Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia

Abstract

By the twentieth century, the five-string banjo had become the symbol of Appalachia and its hillbillies. At the turn of the twentieth century, individualized local styles of old-time Appalachian string music rang out from nearly every holler and crossroads community. By the late 1920s, with the widespread availability of 78 rpm records and the growth in local radio programming, all America could hear the old mountain fiddle tunes as well as the more recent lyric guitar songs popular in the Upland South. These same record companies and radio stations showed little interest in the old-world ballads or old-time banjo playing also common in the region. In August 1927, after southern musicians had enjoyed access to inexpensive mail-order guitars for almost a generation, the Carter Family and the singing brakeman Jimmie Rodgers recorded for Victor Records in Bristol, Virginia. Country music emerged, and the guitar took center stage. In the early 1940s, bluegrass began to replace old-time mountain music; it retained the banjo but changed its shape and increased its volume with the addition of a tone ring and large resonator. Despite the music industry's disinterest, the intense rhythms of bluegrass captured America's ear, and in the 1940s, this hard-driving music reasserted the banjo with brashness and a fast-paced pushing of the beat. Following the phenomenal success of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, this Tennessee city became the performance and recording center for country music. At the dawning of the twenty-first century, the five-string banjo continues to symbolize the people of the Appalachian region. West African Roots of the Banjer But this story obscures the African roots of the banjo. The crucial but long-neglected history of the banjo's journey to Appalachia documents how enslaved Africans brought the fretless gourd banjer, its short-drone thumb string, and its downstroke playing style to American settlers. Early written and pictorial records indicate that enslaved Africans accompanied the singing of improvisatory songs on a gourd banjer strung with a gut, horsehair, or hemp short-drone thumb string and two or more long strings. Recent scholarship elaborates the African roots of the banjer. In West Africa, jeli musicians and other memory keepers, praise singers, satirists, and healers (called by the French) played the predecessor of the banjer for centuries. (1) Ethnomusicologist Eric Charry (2000, 122) observed that some kind of lute is probably the oldest melody instrument of the griots and dates from before the thirteenth century. For centuries, the played solo or in pairs on the gourd koni as it traveled across the arid Sahel and northern savanna regions, from Cameroon to the Atlantic. Swedish scholar Ulf Jagfors (2001) classified African plucked lutes as either or instruments. (2) The transverse lutes have a raised or standing bridge characteristic of American banjers, and the spiked lutes have a reverse bridge (Courlander 1963, 213). These types probably correspond to the earlier African and later Islamic types of plucked lute. Both the seventh-century African gourd (Coolen 1984, 120) and the later Islam-influenced calabash lute were protypes for the banjer at the time of the slave trade (Charry 2000, 122). Before about 1842, American banjers were constructed only of gourds. The numerous and specific local names for these related instruments and their players indicate four important facts. First, this is a musical tradition dating from before the seventh century in Africa--and perhaps even further back to the Egyptian lute and the Indian serod--and continuing to the present. Second, it is geographically widespread from Africa to the Americas: South America, the Caribbean, and North America--especially in the southern United States. Third, many delicate local variations of instruments and repertoires emerged within this tradition. …