The Banjo Song: Why We Don’t Dance Anymore, and How I Found Hope in a Music Video

One of the highlights of my job is chatting with audience members.

Happily, as I am constantly surrounded by them, I find people interesting. Stories, jokes, and quips are some of the best parts about my job. Often, my ‘purpose’ as a musician feels strongest when I hear from audience members. Everything from polite affirmations, to deeply personal anecdotes, make performing feel relevant, important, and positive.

It is rare, however, that I will hear something so profound in my interactions that it lingers in my thoughts for days on end. However, it is one such interaction that has spurred me to write today.

One of the most striking things I have ever heard from an audience member was as I was packing up after a wedding performance. An older lady and I were exchanging pleasantries, when she said those words:

            “It feels good to dance, because we don’t dance anymore”.

In a single moment I felt profoundly sad and inexplicably inspired; validation for my role as a performer in spurring someone to revive their memories and experience the best of the evening, while devastated at the remarkable truth in the statement.

It’s surely something that we’ve all noticed - in our own ways - that slowly, purposelessly, we have lost communities through our search for personal fulfilment. Along the high streets where once stood bandstands, workers’ unions, town halls, and churches, now stands a desolate emptiness. If any floor space does happen to be occupied, it’s usually by something like a ‘metro’-type supermarket, vape shop, or the like.

We have lost the spaces in which we used to find love. In which we used to spend time with people: friends, new and old. Where we used to live, of all things.

Today, dance as a cultural touchstone has all but vanished. It speaks volumes that, far from the Charlestons, waltzes, and Lindy-Hops of the day, the closest thing we get to nation-sweeping popular dances now is TikTok trends. Yes, the hunger for communal movement is there, but it has been commodified, sanitised, and packaged. Stripped of physical grounding and humility, dance becomes a performative, rather than performance, art.

And in this, we have lost not only sophistication, but also our sense of community.

It was a surprise, then, when after opening Spotify one evening, I was brought to tears by a music video. The song was a new release by Mumford and Sons - ‘The Banjo Song’. Having already been familiar with the single, I thought I’d take a look.

The scene is remarkably simple: in a quiet, sparsely dressed hall, sit a small group of people. The room instantly felt familiar to me, having spent a good deal of my youth in Salvational Army halls and back-rooms of theatres rehearsing for shows. There’s nothing like nostalgia for priming an emotional reaction.

The video opens with a title card that really caught my eye:

"Streets of Soul cast this video entirely from people they met at their clubnight events in Bristol, UK."

"These are the dancers that always brighten up our dancefloors, the ones that love to dance. We brought them together with their different styles, energy and flair. We saw how quickly they all became one... Their differences became their joy and their connection."

The title card disappears, revealing a sun-draped shot and a figure walking through a doorway towards the dance floor. He circles the floor, and starts moving to the music, quickly joined enthusiastically by others in the room.

The remaining four minutes of the video are an unbridled joy to watch. A group of people, evidently diverse in age, race, and background as they come, moving as one. While the Mumford track plays, it is apparent that the dancers aren’t moving to its rhythm - and instead must be listening to different music in the room. However, rather than this serving to distance the audience (and the Mumford track) from what is happening in the room, I felt that it paired perfectly to the ‘vibe’ of the room. The music we, and they, are listening to may be different, but the feel is the same. The lyrics of ‘The Banjo Song’  reveal this:

Can you lay down all the things you’ve done?

Don’t turn your face around

You can come undone

And hey

Did you call, did you fall, do you need someone?

Do you need someone?

The song reaches for common ground between two people, despite their inadequacies. Deliverance can come for lost souls, perhaps through music, perhaps through dance. This also feels true, not only between those in the room, but we, the listener, also appear to be sharing the same experience, the same promise of aid in dark times. As are they, so are we.

But what does all this mean for my friend’s late-gig lament? How could one music video change the tragedy that is our society’s aversion to truly social experiences?

The Banjo Song brings me hope, in a world where hope is a rare commodity. When everywhere you look there is division, unrest, and uncertainty; to be in a room - even one imagined - surrounded by dancers feels like coming home. It reminds us that music, in many ways, is our most vital social asset. Music, rhythm, song: represents order amongst societal chaos. It reveals the deep truth, perhaps held more deeply than any other, that we are all members of a greater story, notes in a cosmic concerto. A song that has preceded and will outlive us - woven into the fabric of time.

So what do we take from all this, outside of sentiment? Beyond the words on a page, how can four and a half minutes change things for the better?

Well, maybe it can’t, but I for one will try my best to dance, just a little more.