Your piano comment is nearly as amusing as Mike's guitar comment--to bring it full circle to Mike's original post concerning the banjo--here is a quote, lifted from "Cecil Sharp in America" ,--Olive Dame Campbell, you may or may not remember, is the one whose collection inspired Sharp to collect in the US--

  In December, 1907, the Campbells visited Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky and it was there that Olive Dame Campbell heard a student, Ada Smith, sing a version of the ballad Barbara Allen.

"Shall I ever forget it.  The blazing fire, the young girl on her low stool before it, the soft strange strumming of the banjo - different from anything I had heard before - and then the song.  I had been used to singing Barbara Allen as a child, but how far from that gentle tune was this - so strange, so remote, so thrilling.  I was lost almost from the first note, and the pleasant room faded from sight; the singer only a voice.  I saw again the long road over which we had come, the dark hills, the rocky streams bordered by tall hemlocks and hollies, the lonely cabins distinguishable at night only by the firelight flaring from their chimneys.  Then these, too, faded, and I seemed to be borne along into a still more dim and distant past, of which I myself was a part."