The Banjo- From The Valley To The Hills (Part 2)

Although the transfer of musical culture between African and European settlers was most striking and apparent in the mountains, it did not begin there, and by no means was it limited to there. This musical heritage was taken with new settlers into the mountain frontier of Western Virginia, North Carolina, and much of the Appalachia range. But the banjo and it's history also stayed on the plantations of the east, and took on a very different life. These two divergent courses would meet again. But first, the story of the banjo's journey to the hills:

The social tensions of the 1600's were driven more by economics than by race. In the turbulent time before and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chattel slavery and virulent racism were not yet widespread, but this evil institution had it's beginnings in this era. In the flux of the plantations and colony life, enslaved Africans were thrown into this new culture, where they were treated with the same contempt and disregard by the ruling class as were white indentured servants.
Paul Heinegg says in Free blacks of North Carolina and Virginia:
‘When enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, they joined a society which was divided between master and white servant - They joined the same households with white servants - working, eating, sleeping, getting drunk, and running away together.’
So the interaction between the “lower classes” was frequent, as they were often in a similar predicament. Through the first fifty years of English and African settlements on the Chesapeake, black and white workers lived together in ways that blurred the racial lines. By mid-century, around 1650, small communities of free blacks and formerly indentured whites sprang up around the perimeter of the Chesapeake Bay, with the largest concentration on the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland. Mr. Heinegg continues:
'Many blacks and whites in this area appeared to enjoy one another's company, perhaps because they shared so much. Behind closed doors … black and white joined together to drink, gamble, frolic, and fight… Inevitably conviviality led to other intimacies …’
Some later generations descended from the union of a slave and a white servant woman in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Or some free African Americans married into the Native American population, and other times marrying slaves. Sometimes, African Americans would marry into the European communities. These various and diverse groups had thousands of descendants by 1800. For many reasons, sometimes by choice and sometimes not, many stayed in the valleys and plantations. But thousands had moved to the frontier at that point as laws and attitudes regarding all non-Europeans became incredibly restrictive.

Many ethnicities made the transition from valley to mountain frontier life. For decades before this time, there was a subjugation and decimation of Native American tribes in these areas. Intermittent battles were waged between the newly formed U.S. government and the mountain communities of Native Americans, mostly the Cherokee nation in the hills of North Carolina and Virginia. They were weakened then driven off land they had lived on for thousands of years, and it didn't take long for ethnicities hungry for a new start to occupy the land. Irish, Scot-Irish, German, Italian, English, African, all staked their claim in the "new" frontier. As they would have brought the culture familiar to them, it would be reasonable to assume some of these families maintained a banjo tradition. The banjo tradition in the mountains might have had its inception in the courting rituals, dances and parties of young people of the "lower classes" newly arrived from the plantations and the valleys. But the elders of these families undoubtedly held the majority of the oral and musical knowledge, and must have been responsible for keeping traditions alive and passing them on.

Whether it was a direct link to the gourd banjo traditions of Africa, or descendants of the first generation of immigrants, the traditions of banjo folk music were being passed on to the many different cultures here in this chaotic land. In the mountains of Appalachia it was transferred and thrived while mixing with the instruments and traditions of other settlers. But the story of the banjo in the valleys and plantations of the east and south was what first entered popular American music, as it made it's way from the valleys to the cities.

The Banjo- An American Instrument (Part 1)

Ask most Americans what type of music they associate with the banjo, and they'll generally list some form of white folk music: bluegrass, old-time.... However, the banjo is actually a descendent of African musical instruments. In West Africa, jeli musicians and other memory keepers, praise singers, satirists, and healers (called griots by the French) played the predecessor of the banjo for centuries. Lutes made from gourds have been commonplace in Africa for at least a millennium, and it was these lutes that inspired the banjo. Instruments like the xalam and akonting of Senegal, and the West African ngoni.









Instruments of this general construction can be found from Morocco to Nigeria, and everywhere in between. Some are very large, such as the gimbri played by the mystic Gnawa brotherhood of Morocco. Others are tiny, such as the one-stringed gurkel of northern Mali. In Senegal the Wolof call it xalam (pronounced: halam) while in the Gambia the Mandinka have a 5-string version they call kontingo. The version played by the Manding griots of The Gambia, Mali and Guinea is typically about two-feet long and has either four or seven strings.

