Plectrum Banjos Quotes

I think it is very ironic that most people think that the banjo is a southern white instrument. It came from Africa and even for the first years that white people played banjo they would put on blackface. ~ Bela Fleck

I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles and words. ~ Theodore Bikel

Visit an elf outpost and you practically hear the banjos in the background. ~ M.L. Brennan

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. ~ Nalini Singh

For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if-like the statues made by Daedalus or the tripods of Hephaestus, of which the poet says that "self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods" - shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves. ~ Aristotle.

The banjo am the instrument for me. ~ Grandpa Jones

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn't actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake. He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen. ~ Bela Fleck

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. ~ Rory Block

Set your guitars and banjos on fire and before you write a song smoke a pack of whiskey and it'll all take care of itself. ~ Beck

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. ~ Karen Russell

My dad also plays a little banjo and guitar, my mom plays the mandolin. ~ Page McConnell

When I got out of school, I spent two years just hitchhiking around. Every time I met some old farmer who could play banjo, I got him to teach me a lick or two. Little by little, I put it together. ~ Pete Seeger

My mother played a little bit of the old time clawhammer. She tuned the banjo up and picked one tune for me, and it just become natural to me. When she picked it, I just started and picked it, too. ~ Ralph Stanley

When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom - goddammit! - herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon! - by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers ~ Edward Abbey

The golden rule for playing the bass is that's it all about feel, not just plonking away. You need to feel the sound, not using a pick or a plectrum - which has meant plenty of calluses on my fingers. ~ Suzi Quatro

Nova Scotia is a box bass and a fiddle and German sourdough and scotch eggs. And the air, all heavy and bracing and wet. When you're driving, you wave to the old guy walking along the side of the road in the plaid flannel shirt and he waves back, because it's just what you do. This is an extraordinarily hospitable and musical place. You've got to haul wood in the winter and batten down hatches during hurricanes, and there are bagpipes and banjos and weathered old barns and whales offshore and abandoned fishing boats sleeping on the beach. ~ Kate Inglis

Hymn to Mercury : Continued

71.
Sudden he changed his plan, and with strange skill
Subdued the strong Latonian, by the might
Of winning music, to his mightier will;
His left hand held the lyre, and in his right
The plectrum struck the chords - unconquerable
Up from beneath his hand in circling flight
The gathering music rose - and sweet as Love
The penetrating notes did live and move

72.
Within the heart of great Apollo - he
Listened with all his soul, and laughed for pleasure.
Close to his side stood harping fearlessly
The unabashed boy; and to the measure
Of the sweet lyre, there followed loud and free
His joyous voice; for he unlocked the treasure
Of his deep song, illustrating the birth
Of the bright Gods, and the dark desert Earth:

73.
And how to the Immortals every one
A portion was assigned of all that is;
But chief Mnemosyne did Maia's son
Clothe in the light of his loud melodies; -
And, as each God was born or had begun,
He in their order due and fit degrees
Sung of his birth and being - and did move
Apollo to unutterable love.

74.
These words were winged with his swift delight:
'You heifer-stealing schemer, well do you
Deserve that fifty oxen should requite
Such minstrelsies as I have heard even now.
Comrade of feasts, little contriving wight,
One of your secrets I wou ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

I happened to take a photo, and there was my wife, my dog and my banjo, all in the same shot - and I thought, "Oh, that's like a family portrait right there." ~ Steve Martin

Woodrell's storytelling is as melodic, jangly and energetic as a good banjo riff ... Sammy Barlach's story is a tragedy, but the telling of it is a pleasure. ~ Valerie Sayers

A banjo will get you through times of no money, but money won't get you through times of no banjo ~ John Hartford

I reside in a new colony for the Chinese-singing banjo player, with a population of one. At least I have something I have to do with my life. ~ Abigail Washburn

There's many a good tune played by an old banjo. ~ Anthony Hopkins

Earl Scruggs had this thing that it wasn't just the technique or even the instrument. It was him. There was this soulful quality that came through that made you - if you're somebody like me who was, I guess, supposed to play the banjo, it made you stop in your tracks, and you couldn't do anything until you got done hearing him play, and then immediately you'd have to go try and find a banjo. ~ Earl Scruggs

