DJ Banjo

DJ Banjo was born in the north of France in 1743.  Born already possessed of an immense vocabulary, voice, and beard, he immediately joined the circus. While employed on the road, first as a roustabout, then as a geek (or "Man Eating Chicken" - for four years he subsisted only on chicken heads), and finally as a strongman, DJ Banjo picked up mad skills and kung fu in super futuristic electronic technologies and the hidden funk of the open-backed five-string banjo.

Thirty-one years later he has descended to the earth to bring us the power to Dance. All that is required is a steady sense of Fun, and loyalty to the Groove. He has assembled an extraordinary legion of dancers and musicians to join in body, spirit and electron toward life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Towndowner Records presents an amalgam of the greatest hits of the nineteenth century and the hot electronic dance sounds of 2010.

DJ Banjo (aka Don Beasley) is currently played by Dan Easley of The Shakes and The Kindly Ones.  Live, he sings lead and plays a fretless banjo in the traditional clawhammer style.  He's also programmed and performed the prerecorded backing tracks, which consist of a great many breakbeats, drops, gimmicks and cliches borrowed from electronic dance music of the last two decades, mixed in with sentimental piano parts, aggressive saxophones, funk and ambient electric guitar work, and a whole bunch of weird vocal harmonies.

He's joined on stage by Morgan Hager, of Madame Flod and Aeon Now, who plays fiddle and accordion.

Their repertoire is primarily traditional fiddle-and-banjo tunes of the 1800's, focusing on material common to the Appalachian area of that time.  Gypsy music and the odd tango also appear, as do a growing number of covers of contemporary popular songs by artists as disparate as Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Roger Miller, and Radiohead.

Franchise opportunities are available for other would-be DJ Banjos - please contact Dan for more details.

A sample of our work is here.