The Banjo's Evolution. The instrument's murky history doesn't stop there. The banjo hit mainstream culture through minstrel shows, where performers often donned blackface and used the stage to ...

The banjo is a key instrument in Western folk music -- from US bluegrass to Irish trad -- and over the past 20 years, research into the roots of this three-stringed instrument have revealed its ...

However, when enslaved West Africans were brought to America in the 1600s, they carried ancestors of the instrument we’d eventually call the “banjo”: spike-lute instruments such as the ngoni ...