African American Roots and Branches of the 5-String Banjo: a Selective Videography

Public and scholarly interest in the African American banjo tradition has been piqued in recent years by a movement among many African Americans to reclaim the banjo. Groups such as the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Ebony Hillbillies and individual performers such as Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, Taj Mahal, and Otis Taylor have taken up or continued to play the banjo. Interested people from diverse backgrounds are coming together to share information online at sites such as the “Black Banjo: Then and Now” group, the “Banjo Sightings Database” and “Banjology.” At least two major conferences have also investigated the African American banjo traditions, the 2005 and 2010 “Black Banjo: Then and Now Gatherings.” There are many people newly interested in this topic; however, they soon have the same realization that ethnomusicologist Greg Adams mentions just a few minutes into Give Me the Banjo (2012), “You can’t talk about the history of the banjo if you can’t talk about racism, slavery, misogyny, appropriation, exploitation, all of the things that run counter to what we love about the banjo. We’re at a point in our understanding of the history of this instrument that it’s no longer acceptable to pretend these other things don’t exist.”¹

No instrument reflects the complicated history of the United States of America better than the banjo. As we know it today, it is a multicultural and multiracial creation with roots in Africa, modifications inspired by European instruments, and with much machinery first made here in the United States. Beauty and ugliness have accompanied the banjo from its earliest days. Although the banjo was brought over to the New World with West African slaves who played it for entertainment, it was also used as a tool by white slavers who forced African musicians to play banjo in order to exercise, not entertain, their captives.²

The popularity of the banjo and the music played on it was crucial to the early cultural exchange between Blacks and whites in this country and that interchange was essential to the creation of our first popular music, the music of minstrelsy, as well as to our most unique music, jazz. It was once one of the most popular instruments in the U. S. and played by all races and classes of people, but it is now frequently the object of derision and played by relatively few, almost all of whom are white. The African origin of the instrument was once commonly known by all who knew of the banjo. Now, most assume that the banjo has always been an instrument played solely by white Southerners.

Much has been written on the origins of the banjo, African American banjo players, minstrelsy, the adoption of the banjo by White American parlor musicians, the use of the banjo in early jazz, the abandonment of the banjo by Black players, and the centrality of the banjo to the birth and evolution of the primarily white musical genres that are now known as old-time and blue-grass music. Any small sampling of the literature pertinent to these topics would inevitably include several important texts. In the celebrated book Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War, Dena Epstein uses first-person narratives, diaries, and travelogues to prove conclusively that, among other things, the banjo did come with slaves from Africa.³ In “The Folk, the Stage, and the Five-String Banjo in the Nineteenth Century” Robert Winans traces the playing styles of the African slaves who brought the banjo to the New World in the playing styles of the early blackface minstrels.⁴ Philip Gura and James Bollman’s America’s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century uses items from Bollman’s extensive collection to detail, among other things, the mechanical changes and improvements made to the banjo over the course of the 19^th century.⁵ Robert Toll examines the origins and history of minstrelsy in Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America⁶ and Cecelia Conway explores in African Banjo Echoes...