As a child growing up in Switzerland, Jens Kruger was so fascinated by a broken tenor banjo owned by his father — actually, just the neck of it — that he nailed strings to it and silently taught himself the fingering for several chords. When his mother bought him a proper banjo at about the age of 10, Mr. Kruger said, “I could finally hear how all these chords sounded.”

These days, Mr. Kruger, 50, who composes bluegrass music and plays banjo in a trio called the Kruger Brothers, can presumably afford better equipment. He has been named the winner of the fourth annual Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, a $50,000 award created by that multifaceted actor and musician, and chosen by judges including Mr. Martin, Pete Wernick, Béla Fleck and other musicians.

Mr. Kruger, who lives in North Carolina, grew up a German citizen in Switzerland, where, he said, “we didn’t make much distinction between all the different music forms.”

“It was just all American music,” he said in a telephone interview. “It wasn’t that we looked at it as old-time or bluegrass or country-western or Dixieland. It all melted together.”