Banjo, Britney and Marcus

I live in a farily large city (~2.7M??) and pretty consistently I am carrying some sort of musical equipment around.. whether it’s my stuff to and from a show, a new toy home, bags from various music stores, anything really and usually most items go completely unnoticed by the general populus.

That is, until I started carrying a banjo around. In an attempt to continually educate myself in the world of music, I took a few lessons and started carrying a banjo (in a case, mind you) weekly to and from the local music school. The response from the general populus? UNREAL. If it was as if they had never seen a banjo in the city before! I was consistently and frequently the subject of a conversation; whether a little girl asking about it on a bus, being asked to play the Deliverance on the subway at 2 am, or even being asked yelled out of car windows. 

I’d like to think this all boils down to Britney Spears. Listen closely around 0:43 seconds in…

Okay, okay, I kid, kid, because I know you all listened to this track back when it came out in the early 2000s (..yes, I actually did), but isn’t it outstanding how an instrument so commonly reserved for folk and bluegrass to make it mainstream? My favorite memory, which I have witnessed live, is from Mumford and Sons playing I will Wait.

Don’t you love the banjo sound in that? I think mainstream would agree with you, and hopefully the trend will continue.