Banjo

The banjo descends from West African gourd instruments -- split gourds topped with stretched animal skin and a fretless wooden neck -- that enslaved Africans brought to the Americas and the Caribbean; English trader Richard Jobson described a similar instrument in the Gambia as early as 1621, and a gourd banjo (recorded as the "banza") was documented in Martinique by 1678. In the antebellum American South, the instrument was played widely by enslaved African Americans and, through them, spread into the broader population.

The now-standard five-string form owes its shape in part to Joel Walker Sweeney, a Virginia performer who learned banjo from African American musicians in the 1820s-30s and became the first white performer to play it on stage; he is traditionally credited with adding a string to the four-string African American banjo, though some modern scholars question whether he actually originated the change. The instrument's commercial spread accelerated through 19th-century minstrel shows -- by 1866, an estimated 10,000 banjos existed in New York City alone.

Open G tuning is the most common tuning in bluegrass and old-time banjo playing, and it is unusual among stringed instruments for being re-entrant: pitch doesn't climb steadily from the thickest string to the thinnest. The 4th string (D3) is the lowest, followed by the 3rd (G3) and 2nd (B3), but the pattern breaks at the 5th string -- it's the shortest string on the instrument, running only from a peg near the fifth fret up to the headstock, which lets it be tuned higher than even the full-length 1st string (D4). Players typically strike this short 5th string with the thumb as a rhythmic drone, which is why it's commonly called the "drone string."