Bill Evans

Musician · b. 1956 · Also a recording artist
Best known for Banjo

Bill Evans is a banjo player, teacher and historian of the instrument — the author of the book most beginners learn from, a working performer in bluegrass and old-time settings, and the man behind a concert-lecture on the banjo’s American history that traces it from West Africa through minstrelsy to Earl Scruggs.

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  • Born September 2, 1956, he took up the five-string banjo as a teenager and never treated the instrument’s past as separate from its technique.
  • He has performed with Dry Branch Fire Squad, David Grisman, Peter Rowan and Tony Trischka, moving between hard bluegrass and old-time as the job requires.
  • He wrote Banjo for Dummies, the best-selling banjo instruction book in the world, now in a second edition and translated into French and Portuguese.
  • He received the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, awarded by a jury of players to musicians whose work has not had the audience it deserves.
  • His stage program The Banjo in America performs the instrument’s history on period instruments — gourd banjo, minstrel banjo, classic-era and bluegrass — and is as much scholarship as concert.
  • He has taught thousands of players in private lessons, camps and workshops on several continents, and writes instructional material continuously.
  • His own records — Native and Fine (1995), Bill Evans Plays Banjo (2001) and In Good Company (2012) — mix Scruggs-style bluegrass with clawhammer and older parlor repertoire.
  • In this catalog he appears on Dry Branch Fire Squad’s “Aragon Mill,” on old-time material like “Elzic’s Farewell” and “Chinquapin Hunting,” and on his own “Heavy Traffic Ahead” and “Omie Wise.”

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