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. Pp. xvi+303. $45

America's Instrument is an unusual publication, a collaboration between a cultural historian and a highly respected collector. Philip F. Gura is a professor of English and American Studies at the University of North Carolina. James F. Bollman is an enthusiast and musician who, over the past three decades, has amassed and researched an unparalleled collection of banjos and banjo-related ephemera. Their collaborative effort has produced a narrative that contains detailed information about instrument and industry and connects both to broader cultural issues. The story is told from a thorough consideration of both documentary research materials, such as company records, promotional literature, and photographs, and the material-culture resources of the instruments themselves.

Gura and Bollman trace the history of the banjo from its origins as an African folk instrument to its prominent place in American popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. The narrative begins by examining the African roots of the banjo and the use of the long-necked stringed instruments by free and enslaved African Americans in eighteenth-century America. It next proceeds to the adoption of the instrument by white musicians during the minstrel era of the 1840s and 1850s, and its continued refinement and commercialization by urban craftsmen in the decades following the Civil War.

America's Instrument then illuminates the efforts of the banjo's greatest champion, musician and manufacturer Samuel Swaim Stewart, to promote the instrument as America's most important contribution to the development of music. Stewart's tireless public relations efforts helped transform the banjo from an instrument associated with lower-class entertainment, such as minstrel shows and dance halls, into a symbol of middle-class gentility. Gura and Bollman also look at the important Boston manufacturers who took banjo design to new technical and aesthetic heights during the 1880s and 1890s. Their book ends with mention of the banjo's enthusiastic embrace by American popular culture, as middle-class citizens welcomed the banjo into their parlors, formed amateur banjo groups, and applauded banjo professionals on the concert stage. The volume is lavishly illustrated with eloquent images of nineteenth-century amateur and professional musicians and their instruments, banjo factories and production methods, and period sheet music and broadsides. It also includes numerous photographs of nineteenth-century banjos and details of banjo construction.

Gura and Bollman offer a thorough and impressive address to the ways in which banjo makers built, promoted, and marketed their instruments to the American public. They provide a great amount of detail on manufacturing processes, patented technological improvements, and the models offered by the various manufacturers. These lengthy descriptions sometimes border on internalist history. At its best, the book presents an intriguing look at the personalities and activities of banjo makers as they developed products and helped to cultivate the American public's taste for the banjo. Yet the story of the banjo remains chiefly told through the eyes of these makers and the instruments they manufactured and marketed. While the users of the instrument are mentioned throughout the narrative, they appear largely as supporting players. These amateur and professional musicians remain, for the most part, people glimpsed through the window of a banjo factory.

While the book offers much technological and marketing history relating to the banjo, the authors offer a less thorough look at broader social and cultural issues. The banjo's connections with nineteenth-century minstrel shows are addressed, for example, but the complexities of racism that surrounded this genre are left largely undiscussed. And while the authors' knowledge of the banjo industry is clearly unparalleled, it would have been useful for them to have placed the banjo more solidly within the broader context of the nineteenth-century American popular music industry and musical instrument manufacturing as a whole...