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.