Banjo

Banjo music, or a rustic, country mood, more than the instrument itself.

Most people who send 🪕 are not banjo players. The emoji stands for a style: bluegrass, country, Americana, folk, Irish trad or old-time music. It appears in playlist names, festival posts, captions for a porch or campfire evening, and jokes about going "full country". A banjo player, by contrast, uses it literally: a lesson, a new instrument, a gig.

Its tone is cheerful and a little homespun. The sharp, plunky sound of a banjo is hard to take too seriously, which is why the emoji also turns up in self-deprecating jokes about rural life or bad singing around a fire. Beside a sneer about someone's hometown, though, that same association turns into a "hillbilly" jab, so watch the words around it.

What is a banjo, exactly?

A stringed instrument whose body is a drum, not a wooden box.

That drum is the whole secret. A guitar's strings ring over a hollow wooden body; a banjo's strings run over a tight membrane stretched across a round frame, like a drumhead. Plucking the strings makes the head vibrate, which gives the banjo its loud, bright, quickly fading note, the sound people call twang. The classic American version has five strings, the fifth one short and high, played with fingerpicks in the fast rolling style Earl Scruggs made famous in bluegrass. Four-string banjos are strummed with a pick in Irish traditional music and early jazz.

The banjo's roots are African. Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the American South built gourd-bodied lutes modelled on West African instruments such as the akonting; travellers described these "banjars" in the 1700s. White performers took the instrument into blackface minstrel shows in the 1800s, where it became a national craze, and from there it passed into Appalachian string bands, early country and, in the 1940s, bluegrass. For much of the twentieth century it was stereotyped as a white rural instrument, and its Black history was largely forgotten.

That history is being reclaimed. Musicians such as Rhiannon Giddens have put the Black string-band tradition back on stage, and her banjo opens Beyoncé's 2024 country album Cowboy Carter. Earlier, Mumford & Sons carried the banjo into stadium folk-rock in the 2010s. So 🪕 can carry more than a campfire mood: for many listeners today it is a symbol of Black roots music too.