America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (review)

America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century. By Philip F. Gura and James F. Bollman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. [xvi, 303 p. ISBN 0-8078-2484-4. $45.]

This is and will remain the definitive history of the production, advertisement, and distribution of the banjo in nineteenth- century America, of its "transformation from African folk origins into a sophisticated parlor and orchestra instrument" (p. 3). The authors address the intersection of organology, technology, and the music business, with less but significant attention paid to sociology, and with music often mentioned but little discussed. Philip Gura, a cultural historian and Americanist, wrote the text, while avid banjo collector James Bollman allowed the use of his magnificent array of instruments, photographs, and other documents, and also read the text for errors of fact. Gura's writing combines comprehensiveness with ingratiating informality and many graceful turns of phrase. The book is so dense in its documentation and technological detail that few apart from banjo lovers will read it from cover to cover. Yet nearly one hundred lush color plates and half again as many black-and-white photos and line drawings offer their own narrative, one as informative as sensual; few books featuring such meticulous scholarship will repose as easily on a coffee table.

The opening chapter, a review of previous scholarship on the origins of the banjo (and thus the only section that is not an original contribution) contains the book's only questionable interpretations. Was the banjo a straightforward transferral or conflation of African instruments (p. 2), or was it somewhat less directly linked, merely "derive[d] from African ancestors" (p. 1)? The received belief that "Africans and African-Americans had been making music with similar longnecked stringed instruments" (p. 11) is true, but oversimplified. West African string instruments had been (and still are) quite varied, falling into two main groups: lutes (see Eric Charry, "Plucked Lutes in West Africa: An Historical Overview," Galpin Society Journal 49 [1996]: 3-37) and rather more common harps, on which a neck, likely curved, offers an anchor for the strings, but each string produces a single pitch. The banjo is a lute type, with the strings routinely pressed against the nearby neck to allow the production of many more pitches than are available on African harps. These harps are suited to performing one or several lines in a matrix of ostinatos, while the minstrel banjo, like its direct modern issue, the five-string banjo of twentieth-century southeastern string bands, is designed for a very different texture, the combination of a melody (itself performed in heterophony with a fiddle and perhaps a voice) with a drone. The selection process that started with such organological variety, eventually yielding the five-string banjo, must have been complex indeed. What was needed was an instrument looking African and with an African timbre, but allowing the performance of European-style melodies.

The drone on the banjo's fifth string, though having African precedents, echoed the sound of Scottish folk music. Slave fiddlers performed a British repertory featuring Scottish tunes, which were echoed as well in many minstrel songs. For instance, "Old Zip Coon," today's "Turkey in the Straw," follows the contour of the eighteenth-century Scottish fiddle tune and ballad-opera melody "Rose Tree." We know that minstrel melodies are not particularly African and that playing them with a superimposed vague imitation of African rhythms and timbres helped create music that was not African but, rather, about the feelings of white Americans toward blacks. Why not understand the early minstrel banjo similarly, as partly a logical continuation of African instrument making, but equally as a superficial--albeit fascinating --organological caricature?

The second chapter is entitled "An Expanding Market: The Dobson Brothers and the Rise of Banjo Culture." As the ethos of the banjo diversified, its repertory and technique became more like that of the genteel guitar and related (and hybrid) instruments. In...