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 ...

My 25th wedding anniversary was approaching. My husband, Bruce, a 50-year piano student who takes a lesson every two weeks, asked me if I might like an instrument for an anniversary present. I love ...

ALTON — Fiddlin’ Banjo Billy Mathews has been playing music since he was 8 years old when he started piano lessons. Around the age of 13, he added the guitar, and then picked up the banjo during his ...

DIM WERE the stage lights of New York in early 1843. With the country trying to shake off a nagging recession at the midpoint of the John Tyler administration, economic unease had trickled down to the ...

Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn pool their skills in duo Husband and wife Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn are both banjo-music greats in their own right. Fleck is the innovator, experimenter, the rock ...

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 I was growing up (along Banjo Branch, north of Mars Hill),” old-time musician Roger Howell says, “we had a neighbor, Pearl Ball, who lived across the valley. (She) sat on her front porch and ...