So American banjos trace their birth to a family of instruments that is very old. Drums with strings stretched over them can be found throughout the Far East, the Middle East and many parts of Africa, where they were played like the banjo, bowed, or plucked like a harp, depending on their development. The banjo as we can begin to recognize it, was made by African slaves, based on instruments that were indigenous to their parts of Africa. Often, they were made using gourds as they were in Africa, and importantly, a drone string. The ringing drone string was something seen in many of the African gourd ancestors, and was being added here as well. Here it evolved as a higher tuned 5th string.
Early banjos were spread to the colonies of those countries engaged in the slave trade. Scholars have found that many of these instruments had names that are related to the modern word "banjo": such as "banjar", "banjil", "banza", or "banshaw". Also of note, Africans transported to the Caribbean and Latin America were reported playing banjos in the 17th and 18th centuries, before any banjo was reported in the Americas.


So the banjo was brought from Africa in the memory of enslaved Africans. By the mid-1700s the banjo was transported to the Virginia and North Carolina frontiers by the "lower classes" which included enslaved African, free blacks, white indentured servants, and servants free of indenture. It would be logical to assume that the banjo music of slaves and the fiddle music of indentured white servants began to be shared during this era. The mountain frontier of Virginia and North Carolina was populated in part by white servants free of indenture and free blacks hoping to improve their circumstances. Slavery and indentured servitude still existed in this area, but even then there was not the separation that was seen on the plantations. And in the hills of this mountain frontier and throughout Appalachia, mountaineers of both African and European ancestry used the banjo for frolics in remote frontier cabins before 1800. The transfer of banjo playing from Africans to mountaineers of European descent occurred much earlier than has been assumed and was certainly not as simple as many claim, for some mountaineers have both African and European ancestry.

So folk banjo music, a mixture of European and African influences, has been in the mountains since the days of the first settlers. The music has never left there, but the banjo has traveled far...

Finding the Đàn Bầu

I was wandering the streets of the city, in a rush to go nowhere, to see everything. Every turn was somewhere new, even if I had already been there two times before. I didn’t mind getting lost. If it was hopeless, I’d find a café or stop at one of the roadside stands. Or write in my journal, check everything out. Just notice the habits, the small things- the timbre in someone’s voice, the way a friend reached out to another, the crazy traffic, the way it all coexisted and worked.
I had read about a puppet show, and I had nothing to do that night, so I went. Nothing but tourists and a couple wealthy Vietnamese families. Oh well, I am one, I am one…I was constantly reminded, but when the music started, I was put in a trance.
Beautiful ladies in flowing dresses and men in traditional dress had set up unnoticed, at least by me. The first note was the haunting and sublime sound of the dan bau. It enchanted the air. I immediately fell in love with the angelic lady playing it. I barely had the wherewithal to press start on the cheap analog tape recorder I had brought. But it was for this moment I did bring it.
4 years later, and I’m back in Hanoi. We are set to leave tomorrow. I had been keeping an eye out for instrument shops, but today was the day to actually find one. Over the last couple years, thinking about my experiences here, I would often listen to the recording I had made. It captured the sadness, grace, and tradition I had seen here. A couple days back, while looking through an old government building, we saw two musicians playing, one was playing the dan bau. There was something about the instrument that spoke of this country, and I was still haunted by the sound from before. So I wanted to see if I could find one.

In a guide, we read about a shop that sold native instruments, so we set off on a trek to find it. These little day trips always felt like small journeys, cause it always involved getting lost, keeping your calm, stopping for the best food, being infused with all that was going on. The looks, the flow, the smells, all new, all old.
After a couple hours of searching, we took a turn into a street lined with shops. Yes! We found it, but I had no idea the connection I was about to make. The shop had the usual popular Chinese zithers that were used quite often in traditional Vietnamese music, but my eye was searching for the dan bau. In the back of the store, up on a shelf, I saw one. I approached it, not knowing how to play it or get a sound. The nice younger lady who was running the shop that day knew that I was curious and just wanted to get a sound out of this exotic instrument. She had probably seen many tall westerners roam her shop, only to ask a couple questions and leave. But 30 minutes later, she was still showing me the way harmonics are made to get the crying, emotive sound that is this instrument. We were having a good time and she was handing to me a little knowledge of the Vietnamese culture. What a good experience. She told me that they had made this instrument in the shop in the back of the store. Her father had started the shop many years ago, and he had died recently. She showed me a photograph of him working and planing the wood on a dan bau, scraps lying all around him. Over his life, he had taught his family how to make these elegant instruments, along with others. This was truly something special, part of her family's story right in front of me in this instrument. With scenes of life on the side all outlayed in mother of pearl, it was an instrument and a work of art.
Everything about this instrument was beautiful to me. And this experience was beautiful as well. As long as I had played music in my life, I had never been this enchanted by an instrument and it's history, origin, sound and tradition.

