This week the open threads will highlight six elements that illustrate country music’s roots in African-American history.
There is a total lack of black artists in country music today, except for Darius Rucker, Cowboy Troy, and Charley Pride. The truth is that the roots of American country run black, and the key artists that built country music couldn’t have done so without their great love of and connection to African-American music. Now that we’re living in the age of Trump, it’s more important than ever to know where we come from and to look back to a time before the country music machine had erased black artists and musical forms from its own history.
Few instruments are more iconic to country music than the banjo. The banjo is a four-, five- or six-stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity as a resonator, called the head, which is typically circular. The membrane is typically made of plastic, although animal skin is still occasionally but rarely used. Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by Africans in America, adapted from African instruments of similar design. The banjo is frequently associated with folk, Irish traditional, and country music. Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in African-American traditional music, before becoming popular in the minstrel shows of the 19th century. The banjo, with the fiddle, is a mainstay of American old-time music. It is also very frequently used in traditional (“trad”) jazz.
The modern banjo derives from instruments that had been used in the Caribbean since the 17th century by enslaved people taken from West Africa. Written references to the banjo in North America appear in the 18th century, and the instrument became increasingly available commercially from around the second quarter of the 19th century.
Several claims as to the etymology of the name banjo have been made. It may derive from the Kimbundu word mbanza. The Oxford English Dictionary states that it comes from a dialectal pronunciation of the Portuguese “bandore” or from an early anglicisation of the Spanish word bandurria. A Banza: a five double string courses Portuguese vihuela with two short strings. Mbanza is a string African instrument that has been built after the Portuguese Banza.
Various instruments in Africa, chief among them the kora, feature a skin head and gourd (or similar shell) body. The African instruments differ from early African American banjos in that the necks do not possess a Western-style fingerboard and tuning pegs, instead having stick necks, with strings attached to the neck with loops for tuning. Banjos with fingerboards and tuning pegs are known from the Caribbean as early as the 17th century. 18th- and early 19th-century writers transcribed the name of these instruments variously as bangie, banza, bonjaw, banjer and banjar. Instruments similar to the banjo (e.g., the Japanese shamisen, Persian tar, and Moroccan sintir) have been played in many countries.
Another likely relative of the banjo is the akonting, a spike folk lute played by the Jola tribe of Senegambia, and the ubaw-akwala of the Igbo. Similar instruments include the xalam of Senegal and the ngoni of the Wassoulou region including parts of Mali, Guinea, and Ivory Coast, as well as a larger variation of the ngoni developed in Morocco by sub-Saharan Africans known as the gimbri.
Early, African-influenced buy viagra egypt banjos were built around a gourd body and a wooden stick neck. These instruments had varying numbers of strings, though often including some form of drone. The five-string banjo was popularized by Joel Walker Sweeney, an American minstrel performer from Appomattox Court House, Virginia. They would animate slave dances as well as dances for the plantation owners and whites. Over time these instruments became the banjo we know today, rooted in West African history and culture, and the structure of the music began to bend back towards Africa as well, moving towards modal melodies and notes existing in the gaps between the Western scale.
In the 1830s, the first banjo player star was the white minstrel banjo player Joel Sweeney who, though he learned the instrument from black artists, laid claim to having invented the fifth string, a clearly African part of the instrument. The banjo came into America through the incredible popularity of the minstrel show.
This new banjo was at first tuned d’Gdf?a, though by the 1890s this had been transposed up to g’cgbd’. Banjos were introduced in Britain by Sweeney’s group, the American Virginia Minstrels, in the 1840s and became very popular in music halls. But even from the very beginning, white people laid claim to the banjo and worked to erase its African history. In the Antebellum South, many black slaves played the banjo and taught their masters how to play. For example, in his memoir titled With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon, Confederate veteran and surgeon John Allan Wyeth recalls learning it from a slave as a child on his family plantation.
The modern banjo comes in a variety of forms, including four- and five-string versions. A six-string version, tuned and played similarly to a guitar, has gained popularity. In almost all of its forms, banjo playing is characterized by a fast arpeggiated plucking, though there are many different playing styles.
The body, or pot, of a modern banjo typically consists of a circular rim (generally made of wood, though metal was also common on older banjos) and a tensioned head, similar to a drum head. Traditionally the head was made from animal skin, but today is often made of various synthetic materials. Most modern banjos also have a metal “tone ring” assembly that helps further clarify and project the sound, however many older banjos do not include a tone ring.
The banjo is usually tuned with friction tuning pegs or planetary gear tuners, rather than the worm gear machine head used on guitars. Frets have become standard since the late 19th century, though fretless banjos are still manufactured and played by those wishing to execute glissando, play quarter tones, or otherwise achieve the sound and feeling of early playing styles.
Modern banjos are typically strung with metal strings. Usually the fourth string is wound with either steel or bronze-phosphor alloy. Some players may string their banjos with nylon or gut strings to achieve a more mellow, old-time tone.