I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo - a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money, and I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, 'I could do that.' And I said to my husband, I said, 'Ben, can I buy a banjo?' And he's like, 'No.' ~ Mena Grabowski Trott

Strigoi are the Lost. You're the Tainted because you joined the modern world and left behind their backward ways for your own messed up customs."
"Hey," I retorted. "We're not the ones with overalls and banjos."
"Rose," chastised Dimitri, with a pointed look at the door. "Be careful. And besides, we only saw one person in overalls. ~ Richelle Mead

I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome. ~ James Dickey

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen. ~ Carl Sandburg

Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses ... ~ Edward Abbey

The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past. ~ Steve Martin

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. ~ Ralph Stanley

I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. ~ Steve Martin

My grandfather played a mandolin, so I got my hands on that. Then on down to a banjo, and I found I couldn't play any kind of soft or mournful music with that so I took up the fiddle in my late 20s or early 30s - and that was far too late. But it keeps me off the streets. It has been a love of mine since I was 17 maybe. ~ Brendan Gleeson

I've heard of people stopping their cars, having car wrecks, all kinds of things. But most of the banjo players I know had that moment when they heard Earl Scruggs. So, for me, it transcends the technique. It's the musician in him and his personality, his musical personality, such great taste, such great technique, very, very creative. ~ Earl Scruggs

When you want genuine music
music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,
when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo! ~ Mark Twain

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. ~ Ketch Secor

I mean if it wasn't for Earl Scruggs, guys like me wouldn't be doing what we're doing. I mean, he's changed so many people's lives, honestly. I was thinking about all the thousands of people that live in Nashville, like myself, that there's no reason a guy from New York would end up down there if it wasn't for the sound of Earl Scruggs' banjo coming over the airwaves and just changing my life. ~ Earl Scruggs

Among other words used in ordinary conversation, [Francis of Assisi] could never hear "the love of God" without a kind of transformation within himself. For immediately upon hearing "the love of God," he would become excited, stirred, and inflamed, as though an inner chord of his heart had been plucked by the plectrum of the outward voice of the speaker ... . "The love of him," he said, "who loved us much is much to be loved."1 - Thomas of Celano,The Second Life of Saint Francis ~ Pope Francis

I also play fiddle, banjo and mandolin. ~ Sonny Burgess

saw my sweetheart wandering about the house; he had taken a rebec and was playing a melody.
With a plectrum like fire he was playing a sweet melody, drunken and dissolute and charming from the Magian wine.
He was invoking the saqi in the air of Iraq2 ; the wine was his object, the saqi was his excuse.
The moonfaced saqi pitcher in his hand, entered from a corner and set it in the middle.
He filled the first cup with that flaming wine; did you ever see water sending out flames?
He set it on his hand for the sake of the lovers, then prostrated and kissed the threshold.
My sweetheart seized it from him and quaffed the wine; flames from that wine went running over his face.
He was beholding his own beauty, and saying to the evil eye, "Never has there been, nor shall there come in this age, another like me. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

It seems like everyone's listening to fiddles and banjos. ~ Ketch Secor

There are tons of people in the West who love fiddles, banjos and mandolins. If you got to any cowboy poetry and music gathering those are the instruments they use. It's acoustic music. We don't do that much modern country that has electric guitars and a lot of volume. It's a gentler form of music. It's from the land and comes from the ranchers and farmers. ~ Michael Martin Murphey

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. ~ Steve Martin

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. ~ Vince Gill

I just naturally started to play music. My whole family played-my daddy played, my mother played. My daddy played bass, my cousin played banjo, guitar and mandolin. We played at root beer stands, like the .Drive-ins they have now, making $2.50 a night, and we had a cigar box for the kitty that we passed around, sometimes making fifty or sixty dollars a night. Of course we didn't get none of it, we kids. ~ T-Bone Walker