It was a good while later that we left. We said a heartfelt goodbye to her, and I had a handmade dan bau in my hands. It's years later, and I consider this instrument one of my dearest possessions. Instruments fill the walls of my room, but only one is handmade and native to the country I bought it in. The care taken to make this instrument and reverence to traditional forms of art are what make it special. This instrument has guided my thinking towards finding more like it in other countries. Countries with life as chaotic and serene as Vietnam, where there are ways of life that tie people to their ancestors and the land they lived in.

Here's an example of how it sounds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYSgPobFndk

This Home of Mine

How do you make sense of this city, this home of mine? This is nothing but idleness and insanity. From one back to the other, drugs intertwined. Is it the same in every major city in the world? Maybe, but this is getting ridiculous. One after the other as I walk, men lying, looking, oblivious on the sidewalk. Do they have no impulse to do anything else? The crazy man ranting makes more sense than this. Why can people across the globe persist in the face of death and these people languish in the land of plenty? Is it not their fault?
A long line around the block, waiting for a handout from the church. I stare, trying to put them in the proper context. They sit there, waiting. Waiting, that in itself is a different concept in this land. We can’t wait for anything, we need it now. But these people are waiting for…a handout. Are times really that tough? Are there no jobs left? What is going on? How can you call this a healthy society? We as a people are judged around the world by things superficial, like the economy. The depths, the ugliness are exposed now. The sick wealth- exposed, and people can see again what’s important to people here. But that isn’t this country.
There are people struggling, trying- and these people, waiting. But there are people elsewhere waiting to die. What the fuck is going on?
How inextricably are we all tied to each other? Waiting, on what, for what reasons? Down and out, in what way? Who would switch with who given the chance?

Water for the Plants

The thought process inherent in the people’s life, in their actions, in their struggles, in the limited view I took home with me. So similar to mine, but I could never practice it, live it. I’m outfitted with precepts, learned from my parents, passed on from theirs. They would have marveled at their similarity to people of other lands. They could have talked the same language with these people. They, more than me, could have related to the deceptively simple ideals of a predominantly rural land. The precepts of a distant generation, of my ancestors. Could they be so different than mine?
Sometimes it seems of little use to ask this question, because life beckons with it’s infinitesimally small challenges that if ignored, will cut down the strongest person. The values, however, that I use to guide me through these challenges have a root, a providence that I believe every human being draws from. The mere act of breathing and the instinctual drive to think hold us all as brethren, but the more complicated and illusory accomplishment of making sense of this world present other hallmarks of our close relations.
The scope in which to process these experiences seems like half the answer. How do we concentrate on what’s important, on what was meant for us to survive? Be it religion, our relative’s ideals or anything else. My thinking and instinct tells me that our perspective is always changing, and that a static frame limits our view. So I have the urge to shed all notions previously prescribed for me, to leave behind all their comforts. But this is not the answer, I can see that now. It is fitting what we’ve been given with what we experience. The frame to the picture. Water for the plant.

The Valley

It was beautiful, the valley seemed endless below, shrouded by mist, a river hidden behind undulating green hills stacked with stairs of ingeniously formed rice paddies. Against my conscience, I led myself down little by little, passing H’mong children who would sell the shirts off their backs for the price it would catch. The game was in full effect, and it was more of the same. I was already disheartened by their situation, and I was feeling more and more like the problem. For some reason I kept going, I had a few hours until I motoed down to catch the train back to Hanoi.
So I crossed the old and swaying bridge to a path that climbed up by homes that hugged the hillside. It seemed I was alone now, only catching the attention of a dog, who let me know I was on their path. I crossed the crest of the hill and while descending towards another bend of the river, saw a young H’mong man coming down another close hillside. I stopped at the bluff to admire the view down to the river below, and up to the rainforest clad Mount Fansipan and beyond into China. He came right up to me, and he had his basket and long knife hung on his back. With no hesitation, he offered me some fruit he had picked on his trip down the hill. The fruit was green, and when you broke the outside, it had a viscous liquid so sweet which you sucked out. We couldn’t talk to each other, but I pointed to the mountain to make sure it was Vietnam’s tallest mountain, Mt. Fansipan, and he nodded. I mimed working with an imaginary knife and he nodded that that’s in fact what he had been doing. He nodded it was alright to take a picture with him, but looked shyly away when I did, as if this was the first time someone had taken his picture. After accepting some more fruit, I said goodbye, thinking it was better to stay out of his way, to let him get back to his life. After a second, he called after me, wanting to help me get out and back to the town. I followed him through this surrealistic setting, it seeming like a dream, me being led through exotic foreign lands by a person I would never see again, couldn’t really talk to, but with whom there was a connection made. When we encountered another bridge, he motioned that he would have to depart here, taking the path up into the hills. We waved goodbye- the dream ending abruptly- a grazing cow was on a controlled fall careening down the hill towards me being led by two kids no more than 10 years old! They passed, and I started to make my way backup the path, up out of the tall valley, taking the spine of it up and out, past more impossible rice paddies and houses, back to the main road. As I approached it, a man caught my eye and had something to sell- I was back in the tourist game.
But in that valley I was not a tourist, I was allowed to exist in the same consciousness as my H’mong friend. It was simple and true. We were human, and we met.

