Close your eyes. (Actually, keep them open. I don’t know how else you’d read this article. But let’s pretend.) Picture Kermit the Frog. What’s he doing in your mind’s eye? He might be wiggling his little arms, or he might be teaching Cookie Monster about the letter W. But if I were a betting blogger, I’d guess that he’s playing the banjo.
Kermit has been synonymous with the banjo as far back as we can remember. So much, he’s got his own spotlight in the American Banjo Museum. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a recent appearance of Kermit where he doesn’t have his banjo in tow. But I got to thinking – where did Kermit’s connection to the banjo come from?
I don’t mean “where did his banjo literally come from?” (I assume the Muppet Workshop) nor do I mean “why does Kermit even have a banjo?” (probably some sort of historical geosocial reasoning behind assigning a Frog from the South with a local instrument). I mean, when and why did Jim Henson decide that Kermit would be a banjoist?
I posed this question to the ToughPigs team, and we got to digging. As we discovered, there were only two instances of Kermit plucking a banjo before his big moment in The Muppet Movie. Both were from Sam and Friends around 1960/1961. Kermit performed “A Horse Named Bill” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas” while strumming his five-string (or, at least holding it while lip syncing to recordings of each song). Considering how ill-defined Kermit was in those years, plus the sheer amount of Sam and Friends Jim and Jane Henson had to produce, it’s hard to presume this was planned to be a permanent extension of Kermit’s arm.
But this means that Kermit flirted with the idea of playing the banjo, and then wasn’t seen with it again for another 17 years! For all intents and purposes, Kermit’s performance of “Rainbow Connection” in The Muppet Movie was his official introduction to the banjo world. The real magic trick was making it feel so natural, we just assumed he’d been playing it for his whole life. Somehow Kermit rewrote our memories and inserted banjos into his own history, Inception-style.
But folks, it gets stranger!
In 1979, Kermit played the banjo in “Rainbow Connection” and “Movin’ Right Along.” Shockingly, he only played it once during the run of The Muppet Show, and it was to sing “Rainbow Connection” again with Debbie Harry. But after that, when do you think he picked it up next? Gang, I was shocked and shook to learn that Kermit’s next foray into banjodom didn’t come until The Muppets at Walt Disney World in 1990, using it to accompany his frog family during “Knee Deep” (plus a few seconds of “Bein’ Green” before being shut down).
That means that throughout Jim Henson’s entire career performing Kermit the Frog, he only ever played the banjo for two songs on Sam and Friends, two songs in The Muppet Movie, and one in The Muppets at Walt Disney World. Five banjo songs, and that’s it.
Naturally, Kermit would take his banjo out of its case many times over the following years, but as we all know, “Rainbow Connection” has become a de facto theme song for the Muppets, meaning that Kermit’s played that one many, many times. But if we’re just counting the individual songs, it’s surprising to see how few there really are.
There was only one more new Kermit banjo song throughout the entirety of the 1990s with “Zing into Spring,” a song on a cassette tape that came attached to a plush toy. Yeah, the 90s were weird. Anyway, there’s a commercial for the product, and Kermit appears with his banjo.
It wouldn’t be until 2005 when Kermit plays a new, original banjo jam. That honor goes to an untitled (as far as I’m aware) banjo duel between himself and country star Brad Paisley for a Target commercial.
After that, it’s a few more years before the next new song, but it kicks off a streak. “Dueling Banjos” with Steve Martin for a Funny or Die video in 2013. “This Land is Your Land” on A Capitol Fourth in 2014. The “Be More Tea” song from a commercial for Lipton iced tea in 2014.
There wasn’t much new music in the 2015 sitcom The Muppets, but aside from a memorable gag where he begins to play “Rainbow Connection” in his backyard, he just used it once to accompany his duet with Miss Piggy for “In Spite of Ourselves.”
In 2017, he reunited his banjo with Steve Martin for an event at the Drama League of New York to sing “Tonight You Belong to Me.”
Remember those sing-along specials Disney produced in the first few years of the pandemic? Kermit sang “The Muppet Show Theme” in 2020, and then teamed up with Fozzie to sing “Unpack Your Adjectives” in the Schoolhouse Rock tribute in 2023. Banjos in both.
Also in 2023, Kermit sang an original song in a commercial for the Muppet-themed Oris watch, in which he very briefly plays his banjo.
And most recently, Kermit serenaded Sabrina Carpenter in a rowboat with his banjo during “Islands in the Stream” in The Muppet Show Special.
For those of you counting, that’s a grand total of 16 songs. Sixteen!! Throughout the past 70+ years of Kermit the Frog’s existence, he has only played the banjo for 16 songs. (Of course, if we count the number of performances, all those “Rainbow Connections” really add up.) Did you expect more?? I sure has heck did.
Of course, this doesn’t count times when Kermit is seen holding his banjo (the Muppet Wiki helpfully lists a few of these from The Muppets Take Manhattan, The Muppets 2011 film, and a commercial for Booking.com), all of the photography and artwork, the countless pieces of merchandise, and alternate versions of Kermit. Sorry Baby Kermit – maybe you’ll get your own banjo list someday.
I’ll also give an honorable mention to Kermit’s Banjo Bayou Serenade, a mini-game in the Game Boy Advance game “The Muppets: On with the Show,” in which Kermit strums his banjo while avoiding chickens, penguins, comedian bears, and mermaid pigs on a river. It’s not really a song, and despite being able to watch a video of the gameplay, I’m still not convinced it actually exists.
Interestingly, we couldn’t find a single instance of Kermit playing the banjo on Sesame Street. I’m sure there are a number of reasons for this – mainly and presumably due to Jim’s attempts at keeping the Muppet family version of Kermit separate from the Sesame version of Kermit. But if I were a money betting man, I would’ve guessed he’d played the banjo at least once over the show’s 50+ year history. The Mandela Effect is strong with this one.
There are also a good number of examples where I can picture Kermit playing his banjo, but on second glance, it’s a different instrument entirely. He plays a lute in Tales of the Tinkerdee and in the Sesame Street song “If I Were.” He plays the ukulele in “Ukulele Lady” (naturally) and in his rendition of “Wild Thing” on the Kermit Unpigged album. Interestingly, I haven’t found a real version of Kermit playing his banjo to accompany “Bein’ Green'” (excepting those first few notes in Muppets at Walt Disney World), but he did play it on guitar(!!) for Jerry Lewis’s MDA Telethon in 2001, and he sang it while Lucas Ross performed the banjo in 2024. So close.
Sixteen songs or a hundred, it’s impossible to disconnect Kermit from his history with the banjo. It’s a part of his DNA, even if that number of unique songs really feels like it should be higher. And who knows, now that we’ve pointed this out, maybe he’ll finally learn a new song or two.
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by Joe Hennes – [email protected]
