When I was 3 years old, I was playing banjo on a country music TV show.
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.
The banjo is my chosen instrument - it's what I write my music on.
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."
A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't.
I always loved the guitar, from when I was quite little. My dad had a G banjo at the house that he played. When he had parties, my sisters always played piano, and my dad played banjo.
I did a lot of things when I first started out. In order to be in show business, I juggled, I did magic tricks, cards tricks and I played the banjo.
My family making music was like a folk background, really: banging on tabletops, playing banjo and all kinds of things.
When I got to NYU, I had applied based on playing folk music, and they said, 'You're the banjo girl,' so I thought, 'OK, I'm the banjo girl.'
This all came of a conversation I had with [John] Steinbeck once when we were standing in a men's room somewhere. Steinbeck asked me why I didn't play the banjo any more and I told him that went out with the high-button shoes.
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.
I love five-string banjo. On an electric guitar, let's say a two-hour show, it starts getting heavy right across the neck and shoulders. And I like to be able to flip it off and grab the fiddle, and that's just the way I do it.
If I have something inside me that I want to get out, I'll just beat it out on the banjo right then and there.
English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.
The bottom line is, between Sonny Osborne and Earl Scruggs, I better know how to play banjo. I had the greatest teachers in the world.
My finger picking is sort of a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence.
I would get records by Earl Scruggs... I would tune my banjo down and I'd pick out the songs note by note. Learned how to play that way. I persevered. There was a book written by Pete Seeger, who showed you some basic strumming and some basic picking... And I kind of worked out my own style of playing.
I was 18, at art school, and saw this cute boy playing banjo. I was obsessed. I taught myself how to play. I listened to a lot of country and just messed around. The second song I wrote on the banjo was 'Good to Be a Man.' That what's got me signed.
I guarantee you there's a bunch of the twentysomethings that don't know that, don't know I play banjo and bluegrass.
Id be happiest standing at the back, strumming my little banjo where no one could see me.
Mind you, I've always been musical... Mother used to sit me on her knee and I'd whisper, 'Mummy, Mummy, sing me a lullaby do,' and she'd say: 'Certainly my angel, my wee bundle of happiness, hold my beer while I fetch me banjo.'
