African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (review)

This book is rollicking good fun mixed with human misery and murder, bluegrass music and mythology, and a good dose of Robin Hood. I enjoy Witt's wording, and my favorite passage comes near the end of the book: "Outside, the creek stops gurgling, the wind goes to sleep, the birds close their mouths, and for a moment the whole world stops to let Gilman Lee step off." That's the way a larger-than-life hero ought to go out. Some of you won't like Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones for what you'll perceive as stereotype and degrading characterizations. This is not an Appalachian Studies text. If you read for fun, though, this book might be for you. —Garry Barker Conway, Cecelia. African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study ofFolk Traditions. Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1995. 394 pages. Paperback $25.00. Scholarly arguments to demonstrate influence—whether of literary style and content or of the development of a practice in its cultural context— are inevitably complex. Cecelia Conway's book works in both areas, so one can anticipate the circuitous nature of the rhetorical threads. Couple this complexity with the passion Conway clearly feels for her thesis and material, and the result is a difficult but engaging study which attempts to prove the preeminence of the African tradition in the development of American banjo playing. This study consists of several subarguments which combine in support ofher thesis. In the process ofdemonstrating the African influence, Conway (1) presents and analyzes the written history (mostly in the form ofinstructional materials and brief literary or personal journal references) of the banjo in African-American traditions; (2) studies the impact of slaves' banjo playing on white professional entertainers, an "apprenticeship " that resulted in the formation of a new form of entertainment— the minstrel show; (3) charts the avenues of cultural exchange (circuses, medicine shows, proximity, etc.) which allowed the transmission of the banjo from black folk to mountain white folk; (4) studies the banjo as an artifact of material culture (from the delicate gourd instruments of Africa to more durable wooden creations), putting to rest the idea that the drone string was an American invention; (5) demonstrates the stylistic influence ofblack playing on the white mountain banjo styles ofthe 69 present, (6) posits the existence of a distinct genre of "banjo songs," and (7) demonstrates the characteristics of this genre through close textual analysis of the songs of one particular black banjo man, Dink Roberts. It is particularly interesting to note Conway's approach. To begin, she considers scores of textual references to and descriptions of AfricanAmerican banjo playing in America, in addition to the primary and secondary banjo literature, much of which pertains to the minstrel tradition . These textual resources are studied in light of another compelling set of data: gleanings from the author's fieldwork with the small handful of remaining banjo players in the African-American tradition— Dink Roberts, John Snipes, and Odell Thompson. As Conway writes, "Their traditions and practices [provide] a means for reaching beyond the written records to an understanding of a continuous strand of African -American musical culture, its impact upon white tradition, especially in the Southeast and in Appalachia, and its contribution to American folk music." What results from her study, then, is not only a convincing argument about the dominant and enduring African-American influence, but an engaging portrayal of a living pre-blues banjo tradition and a saga of the evolution of banjo styles and song genres. Conway says that much of the influence once attributed to minstrel sources in the development of the mountain banjo styles is in fact a direct influence of African-American playing on the white mountain style. She demonstrates that such influence was both possible and likely by proving (1) that more musical contact occurred between mountain whites and blacks than between mountain whites and minstrels, and (2) that the playing styles, musical terminologies, tunes, and tunings of the white mountain folk are more similar to those of black folk than they are to those of the minstrels. What makes this particular line of argument so relevant and heartening today is that it demonstrates the degree...