Johnny Baier

Johnny Baier will be inducted into the American Banjo Music Music Hall of Fame this September 2019. He has been called the “banjo player’s player” and the “entertainer’s entertainer”. Baier is the Executive Director of the American Banjo Museum and comments that “the museum was originally founded primarily by and for enthusiasts and players of the four-string banjo, the predominate stringed instrument associated with the jazz age of the 1920s and early 30s.” In contrast to that beginning, Baier noted that the museum has evolved much like the banjo. As the banjo has evolved for nearly 400 years in the United States taking on many different forms and styles, the American Banjo Museum has expanded and made a commitment to present every chapter of the banjo’s story, from its roots in American slavery to its most recent identities in Bluegrass and international folk music.

Baier started playing banjo professionally at 15, just two weeks after first picking up the instrument! From “learning as he earned,” leading sing-alongs at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Baier went on to win the Canadian National Banjo Competition in 1983. He subsequently spent three years touring across the U.S. as musical ambassador for the Sara Lee Corporation, prior to settling down in Orlando, Florida. Well known as a crowd pleasing entertainer and virtuoso banjo player—placing him in the ranks of Eddie Peabody, Harry Reser, John Cali and others who inspired him—in 1988 Baier started what would be a 15,000 solo show run at Rosie O’Grady’s in Church Street Station in downtown Orlando (so it’s fitting that Rosie O’Grady’s founder, Bob Snow, will be inducted alongside Johnny this year in the category of Promotion).