Character Quotes
from "The Magic Banjo"

1796 JAMAICA, from the journal of George Pinckard

A slave ship, belonging to North America and bound to Savannah, Georgia had arrived from the coast of Guinea and was lying very near to us with a cargo of Negroes on board... In the daytime, they were not allowed to remain where they had slept, but were kept mostly upon the open deck where they were made to exercise and encouraged by the sound of their beloved banjar, to dancing and cheerfulness.

RICHARD REILLY, North Carolina

"Every Satiday, we'd get a few old boys together and play and some of those girls they'd be dancin' and we liked that, so we played some more and sometimes those slave boys they'd play with us and it was like we were more equal then even tho we wasn't."

MARK TWAIN, Missouri

….“When you want genuine music—music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin feather pimples on a pickled goose—when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!”

GIBSON BANJO CATALOG 1927

“The Gibson Banjo is the modern 'Open Sesame' to a world of good times, fun, and happiness. Ability to play the banjo soon places one in position to pick and choose from scores of social invitation.  Everywhere, the banjoist is assured of a hearty welcome.”

FRANK PROFFIT

“I recall going to the woods with Dad to get the timber for banjo making.  He selected a tree by its appearance and by sounding, sounding...a timber cutters' term of speech in describing hitting a tree with a hammer or axe, to tell by the sound, if it is straight grained, sound, shaky, faulty or hollow.  I do this myself now...I can't describe it in words but I see inside the tree by the sound of hitting it.”

CARL SANDBURG

"My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.”

FBI OPERATIVE

“After going through the song only once, the entire audience joined in the singing.  They joined in not because they wanted to, but were led into it through mass psychology at the hands of these Almanac Singers and all their communist friends.”

WALT WHITMAN

"Poets to come,” he said, “orators, singers, musicians to come, arise for you must justify me!”

WOODY GUTHRIE

"For these reasons most politicians are plumb off track.  They got a whole system of life and living, eating, drinking, celebrating, poker playing, exercise as well as book reading, going to meetings, shaking hands etc. That system of living and that way of doing things ain’t no more like the people's way than nothing."

PETE SEEGER BEFORE HUAC

"I resent very much and very deeply the implications of being called before this committee that in some way, because my opinions may be different from yours, that I am any less of an American than anybody else."