The African Banjo and American Music

First introduced to the United States by African Americans in southern slave communities, the early banjo was construed with a gourd head and four gut or vine strings. Early, relatively primitive designs of the instrument are African in origin and modern (designs) vaguely resemble these early versions. The banjo was introduced to Anglo-American culture in the early nineteenth century.

It quickly underwent important changes in structure and construction. The gourd head used in the African and early forms of the instrument was replaced by a wooden rim design. By 1850, some forty years after the date believed to signify the initial crossover into Anglo-American culture, the gourd sound chamber design had almost entirely disappeared. 1 In the mid-nineteenth century, the addition of a fifth “drone” string proved to be the most significant adaptation. It is not clear whether this development occurred in African American or Anglo-American playing circles.

Fretless 19th century banjo

Regardless of who made this modification, the impact on the playing style of the instrument cannot be understated. The fifth string fundamentally altered the way the banjo was played and the sound that it produced. It was this alteration that brought the banjo from an African instrument to what John and Alan Lomax described as “America’s only original folk instrument.” (source: North Carolina Craft Revival)

THE FIFTH STRING

Joel Walker Sweeney of The Sweeney Minstrels, born 1810, was often credited with the invention of the short fifth string. Scholars know that this is not the case. A painting entitled The Old Plantation painted between 1777 and 1800 shows a black gourd banjo player with a banjo having the fifth string peg half-way up the neck. If Sweeney did add a fifth string to the banjo it was probably the lowest string, or fourth string by today's reckoning. This would parallel the development of the banjo elsewhere for example in England, where the tendency was to add more of the long strings with seven and ten strings being common. Sweeney was responsible for the spread of the banjo and probably contracted with a drum maker in Baltimore, William Boucher, to start producing banjos for public sales.

These banjos are basically drums with necks attached. A number have survived and a couple of them are in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Other makers like Jacobs of New York or Morrell who moved his shop to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, helped to supply the growing demand for the instrument in the mid 1840s as the minstrel shows traveled Westward to entertain the gold diggers. (source: Bluegrass Banjo)

Perhaps no other instrument has been more deeply associated with the mountains of the southeast than the banjo. Through Hollywood portrayals, media stereotyping, and the recent rise in popularity of Bluegrass music, the banjo has become became inextricably linked to the people of the southern Appalachians.

EARLY STAGES

Banjos belong to a family of instruments that are very old. Drums with strings stretched over them can be traced throughout the Far East, the Middle East and Africa almost from the beginning. They can be played like the banjo, bowed or plucked like a harp depending on their development. These instruments were spread, in "modern" times, to Europe through the Arab conquest of Spain, and the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. The banjo, as we can begin to recognize it, was made by African slaves based on instruments that were indigenous to their parts of Africa. These early "banjos" were spread to the colonies of those countries engaged in the slave trade.

Scholars have found that many of these instruments have names that are related to the modern word "banjo", such as "banjar", "banjil", "banza", "bangoe", "bangie", "banshaw". Some historians mention the diaries of Richard Jobson as the first record of the instrument.. While exploring the Gambra River in Africa in 1620 he recorded an instrument "...made of a great gourd and a neck, thereunto was fastened strings." The first mention of the name for these instruments in the Western Hemisphere is from Martinique in a document dated 1678.

It mentions slave gatherings where an instrument called the "banza" is used. Further mentions are fairly frequent and documented. One such is quoted in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians from a poem by an Englishman in the British West Indies in 1763: "Permit thy slaves to lead the choral dance/To the wild banshaw's melancholy sound/". The best known is probably that of Thomas Jefferson in 1781: "The instrument proper to them (i.e. the slaves) is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa." (source: Bluegrass Banjo)

Folk America ep01 Birth Of A Nation

About the Banjo by Tony Thomas

From Black Banjo Gathering this article "About the Banjo," written by Tony Thomas discusses the banjo and American folk music. Tony Tomas writes: The banjo is a product of Africa. Africans transported to the Caribbean and Latin America were reported playing banjos in the 17th and 18th centuries, before any banjo was reported in the Americas. Africans in the US were the predominant players of this instrument until the 1840s. Originally the banjos were made out of gourds and skins. The strings numbered between three and nine, with four- and five-string banjos being popular. A distinguishing feature was one or more short drone strings sounded with the thumb.

