Clair McFarland: Don't Harass Your Banjo Player

Some of you don’t like banjo, but I won’t hold that against you.

Stringed instruments go way back, to eras even before the one in which young David played for the Lord. The boy also had to play hard enough to give his royal predecessor, King Saul, a break from the demons that haunted him.

And for that, I like to think, David unleashed a little twang.

As for me, I don’t play banjo. I’ve always loved it though.

The first time I heard one in person was at a cowboy poetry event in Atlantic City, Wyoming, sometime in the mid-90s. A lone banjoist rattled off Red River Valley while I – all of 6 years old and not big enough to see the pearl inlay through a field of Stetsons – nursed a sassafras beer and an incurable ache.

I stood on my tiptoes. I jumped and stretched, trying to link the invisible ramble to the way it flushed my cheeks.

Something ungovernable broke loose in my head. I felt like the stunning peaks of existence were right there in my own head and soul, no matter what the world may do to knock me down.

Years later I met The Husband, and he brought me to Easter dinner at his parents’ house. One of his brothers grabbed a guitar. Another grabbed a banjo, and they jammed hard enough to do David proud.

Felt like home to me.

In 2009, the United Kingdom folk-rock band Mumford and Sons exploded onto stateside FM radios. They fused rock, with Shakespeare, with banjo – spawning a family tree of hipster-rock, bluegrass pop bands that still hasn’t fizzled into a musical autumn.

Mumford’s banjo player quit the band in 2021 after being made to apologize for (of all things) a book he’d read and praised.

He then quoted Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not By Lies” and strode off into his new social-media influencer career with his banjo on his back.  

Ungovernable.

Since then, Mumford and Sons has been kinda blah: sentimental anthem rock. So I always tell my sons, don’t ever test your banjo player.  

My banjo player is the little, feisty twin.

He sat down with my father-in-law and a five-string one day last autumn, listening to such instructions as “now always return to the top string. That’s what gives it that brightness.”

I still haven’t cracked the code of what gives Little-Feisty all his brightness, but at least I understand the banjo a little better now.

A tortured conduit with metal fingerpicks wrapped around his little, rosy fingertips, Little-Feisty curls his entire soul around his banjo when he plays.

Today it was “Cripple Creek” and “She’s Comin’ Round The Mountain.” Just as he was really getting into the rogue mashup that is my housework anthem, Middleborn saw fit to plug in his electric guitar three feet away and blast out a chorus of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”

I frowned.

“Well that was unnecessary,” I said.

Middleborn turned the dial up and started playing the chorus to “Thunderstruck.”

Little-Feisty was undeterred. He played “Joy to the World.”

Even with that banjo being just a pan, a neck, five strings and some invisible sprites, I could hear it well above the sound of “Thunderstruck.”

Little-Feisty played so hard, Middleborn gave up, wrinkled his nose and hung up his guitar. Black Sabbath shriveled. The spring wind whimpered and died.

The banjo is not for everyone. It’s twangy, associated with bare dirty feet and threadbare suspenders. But nothing drowns it out or mutes its brightness, its uniqueness.

And I think, what makes the banjo so timeless and so stunning isn’t whether you like it – it’s that it doesn’t care if you do.