To early recordings and broadcasts of country music, the banjo brought not only its distinctive frailing or finger-picked sounds, but also its African and minstrel connotations. The banjo is visually and aurally one of the most recognizable instruments associated with country music. Banjos may be fretted or fretless, acoustic or electric, mass-manufactured or individually handcrafted. Most common now is the five-string banjo, where the "fifth string" is a short string usually tuned to function as a high drone or "chanterelle." Five-string banjos may be found in open-back folk or old-time types using gut or steel strings and also in resonator-backed variations, almost always steel-strung. The family of banjos today includes four-string tenors (similar to the standard banjo but with a shorter neck and no fifth string), plectrums (so called because they are played with a plectrum and, in form, identical to the standard banjo but with no fifth string) and six-string guitar-banjos. The slave trade brought banjo prototypes to the New World, where such powerful transforming forces as nineteenth-century minstrelsy and mass manufacture changed the banjo and its associated playing styles many times over. Historically, American banjos are descendants of a broadly related family of lutes developed in West Africa from earlier Middle Eastern models. Banjos are plucked or strummed stringed instruments whose distinctive tones stem from the strings being supported by a bridge that rests on a tightly stretched skin membrane.
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