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Reviewed by:
  • The Banjo: America’s African Instrument by Laurent Dubois
  • Brian F. Wright
THE BANJO: America’s African Instrument. By Laurent Dubois. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2016.

The sheet music for John T. Rutledge’s “De Banjo Am De Instrument For Me” (1877) depicts a blackface minstrel jovially playing a banjo, a racist caricature of former slaves and their most closely associated musical instrument. Nearly 100 years later, banjoist Grandpa Jones performed an updated version of the song on the CBS television show Hee Haw, where it was transformed into a comic representation of the American South. In both instances, the banjo acted as a stand-in for the people who played it—the black slaves that originally popularized the instrument and the rural white southerners now most commonly associated with it. This shift in signification was a complex and contradictory process, one that developed gradually over the banjo’s winding history. That history and those contradictions lie at the heart of Laurent Dubois’s The Banjo.

Like Karen Linn’s That Half-Barbaric Twang (University of Illinois Press, 1991) and Philip F. Gura and James F. Bollman’s America’s Instrument (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), Dubois chronicles the banjo’s contributions to American culture. However, unlike these previous texts, The Banjo takes a much more expansive view, plotting the instrument’s story across more than 400 years.

Dubois begins with the banjo’s historical antecedents in West and Central African string instrument traditions, before situating it as a distinctly North American invention—one born of the horrific, brutal, and bewildering conditions of slavery. He argues that the banjo’s versatility and its vague resemblance to previous African instruments made it a tool of solidarity among enslaved communities in the 18th century, where people without a shared language or culture recognized it as a common reminder of their distant homelands. The banjo’s early history is poorly documented, as the instrument was played exclusively by slaves; yet Dubois has impressively reconstructed a vibrant account of its role in slave life by scouring the historical record, incorporating discussions of eyewitness accounts, paintings, theatrical productions, poetry, songs, and more. In the second half of the book, Dubois charts how the banjo entered the American mainstream. The instrument, as a signifier of slave culture, became a key component of blackface minstrel shows, and minstrelsy’s popularity, in turn, made the instrument more respectable among white audiences. These factors fostered a wave of mass-produced banjos in the 19th century, which supplied inexpensive instruments for a burgeoning movement of amateurs. These banjos then found their way into later styles of American popular music, including string band music, early blues and jazz, folk music, and bluegrass.

The Banjo’s massive scale allows Dubois to contextualize the instrument within larger changes in American history. Yet, this breadth inevitably means that not every subject is covered with the same depth. This is felt most palpably in the book’s final chapter, which covers the twentieth century. Focusing primarily on Pete Seeger and his political battles during McCarthyism, Dubois too quickly glosses over other important threads, especially the banjo’s role in country music.

Overall, The Banjo is an immensely rich and detailed work. Dubois’s previous research on French Caribbean slave communities provides him unique insights into the instrument’s early history and the book should appeal to anyone broadly interested in the development of American vernacular music. [End Page 118]

Brian F. Wright
Fairmont State University
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