The Banjo (and Banjo Players) in America

Philip F. Gura and James F. Bollman. America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 400 pp. Glossary, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $45.00.

In a country that manufactures the mega-distortions of amplified heavy metal guitars, the banjo can seem a quaint relic. A quick search for the plangent instrument most often will locate its steely twang midst the excessively cheerful natterings of straw-boated and candy-striped Dixieland bands. Philadelphia's wildly togged Mummers' parades still feature massed banjo formations, and, of course, individual five-stringed, long-neck banjos anchor folk music revival groups and reruns of Hee Haw. You won't find banjos on MTV, but if mediated memories of popular music extended back beyond the birth of Rock and Roll and the electric guitar, they'd be there, too. The banjo played the musically rebellious role of the electric guitar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In their elegant and informative new book, America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century, Philip F. Gura and James F. Bollman remind us that the banjo actually was the key instrument in this country's nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century popular music and culture. It has fully documented roots in the African diaspora and African American plantation music, a dominant role in minstrelsy, and a central one in ragtime, early jazz, and country music. Africans and African Americans were the first to play this instrument, expressing on it musical memories of West Africa while fashioning in North America new blends of work songs, blues, ragtime, and jazz. A more sustained search for the banjo, after all, will discover that it still plays a supportive role in New Orleans Preservation Hall. Musicians there, and even the few true believers who persevere on Bourbon Street, have largely shunned the commercialism of popular music, devoting their lives to the music and sensibilities of African Americans who were, in Michael Ondaatje's chilling title phrase, "Coming Through Slaughter."

The story of just how the banjo came to express memories of Africa, the Middle Passage, Congo Square, the plantations, and of the African American thrust into the popular music business has been more difficult to discuss than the story of its subsequent adoption and adaptation by whites. The best synthesis of primary sources that definitively ties the banjo into African American life was fashioned by Dena Epstein in her influential article, "The Folk Banjo: A Documentary History, and her monograph Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Robert Winans painstaking study of "Black Instrumental Music Traditions in the Ex-Slave Narratives," Black Music Research Newsletter 5 (Spring 1982) provides essential evidence that blacks continued to play the banjo long after the Civil War. ¹ Bollman and Gura, like most writers on the banjo, refer back to the work done by Epstein. In the process, black musical involvement with the banjo in North America remains a prelude to much more fully developed narratives of what whites did with what had once been a black musical instrument.

Among the several large format picture books published on the banjo, this one is the first to focus on the nineteenth century with a mix of graphic illustrations and historical narrative. It arrives against a background dominated by Akira Tsumura, Banjos: The Tsumura Collection (1984). That book feasted on nearly hyper-real photos of the glitzy four-string banjos made for Jazz Age musicians of the 1920s. It showed no inclination toward historical narrative. In 1993, Tsumura weighed in with his huge, definitive photographic statement, 1001 Banjos (1993), which took up where his earlier book had ended. Tsumura's is the largest collection of banjos in the world, and it is housed in Japan.

Gura and Bollman are pictured on the dust jacket of their more historically inclined book playing five-string banjos of...