dueling banjos

English

Etymology

From a scene in the 1972 film Deliverance in which a tourist with a guitar gets into a picking contest with a hillbilly on a banjo, both playing parts of the song "Dueling Banjos" (originally titled "Feuding Banjos") by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith.

Noun

dueling banjos pl (plural only)

1. A contest of skill in which two people try to top each other's offerings, especially one involving musical ability.
   • 1990, John F. Witte, William H. Clune, Choice and Control in American Education - Volume 2, →ISBN, page 217:

     The current discussion of choice in education has been driven by this dueling banjos mentality in which scholars and other intellectual entrepreneurs compete for public and intellectual attention by describing the conditions they want to create.

   • 1998, James Schefter, All Corvettes Are Red, →ISBN, page 311:

     Their tools were computers and when three or four engineers surrounded a car and plugged in, the scene wasn't dueling banjos. It was dueling laptops.

   • 2007, Walt Harrington, The Beholder's Eye, →ISBN, page 111:

     The nurse's fingers are pressing dental dough into my lower incisors, and she and the doctor are playing dueling banjos with funny stories about their kids, when in walks another dentist, dropping by to say hello.

   • 2014, Ted Lundrigan, Grouse and Lesser Gods, →ISBN:

     Stick to music that has lots of harmony, and if you ever meet your mirror image, don't try to out-pick him and don't take him grouse hunting. It becomes dueling banjos.

2. Something typical of a stereotypic hillbilly; Something characterized by lack of education, poverty, inbreeding or lack of sophistication.
   • 1998, David Colin Crass, The Southern Colonial Backcountry, →ISBN, page 162:

     The name "Appalachia" evokes a host of popular images and stereotypes: feuds, individualism, moonshine, subsistence farming, quilting bees, illiteracy, and dueling banjos, to name just a few.

   • 2000, J. Allen Myers, Spectre: A Collection of Poems and Short Stories, →ISBN, page 66:

     My family at times seem to think they are aristocrats, at other times I swear I can hear the muffled sound of dueling banjos.

   • 2003, Dan Imhoff, Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches.:

     “Corn and soybeans are the dueling banjos of conventional agriculture that amount to little more than subsidized erosion,” says Thicke, laughing at his own critique.

   • 2014, Pamela Fagan Hutchins, Hot Flashes and Half Ironmans, →ISBN:

     Anyway, Eric kept humming some dueling banjos song and talking about people who marry their first cousins.