How Steve Martin learned to pick

Steve Martin plays a pretty mean banjo, says Tim Cooper in the London Times. “I’m not making any extravagant claims,” says the 64-year-old comedian and actor. “I’m either an amateur professional or a professional amateur—I’m not sure which.” But Martin is no dilettante: He shared a 2002 Grammy for his performance on an album with bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs, and banjo great Béla Fleck has praised Martin’s technique. Martin first took up the banjo during the folk craze of the ’60s, teaching himself to play from a book when he was 17. “I just loved the sound. It’s hard to express why, except that whenever I heard a song on the radio that had a banjo, I would find myself going, ‘What’s that?’” Soon, he was playing onstage to pad out his stand-up act. “When I first started I would play serious songs, but when the comedy started taking off, I just knew that the audience wasn’t there to have me play serious banjo, so I worked out some comedy routines.” As his career blossomed, Martin never gave up the banjo, and a few years ago, when he felt himself getting “a little bit rusty,” he devised a strategy to practice more. “I put a banjo in every room in the house—the living room, the dining room, and the bedroom—so wherever I was, I could pick up a banjo.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up