Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in Black American traditional music and rural folk culture before entering the mainstream via the minstrel shows of the 19th century.

The modern banjo derives from instruments that have been recorded to be in use in North America and the Caribbean since the 17th century by enslaved people taken from West and Central Africa.

[8][11] The OED claims that the term banjo comes from a dialectal pronunciation of Portuguese bandore or from an early anglicisation of Spanish bandurria.

[12] Contrary evidence shows that the terms bandore and bandurria were used when Europeans encountered the instrument or its kin varieties in use by people of African descent, who used names for the instrument such as banza,[8] as it was called in places such as Haiti, varieties that were built around a gourd body with a wooden plank for the neck.

François Richard de Tussac, a former planter from Saint-Domingue, details its construction in the book Le Cri des Colons, published in 1810, stating:[13][14] As for the guitars, which the negroes call banzas, this is what they consist of: they cut lengthwise, through the middle, a fresh calabash [the fruit of a tree called the callebassier].

The stretch across it the skin of a goat, which they attach on the edges with little nails; they put two or three little holes on this surface, and then a kind of plank or piece of wood that is rudely flattened makes the neck of the instrument; they stretch three strings made of pitre [a kind of string taken from the agave plant, commonly known as pitre] across it; and so the instrument is built.

[13][14]Michel Étienne Descourtilz, a naturalist who visited Haiti in the early 1800s, described it as banzas, a Negro instrument, that the natives prepare by sawing one of the calabashes or a large gourd lengthwise, to which they attach a neck and sonorous strings made from the filament" of aloe plants.

It was the custom to also combine this sound with the more noisy bamboula, a type of drum made from a stick of bamboo covered on both sides with a skin that was played with fingers and knuckles while sitting astride.

[16][14] Various instruments in Africa, chief among them the kora, feature a skin drumhead and gourd (or similar shell) body.

[17] Another likely relative of the banjo is the aforementioned akonting, a spike folk lute which is constructed using a gourd body, a long wooden neck, and three strings[18] played by the Jola tribe of Senegambia, and the ubaw-akwala of the Igbo.

[8] Another man who learned to play from African-Americans, probably in the 1820s, was Joel Walker Sweeney, a minstrel performer from Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

[26] Sweeney participated in this transition by encouraging drum maker William Boucher of Baltimore to make banjos commercially for him to sell.

[24] In 1949, Arthur Woodward credited Sweeney with replacing the gourd with a wooden sound box covered in skin, and adding a short fifth string around 1831.

[36] The first book of notated music was The Complete Preceptor by Elias Howe, published under the pseudonym Gumbo Chaff, consisting mainly of Christy's Minstrels tunes.

[37] Frank B. Converse also published his entire collection of compositions in The Complete Banjoist in 1868, which included "polkas, waltzes, marches, and clog hornpipes.

"[45] Musicians such as William A. Huntley made an effort to "elevate" the instrument or make it more "artistic," by "bringing it to a more sophisticated level of technique and repertoire based on European standards.

[46] He was supported by another former blackface performer, Samuel Swaim Stewart, in his corporate magazine that popularized highly talented professionals.

[29][48][43] An 1888 newspaper said, "All the maidens and a good many of the women also strum the instrument, banjo classes abound on every side and banjo recitals are among the newest diversions of fashion...Youths and elderly men too have caught the fever...the star strummers among men are in demand at the smartest parties and have the choosing of the society of the most charming girls.

[51] In the early 1900s, new banjos began to spread, four-string models, played with a plectrum rather than with the minstrel-banjo clawhammer stroke or the classic-banjo fingerpicking style.

[52] The country was turning away from European classics, preferring the "upbeat and carefree feel" of jazz, and American soldiers returning from the war helped to drive this change.

[52] That music encouraged musicians to alter their 5-string banjos to four, add the louder steel strings and use a pick or plectrum, all in an effort to be heard over the brass and reed instruments that were current in dance-halls.

Some banjos have a separate resonator plate on the back of the pot to project the sound forward and give the instrument more volume.

It is played in a number of different styles, the most common being clawhammer or frailing, characterized by the use of a downward rather than upward stroke when striking the strings with a fingernail.

Contemporary and modern works have been written or arranged for the instrument by Don Vappie, Jerry Garcia, Buck Trent, Béla Fleck, Tony Trischka, Ralph Stanley, George Gibson, Steve Martin, Clifton Hicks, George Crumb, Tim Lake, Modest Mouse, Jo Kondo, Paul Elwood, Hans Werner Henze (notably in his Sixth Symphony), Daniel Mason, Beck, the Water Tower Bucket Boys, Todd Taylor, J.P. Pickens, Peggy Honeywell, Norfolk & Western, Putnam Smith, Iron & Wine, The Avett Brothers, The Well Pennies, Punch Brothers, Julian Koster, Sufjan Stevens, and Sarah Jarosz.

Examples include: Hello, Dolly!, Mame, Chicago, Cabaret, Oklahoma!, Half a Sixpence, Annie, Barnum, The Threepenny Opera, Monty Python's Spamalot, and countless others.

Joe Raposo had used it variably in the imaginative seven-piece orchestration for the long-running TV show Sesame Street, and has sometimes had it overdubbed with itself or an electric guitar.

[69] A zither banjo usually has a closed back and sides with the drum body and skin tensioning system suspended inside the wooden rim, the neck and string tailpiece mounted on the outside of the rim, and the drone string led through a tube in the neck so that the tuning peg can be mounted on the head.

This was the instrument of the early jazz great Johnny St. Cyr, jazzmen Django Reinhardt, Danny Barker, Papa Charlie Jackson and Clancy Hayes, as well as the blues and gospel singer Reverend Gary Davis.

Today, musicians as diverse as Keith Urban, Rod Stewart, Taj Mahal, Joe Satriani, David Hidalgo, Larry Lalonde and Doc Watson play the six-string guitar banjo.

A 20th-century Turkish instrument similar to the banjo is called the cümbüş, which combines a banjo-like resonator with a neck derived from an oud.