Meanings
- pluralplural onlyA contest of skill in which two people try to top each other's offerings, especially one involving musical ability.
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.
1998, James Schefter, All Corvettes Are Red, →ISBN, page 3113 more examples
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.
1990, John F. Witte, William H. Clune, Choice and Control in American Education - Volume 2, →ISBN, page 217The 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.
2007, Walt Harrington, The Beholder's Eye, →ISBN, page 111Stick 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.
2014, Ted Lundrigan, Grouse and Lesser Gods, →ISBN - pluralplural onlySomething typical of a stereotypic hillbilly; Something characterized by lack of education, poverty, inbreeding or lack of sophistication.
Anyway, Eric kept humming some dueling banjos song and talking about people who marry their first cousins.
2014, Pamela Fagan Hutchins, Hot Flashes and Half Ironmans, →ISBN3 more examples
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.
1998, David Colin Crass, The Southern Colonial Backcountry, →ISBN, page 162My family at times seem to think they are aristocrats, at other times I swear I can hear the muffled sound of dueling banjos.
2000, J. Allen Myers, Spectre: A Collection of Poems and Short Stories, →ISBN, page 66“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.
2003, Dan Imhoff, Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches.
Origin
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.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
dueling banjos. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/dueling%20banjos
“dueling banjos.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/dueling%20banjos. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “dueling banjos,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/dueling%20banjos.
Source: dueling banjos on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.