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...