Image by Flickr user Photo_History and used by permission.

We're not sure if this resident of 19th century Boston needed thumb picks to play his banjo, but we suspect that he got by without them. The image comes from Flickr user Photo_History, a collector of old school photographs. It's from a cabinet card that was probably made by Louis De Ribas, "a Boston photographer who patented a drop shutter in 1887." It's a reminder that cats were funny more than a century before the Internet put words in their mouths.

And what's the cat playing? A song from a comic operetta based on a Longfellow poem, naturally.

Filed in Arts & Events and tagged Banjo Cat, cats, history, photography, photo_history

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