The loss in Aug. 2007 of the famed transplanted NH resident, Irish singer/songwriter and national folk hero of the Emerald Isle at 74, Tommy Makem, alerted me recently to a news photo of Tommy with ...

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission. There is no way to achieve that old-fashioned Appalachian ...

A reclamation project that takes the five-string banjo’s roots as an African instrument and tosses it into modern settings, Otis Taylor gathers an all-star blues crew to make a case for the instrument ...

"My father was born with this instrument," Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta says. "This is part of our history." Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He's holding an akonting: a ...

Early American banjo music is Black music. The banjo was created by enslaved African Americans, and according to the Smithsonian Institute, up until the 1830s, the banjo was exclusively an African ...

When putting together this top 10 of the most influential banjo players of all time, we needed to make a decision. Do we consider everybody that plays a stringed instrument with a drum for a body, or ...

STRING THEORY: “In retrospect, when I look back on my life, I understand there had always been a passion for banjo music,” says Mike Savino of Tall Tall Trees. As a solo act, he's taken that ...

Multi-instrumentalist Ry Cooder is a revered curator of great folk and roots music from around the world, a Grammy winner, a soundtrack writer, producer, and a brilliant bottleneck slide guitar player ...

When Seekonk resident Paul Poirier first heard his father-in-law play the banjo, he was hooked. “The first thing that reeled me in was my father-in-law, Pete DeBlois,” Poirier, 65, said. “He played ...