Emerson Lake and Palmer song featuring a banjo?

December 22, 2016 7:02 PM

A friend swears there is one but of course could not name it. I was hoping one of you can.
posted by IndigoJones to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

Lucky Man has a banjodoline.
edit: oops, just realized that's a cover.
posted by It'sANewDawn at 7:30 PM on December 22, 2016

Could he possibly be thinking of the Eagles' 'Journey of the Sorcerer', aka the theme to 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'?
posted by holgate at 9:22 PM on December 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Just throwin' this out here - I immediately thought of "Benny the Bouncer" from Brain Salad Surgery. It's a honky-tonky kind of song. I'm not sure it actually has a banjo, but it sounds like it should have one.
posted by dono at 6:45 AM on December 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

There doesn't appear to be an exact match for banjo credits on ELP songs according to the google.

Stretching the point a bit: maybe the autoharp on 'Take a Pebble', or the rather twangy acoustic guitar on the live version of 'Still You Turn Me On'. Or maybe your friend misheard 'The Roof is Leaking' by Phil Collins and thought it was Greg Lake?
posted by ovvl at 7:36 AM on December 23, 2016

Emerson Lake and Powell's song "Touch and Go" has the lyric:

They're leaving you nothing nowhere to go
Just put you in the corner like an old banjo
The strings are breaking but you can't say no
You're runnin' with the devil it's touch and touch and go

Maybe that's what they are thinking of.
posted by octothorpe at 7:40 AM on December 23, 2016

Response by poster: I'm guessing he was mistaken. Pity, though, it could have been interesting.

But thank you all, even not quite right answers are always interesting.

(Banjodoline! That's hilarious.)
posted by IndigoJones at 7:57 AM on December 23, 2016

Maybe your friend was conflating ELP's rendition of Hoedown (from Copland's Rodeo suite) with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones'?
posted by Funeral march of an old jawbone at 1:13 PM on July 19, 2017