Searching for Vance Lowry: “Banjo King” and “A Kind of Parisian Figure”

Abstract

Abstract The life stories of traveling people reveal hidden historiographical connections and serve as allegories for broader cultural patterns. This biographical portrait of African American banjo player Vance Lowry tracks a path from the Appalachian Mountains to the avant-garde salons of 1920s Paris. As a figure on the vanguard of cultural change, Lowry’s knowledge was absorbed by like-minded white people on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet he has been remembered only as a person who influenced the vanguard—if he has been remembered at all. If histories of the white avant-garde have emphasized the ruptures of modernism, this account of Vance Lowry’s life, family, and career point to its continuities. Namely, that Black materials fashioned American culture and the culture of the modern world. In tracing this tradition, the article chronicles the shifting place of the banjo in the modern imagination, while disassembling systems of white patronage that sustained Vance Lowry’s performing life but relegated him to a footnote in annals of modernism.