Banjo playing became an object of popular white culture in the US and later in Britain as a result of the Blackface Minstrel shows that became a popular form of entertainment in the 1830s and 1840s. Minstrels from the South who had actually learned real African-American music like Joel Sweeney popularized the banjo by introducing the clawhammer or frailing style that Blacks had brought from Africa. Commercial banjo makers later claimed that Sweeney invented the banjo in order to cover up its African origin. Sweeney did work with luthiers and drum makers to help perfect drum head banjos, the most common type, and is thought to have popularized the five-string banjo as opposed to the four-string banjo. Banjo playing became widely popular among working class and poor people both urban and rural. While African Americans continued their tradition with the instrument, whites also became fans, makers and manufacturers of the banjo.

Banjos began to be built by fine instrument makers, factory scaled manufacturers, as well as working people and farmers who worked with home-made materials. Gradually, the sturdier drum head style of banjo began to replace the gourd banjos.

Banjo playing expanded in the late 19th Century when classic banjo playing finger-picking styles made the banjo a popular instrument among the upper classes and social elites of the US and Britain. While efforts were made to distance the banjo from its African origins and its continued popularity as the instrument of the poor and the Black, nevertheless the outstanding player of period was Horace Weston, an African-American who excelled at the classic, minstrel, and traditional African-American banjo styles.

In the last 30 years of the 19th Century, manufacturers added frets to banjos to make them easier to play for beginners; these became a standard part for most manufactured banjos while people continued to make their own fretless and gourd banjos. In the same years banjo-based instruments aimed at taking the place of various orchestra instruments such as the banjo cello, banjo-bass, mandolin banjo, and banjo mandolin flourished as banjo orchestras became popular particularly among college students.

The twentieth century saw the emergence of steel strings on the banjos. This meant banjos could be played with a plectrum or pick. This led to the plectrum banjo and the more popular tenor banjo, which were both four-string banjos with the fifth drone string removed. These instruments proved popular for pop, dance, tango, and Jazz bands until they started to be replaced by the guitar in the late 1920s and 1930s.

While five-string banjo playing retained a support among African-Americans and whites in the Piedmont and Appalachian South, five string banjo playing declined until the explosion of Bluegrass in the post war years, powered by Earl Scruggs’ dynamic style of finger picking, Bluegrass led to the repopularization of the banjo among Southern whites. The “Folk Revival” that began in the late 1950s popularized the banjo among college youth. A crucial part of that folk revival was the struggle by some young folk players to learn and reproduce traditional Southern white and Black banjo styles played before Bluegrass. This led to a revival among some players of old-time clawhammer and finger picking styles.

The once ignored music of traditional African-American five-string banjoists from Piedmont areas of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia began to be heard again in the collection and performance of banjoists like Dink Roberts, John Snipes, and Odell Thompson. The publication of Dr. Cece Conway’s African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions linked these players to the African origins of the banjo as well as to the African origins of clawhammer and other traditional banjo styles among white old-time players. The issue by Dr. Conway and Scott Odell of Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina & Virginia, a CD of these Black banjoists’ music, brought the original Black voice of the five-string banjo back to the banjo world. These events helped encourage a layer of African-Americans to take up the banjo and continue and expand the traditions of their elders.

Today Black banjoists are exploring the original Black traditions of clawhammer and finger style five-string banjo, as well as reviving the traditions of Horace Weston in classic banjo, and continuing the great music of the great Black tenor, plectrum, and six-string banjoists of the 20th Century.

For more history of the banjo, please visit www.dhyatt.com/history.html, by George Gibson.