10 Legendary Instruments of Country Music

Pete Seeger’s Banjo

Few musicians have popularized the banjo quite like Pete Seeger. At first, a humble folk musician whose commercial success in the 1940s and 1950s propelled banjo into the limelight, Seeger eventually became a social activist who used his banjo for the greater good. He had a huge hand in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and continued to use the banjo as a symbol of community and fighting oppression. Undoubtedly appropriate, considering the original banjo was built by African American slaves in the Caribbean in the 17th century. He inscribed the now-famous saying on his banjo head, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”