by Kristina R. Gaddy (Music 787.88 Gad)
The banjo might be the first truly American musical invention. Nowadays, we associate the banjo with country and bluegrass music, where it has continued to proliferate as an important component of those musical styles, but during its history, it’s been used for many kinds of music, and its development coincided with a lot of early American history, too. But it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact date and place of its invention: there are related instruments still in use today in many parts of Africa, though the American iterations of the instrument have their own unique design elements. Learning more about the banjo might help us to learn more about ourselves, too, and Kristina Gaddy’s new book, Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Secret History, reveals a lot about both musical developments in early America as well as social issues that have been part of the entire length of our history.
Gaddy approaches the subject of the
banjo both as a musician and as an historian. Her background as a nonfiction
long-form journalist is important to this book, as it digs deeper into the
earliest formative days of the banjo than previous scholars have generally
published so far — there is a lot of original research here that ultimately
pieces together as clear a picture of the beginnings of the banjo as we’re
likely to find. But she is a musician herself, and an enthusiast of the banjo.
She plays fiddle, and she has even produced a CD of field recordings of banjo
player Currance Hammonds. Her partner, Pete Ross, is a luthier who produces
elaborate replicas of period banjos, including exacting replicas of some of the
earliest known instruments. This fascinating combination of backgrounds keeps
Gaddy’s writing about the banjo both thoroughly researched and very
enthusiastic.
Grammy, Pulitzer and
MacArthur-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens provides a short foreword to the book
that aptly describes the current state of research into the earliest days of
the banjo: “Anybody who studies the banjo knows they are walking into a
swamp of unknown players, scraps of primary sources, dead ends, flashes of
brilliant understanding and also of utter despair. How is something so integral
to American culture so badly understood and so widely misrepresented?” She
points out that ceremonial and spiritual aspects of the banjo’s creation
haven’t been discussed before, though they are likely essential to the real
history of the instrument.
Those scraps of primary sources
take interesting forms in the earliest history of the banjo: Gaddy takes over
the prelude of the book with a discussion of her and her partner Ross’ searches
for new information about the banjo in pre-1820 visual art. For Ross, these
early paintings can be important clues for his replicas of early banjos, and
for Gaddy, finding some new art that “changed what we knew about the
instrument’s origins” led to the deep research that ultimately produced
this book. Her immediate observations, which the book delves into in great
detail, were that the origin of the banjo might not be as all-American as
generally accepted, and that the early banjo was a sacred instrument, rather
than a secular musical invention as it’s often discussed.
Gaddy traces the earliest
appearances of the banjo in print to 1688, in the writings of Hans Sloane, who
served as doctor to the governor of Jamaica. While we’ve always known that the
banjo was created by early African-American slaves, the history of the
instrument — and of the slave trade — go back even earlier than America itself.
Sloane wrote of “strum stumps” that he observed being played by enslaved
Jamaicans at a festival in 1688, and his descriptions aptly match the
distinctive characteristics of the banjo. In particular, his descriptions of
instruments that are made “in imitation of lutes” with gourd bodies, flat
fingerboards, and tuning pegs point to being early banjos rather than instruments
like the gurmi or the akonting from West Africa, because the music made on them
features a regular return to high notes. These notes would likely have come
from shorter high-pitched strings added to the “strum stumps,” the precursor to
the 5th string on a modern banjo. Sloane collected various curiosities
throughout the world over the course of his life, and they were eventually
donated to Great Britain where they became the beginning of the British Museum.
His collection included at least two examples of “strum stumps” that survived
into the early 20th Century, but they have unfortunately been lost. Sloane’s
accounts are followed by a chapter on the observations of Father Jean-Baptiste
Labat on the Caribbean Island of Martinique, who observed similar instruments
around 1694 that he described as a “sort of guitar” being used during a dance
referred to as the calenda. Gaddy digs deeper into the nature of the calenda
dance itself: while Western observers of the era thought of it as mere
entertainment, it seems clear that the dance and its accompanying music have
spiritual foundations reaching back to the slaves’ homelands in Africa. So the
earliest accounts of the banjo seem to indicate that it was developed no so
much in America the country, but in the islands of the early Americas.
But the story isn’t that simple. In
reality, this research, and most of this book, is as much a survey of the
history of slavery in the Americas as a story of the banjo. The banjo is
fundamentally a product of slavery, an instrument that draws from its creators’
traditions, the practicalities of their new circumstances, and the natural
result of cross-cultural exchanges that happen over time, like the Creole and
Gullah languages or the Vodou, Santeria, or Obeah religious practices. To trace
the bare threads of information left about the early development of the banjo,
Gaddy takes us from the Caribbean to the New England states and back again many
times. Her writing style is captivating: each chapter generally focuses on the
writings of one European or American interacting with slaves, each of these
somewhat unreliable narrators contributing their own sighting of a banjo-like
instrument, usually as an aside while writing about their broader observations
of dance and musical practices of the slaves in their area. Some of these
narrators are priests, some public employees, some soldiers, and some
slave-owners themselves. And in the midst of their writings, they mention
instruments that all lead to the banjo: the Creole-bania, the banger, bonja,
bangeo, banza, and so on. When one considers that the inner lives and
traditions of slaves are either woefully misunderstood or barely acknowledged
at all in many of these primary sources, we’re lucky to have any mentions of
the banjo at all! We’re left with a complicated puzzle that will never point to
a particular person, date or location, not unlike the stories of most victims
of the transatlantic slave trade.
Research into the earliest days of
the banjo takes up most of the book. Toward the end, we move into the
beginnings of the modern banjo around the 1840s. The instruments we’d quickly
recognize as banjos now, with drum head tops on wooden hoops, originated around
this era, and these were generally the product of white musicians performing in
blackface for white audiences at minstrel shows. The banjo had already started
to represent Black musical culture through songs written by and for white
audiences and distributed as sheet music since roughly the 1820s, but the
minstrel shows spread an exaggerated (and often demeaning) interpretation of
Black cultural arts around the country. The book doesn’t really get into the
history of white musical styles that have subsequently adopted the banjo, but
of course there are lots of resources for learning more about the strains of
country, blues, folk and bluegrass music for which the banjo has become an
iconic instrument. But it’s fair to say that although the styles we associate
with banjo playing in the modern era are overwhelmingly created by and for
white audiences, the instrument itself, and its early repertoire, are entirely
the domain of slaves.
There is a final “coda” chapter
that addresses the handful of Black contemporary artists who have re-engaged
with the banjo. This is a relatively new musical movement that Gaddy traces
through the early days of the internet, when the “Black Banjo Then and Now”
forum transitioned into hosting the first Black Banjo Gathering in 2005. New
generations of black artists are picking up the banjo, combining musical
artistry with deep dives into the history of Black music in America. To the
extent that the banjo represents the earliest strains of new music in the
country, they’re revealing the history of both black music, and American music
as a whole.
Gaddy has uncovered more of the
hidden history of the banjo with this book than any authors before her, but
more work remains to be done. Her extensive notes at the end of the book should
serve as a great starting point for further research. More answers may turn out
to be right in front of our eyes, just not viewed from the proper context of
discovery yet, just like the image that was on display in the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam that Gaddy and Ross happened upon at the beginning of the book.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Lift Every Voice: The History of African-American Music by
Burton W. Peretti, Black American Music: Past and Present by Hildred Roach.)
( official Kristina R. Gaddy web site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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