Tourisms

Tourism, as I witnessed it, was rarely advantageous to the people in the direct vicinity of it. At it’s best, it made a little money for the postcard seller, the moto driver, the roadside marketeer, and a few others. But it changed people, and made them run someone else’s game. When most native people eyed a tourist, their main goal was to try to get some of the disproportionately strong money that these intruders brought in. Spectators were fair game, and the natives would not stop until they felled their prey, for they were skilled hunters. Who can blame a people whose yearly income probably compares to our weekly income, and who could never even dream of leaving their own country to taste the exotic fruits, to hear the enticing sounds, to sense the peculiar feelings of a foreign country?

While rebuffing attempts at a guilt trip to my wallet by an enterprising moto driver, I also knew he was right in telling me how lucky I was that I could leave my country. He really was poor and needed to feed his children with whatever money I could give him. To be a traveler involves a tough skinned coldness combined with a savvy, clever but benevolent demeanor. When to give a little more than necessary for the job done, when just to give, and when to stand your ground and get the best price. Sometimes you find a friend after the money is exchanged, sometimes you find you have just been swindled. But you have to realize the grand swindler is no one but yourself. On this “trip on a shoestring”, this in a land where many don’t even have shoestrings to speak of.

The dollar, in whatever form it takes, is, after all, the fruit that most people around the world collect for sustenance. It seems logical then that it would weigh so heavily on people’s minds and play such an important role in people’s interactions. To expect anything different while traveling would be to insult the intelligence of the people there. It’s not easy to keep this in mind when a lady wants 40,000 dong for a pastry and you know the real price is 2000. Along with being a little transparent and grabby, she is really just a product of the clumsy interaction between those who have and those who have not. I would complain of the lack of respect for the fellow human sometimes when I was being overcharged on a regular basis- no one likes to be fooled or coerced into paying more than they should. But again, the real trickery is done by us who think we can waltz into another land as a spectator to a great show for a great deal.

There were plenty of places where this interaction and it’s effects were rotting the vibrant and fragile culture around it. Because of this, I wanted nothing to do with the intruders, but could do nothing to avoid the fact that I was one myself. There were times when this disease was transcended and for brief moments, knowledge and feelings were exchanged or given. Beautiful moments sometimes cloaked in the dirty, smelly, blood soaked surroundings of a destroyed
land. Sometimes hidden in the nacient attitude of a people and country just now allowed to take their own course. Sometimes their humor and benevolence would surprise you and make you marvel at their fortitude. At the very least you got a glimpse into what it is that makes people tick, because when it came down to it, it wasn’t money, cause there wasn’t enough of that to go around. It was something else, and I’ve seen it.

