Cooking with Banjos

Uncle Dave Macon

The round drum of a banjo is called the “pot” — you say your open-back banjo has an 11-inch pot, and so forth.

Obviously, I’m not the first to notice the cooking association. One of the best-known stringbands before WWII was The Skillet Lickers. It’s like guitar “licks,” except played on a banjo, which if you hold it by the neck, looks like a skillet.

The signature song of the great banjo songster Uncle Dave Macon was “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy”. I like that the design of a 5-string banjo is “written into” this song’s tune. The SKILL syllable is high and loud and you can easily play it by snapping the high 5th string. The word TIME in the rest of the line (“Keep my skillet good and greasy all the time, time, time”) slides up several notes each time it’s said, so it goes: “Keep my SKILLet good and greasy all the slide, slide, slide”. The melody seems to spring naturally from the design of old-time fretless banjos.

There’s also an old banjo tune called “Sugar in the Gourd,” which may refer to the fact that banjos used to be made from gourds, and there’s a great sweetness to the sound of a gourd banjo.

Of course, all of this might be sexual innuendo, as well.