Why Wasn't The Banjo Passed Down As A Cultural Instrument?
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So, the banjo started off as an African slave instrument, but it has since passed into white culture. When asked, most people would say that they associated the banjo with white folk music, including bluegrass. It was the tradition of the travelling minstrel which caused the banjo to become popular outside the black community in America. During the 1830s and 1840s, white minstrels would wear blackface and play for entertainment. The first ever white banjo player is thought to have been Joel Sweeney. He came from Virginia, where he had learned to play the banjo from the local black community. He then took the banjo around the country, and is thought to have been the first to have played it on stage.
This meant that the banjo was moved further and further away from its African roots. Blackface shows caricatured black people, rather than being sympathetic to black culture. Those who played the banjo, including Sweeney, started to try to distance the banjo from its roots. As banjos began to be made by commercial instrument makers, many claimed that Joel Sweeney had invented the instrument, to attempt to cover up its African roots. By this time, the banjo was becoming popular among white people too, particularly poor whites in the American South.
Beyond the banjo’s physical reinvention, the instrument was also given a new coat of cultural paint. Its new color would be white.
The transformation of the banjo from a black African instrument to a white American one occurred from the 1840s through the 1880s, the decades when the banjo’s popularity exploded and took hold. The motivations were equal parts racism and the chase for the almighty buck, as manufacturers such as the Dobson Brothers, and Samuel Swain Stewart, along with banjo proselytizers such as Joel Chandler Harris (author of the Uncle Remus stories) and Frank Converse, made two basic arguments. First, the gourd and calabash instruments played on plantations and minstrel stages were primitive objects, arguably not even banjos at all, at best mere prototypes for the more technologically advanced instruments made by American manufacturers. Second, slaves were too stupid to play these instruments with anything approaching virtuosity, so their contribution to the instrument’s history is just as well ignored.
One other motivation for this cultural deception was the urge to define America’s place on the world stage. “A key irony,” Dubois says of the banjo’s 19th-century revisionist history, “is that in order for Victorian America to distinguish itself from Europe, it needed a really American instrument to crow about. But the only place where you could get an American instrument was, of course, from black culture. How they navigated that is fascinating because no one could ever really escape the truth. Still, Stewart, Dobson, and the rest of them succeeded to the extent that it’s still a surprise to many people today to learn that the banjo was originally a black or African American instrument.”
Sheet music for the Ethiopian Serenaders from 1847. Via Old Hat Records.
The lies perpetrated about the banjo varied, but they all reinforced the proposition that the instrument’s connection with enslaved people was tenuous. In his history of the instrument, banjo maker George Dobson admitted that the banjo had African antecedents, but he also imagined that “Negro slaves, seeing and hearing their mistresses playing on the guitar, were seized by that emulative and imitative spirit characteristic of the race, and proceeded to make a guitar of their own out of a hollow gourd, with a c00n-skin stretched across for a head.” Stewart, after first claiming that the banjo “was not of negro origin,” relented a few years later, explaining somewhat apologetically that “Truth has often come into the world through lowly channels.”
“You can actually track the history of how the idea of the banjo has evolved,” Dubois says of the instrument’s whitewashing. “These ideas weren’t just ‘in the air.’ Nineteenth-century boosters like Stewart worked really hard to make the banjo not African, to unhinge it from its history. We’re still living with that.”
Harris and Converse were even more full-throated in their racism. Citing the banjo’s use in blackface minstrel shows, Harris suggested that “The whole idea of its origins on the plantations was a theatrical fantasy,” as Dubois puts it in The Banjo. Converse, who made his living publishing manuals for white audiences to teach them how to play the banjo, flattered his readers by assuring them that “There were no players among the slaves capable of arousing its slumbering powers,” insisting that only “white admirers in the North” could awaken the instrument’s “inherent beauties.” Never mind that the techniques in his book were as stolen from enslaved people as the banjo itself. The banjo’s destiny, Converse wrote, need not be as “an accompaniment to the darkey song that told of the cotton fields, cane brakes, ‘possum hunts, sweet tobacco posies, or ‘Gwine to Alabama wid banjo on my knee,’ etc.”
Living in the Appalachian region, you can get your fill of the banjo...
On occasion, you'll see black folks playing them, though it'll be folk music or blues. I can barely play the guitar, but I've had some interest in it...
On occasion, you'll see black folks playing them, though it'll be folk music or blues. I can barely play the guitar, but I've had some interest in it...