I marveled at times like the one when I walked the back streets of Pnom Phen. It was crowded, and some houses were made only of plywood and cardboard. People stared from their houses as I went by, and I had enough money in my pocket to feed everybody on that street for a month probably. And they knew it, but not one malicious stare. The tales of guns and debauchery, of theft and villians couldn’t be reconciled with the respectful nods and acceptance of me being there. Or the kind and precious look from a girl as she passed by me on a moto. We saw each other’s eyes, eyes from across the world, eyes we will never see again. Or the moto driver who found me, but didn’t want to take me anywhere, didn’t want my money. He wanted to buy me a meal at his favorite restaurant if I would only talk english with him for a while. He taught me that you have to put one teaspoon of sugar in your Cambodian soup, he told me that he couldn’t kill any living thing because of his commitment to Buddha. I paid of course and was the richer for it. Or the tour of the S-21 khmer rouge prison, where I was told of the horrific history of the Khmer people, what they had to endure from Pol Pot. And the testimony of nearly every adult that they had lost their parents or close relatives to Pol Pot. After saying this, the next thing out of their mouth would often be about me. They had had enough thought and suffering, they wanted to live on, make me laugh, find out about me. Or the trip on a flat boat down a flooded and lazy river when we picked up a stranded older lady who probably never had any reason to venture outside of her town. Her youthful and assuring smile told me she lived a happy life, and she shared her fruit with us as payment for the ride. And the amusement the owners of a roadside restaurant got at watching me eat their house specialty, roasted dog with extremely strong rice wine. And finding out from a bunch of 20 something guys in Hanoi that women there give them the same headaches and pleasures as they do back at home. And watching old men socialize at their favorite coffee shop while downing one of the best drinks on earth, a creamy vietnamese coffee. And a woman poking her tongue out at me in jest out of a passing crowd of bikers all dressed in white flowing dresses, making me love her spontaneity and soul. And the enthralled group of young kids who encircled me on a beach, making fun of my hairy skin and amazed to see a white man in their out of the way town. And the many discussions I had with ex-soldiers, their stories painting a picture never told in my country. Stories of lives lost, destroyed and risked for different governments, conflicting ideals. And the stories telling the point of view of somebody fighting for the mere sovereignty of their country.

How refreshing it was to never feel real aggression from anyone, even in an argument. I now see why they are leary of us back at home. Learning that guns and murders were extremely rare phenomenon in these countries. Physical harm wasn’t the only threat to get things done there, it was cleverness and wits. And the 40 hour train-bus-train ride that was supposed to be a 19 hour train ride. Realizing that patience was a way of life for that crowd that day, and that I better learn it quick since it might be 8 hours till the flood waters recede enough to go on. All these were things, if my intentions were humble and true, that I could learn from. It was possible I could be more than a tourist, someone who was in the same game as the native people, going in some way through the same thing. So when I decided to take the road down into the H’mong village, I was hesitant, I didn’t want to just trapse through, staring at “different people”.

From a Land

Another day, gone to work, outside by a cafe, wanting not to forget the unusual and fleeting experiences I had in SE Asia. I am from a land where the dollar influences most people’s decisions. The aspiration towards life here usually involves a cost, a wanting, constantly, for more.
In other parts of the world, many people have invented ways and means of sustenance that involves what they presently have. We are lucky enough to live in a country where the idea of “more” material is to be had. Do we remember a time when we were bound by our geography, our local food sources, our family, our responsibilities to community? Bound, hung up, restrained, that’s how most of us view these things. But in most other places, these are life, and they come to have sacred meanings and are appreciated. There is no doubt, given the chance, most everyone in these places would love to escape, see the world, a privilege that a few of us, us few, enjoy. As they don’t, their reality must serve them. But our reality, it is never good enough, we always yearn for more. This dogged determination rarely leads to happiness, and when it does, it’s on the backs of others.
So what of a life that is cut off from this possibility, these chances at a better life; the comfort and security we’re supposed to attain and enjoy. Is it possible that most people of the world find it satisfying to not feel the itch of material want, to not hear the nagging reminder of predictable and expected consumerism? Granted, there are in many parts of the world a latent force of consumerism and a shifting of values towards material identity. This whole paradigm puts self worth in accordance with material gain. Mostly responsible for this is the spreading of western capitalistic and cultural ideals: The idea that the economy should have the first and last say, and that to fit into this system one should aspire to be a willing contributor and benefactor of that global economy.
It becomes an extraordinarily complex question to answer whether people are benefited by this system. So many different views exist as to what amount of financial gain constitutes happiness. When you combine that with the spiritual, traditional, habitual, and all other countless forms of existence; financial necessities and wants become hard to pin down. However, I don’t think it would be very hard to argue that when this global economy is encountered by cultures whose parameters and precepts don’t recognize it, many other things are lost, replaced and substituted for. These things are often traditional and simple. And it's my society, the way of life I contribute to everyday, that snags the life force- and sometimes extinguishes it- in so many people and in so many places around the world.

The Native

Home is in the land of plenty. Where the contradiction of homelessness resides. In the land of milk and honey, revered and honored by a native people then stolen from them. Our land, what is our land? We are all here now and we all need a piece. If we don’t own something we haven’t worked hard enough, right? Did we learn nothing from a people whose objective was to live within the only religion there is? The sacred gift of our mother, our provider.