of an instrument akin to the banjo is in the 17th century: Richard Jobson (1621) in describing The Gambia, wrote about an instrument like the banjo, which he called a bandore.[8]
The term banjo has several etymological claims, one being from the Mandinka language which gives the name of Banjul, capital of The Gambia. Another claim is a connection to the West African akonting: it is made with a long bamboo neck called a bangoe. The material for the neck, called ban julo in the Mandinka language, again gives Banjul. In this interpretation, Banjul became a sort of eponym for the Akonting as it crossed the Atlantic. The instrument's name might also derive from the Kimbundu word mbanza,[9] which is a loan word to the Portuguese language resulting in the term banza,[8] which was used by early French travelers in the Americas.[10] Its earliest recorded use was in 1678[8] by the Sovereign Council of Martinique which reinstated a 1654 decree that placed prohibitions and restrictions on "dances and assemblies of negroes" deemed to be kalenda, which was defined as the gathering of enslaved Africans who danced to the sound of a drum and an instrument called the banza.[8][11]
The OED claims that the term banjo comes from a dialectal pronunciation of Portuguese bandore or from an early anglicisation of Spanish bandurria.[12] Contrary evidence shows that the terms bandore and bandurria were used when Europeans encountered the instrument or its kin varieties in use by people of African descent, who used names for the instrument such as banza,[8] as it was called in places such as Haiti, varieties that were built around a gourd body with a wooden plank for the neck. Franois Richard de Tussac, a former planter from Saint-Domingue, details its construction in the book Le Cri des Colons, published in 1810, stating:[13][14]
As for the guitars, which the negroes call banzas, this is what they consist of: they cut lengthwise, through the middle, a fresh calabash [the fruit of a tree called the callebassier]. This fruit is sometimes eight inches or more in diameter. The stretch across it the skin of a goat, which they attach on the edges with little nails; they put two or three little holes on this surface, and then a kind of plank or piece of wood that is rudely flattened makes the neck of the instrument; they stretch three strings made of pitre [a kind of string taken from the agave plant, commonly known as pitre] across it; and so the instrument is built. On this instrument they play airs composed of three or four notes, which they repeat constantly.[13][14]
Michel tienne Descourtilz, a naturalist who visited Haiti in the early 1800s, described it as banzas, a Negro instrument, that the natives prepare by sawing one of the calabashes or a large gourd lengthwise, to which they attach a neck and sonorous strings made from the filament" of aloe plants.[15] It was played during any occasion, from boredom to joyous parties and calendas to funeral ceremonies. It was the custom to also combine this sound with the more noisy bamboula, a type of drum made from a stick of bamboo covered on both sides with a skin that was played with fingers and knuckles while sitting astride.[16][14]
Various instruments in Africa, chief among them the kora, feature a skin drumhead and gourd (or similar shell) body.[17] These instruments differ from early African-American banjos in that the necks do not possess a Western-style fingerboard and tuning pegs; instead they have stick necks, with strings attached to the neck with loops for tuning.[17]
Another likely relative of the banjo is the aforementioned akonting, a spike folk lute which is constructed using a gourd body, a long wooden neck, and three strings[18] played by the Jola tribe of Senegambia, and the ubaw-akwala of the Igbo.[19] Similar instruments include the xalam of Senegal[20] and the ngoni of the Wassoulou region that includes parts of Mali, Guinea, and Ivory Coast, as well as a larger variation of the ngoni, known as the gimbri, developed in Morocco by sub-Saharan Africans (Gnawa or Haratin).
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