{"id":143271,"date":"2024-02-16T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-16T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/?p=143271"},"modified":"2024-02-13T11:22:19","modified_gmt":"2024-02-13T19:22:19","slug":"gibson-gb-bella-voce-guitar-banjo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/gibson-gb-bella-voce-guitar-banjo\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Acoustics: A Rare Gibson Bella Voce Guitar Banjo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Guitar banjos have never been widely popular, but there have always been just enough players seeking them out that most banjo makers have offered them in their catalogs. Because the instrument doesn\u2019t have the percussive snap of a tenor or a five-string banjo, or the mellowness and sustain of a guitar, it\u2019s neither fish nor fowl and consequently has had a hard time finding a musical home. But every now and then, a musician figures out what to do with a guitar banjo, and the results can be magical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Owing to their loudness, guitar banjos sound great in raucous settings like blues, early jazz, ragtime, and jug band music. In the 1920s, Papa Charlie Jackson<\/a> recorded some of the first self-accompanied blues on a Gibson guitar banjo, and his recordings of songs like \u201cSalty Dog\u201d and \u201cShake That Thing\u201d still inspire players to this day. During the same period, Johnny St. Cyr<\/a> used the instrument as a vital rhythmic component of the early jazz bands of Jelly Roll Morton<\/a> and Louis Armstrong<\/a>. The guitar banjo was also used by some vaudeville musicians, who liked the volume the instrument produced before the advent of amplification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n