#Alvarez banjos history skin#

When you see the banjo in these historic accounts, it’s not the banjo by itself, it is in this bigger context, and that context remains remarkably similar, whether we are in the Caribbean or whether we are in Albany, New York. KG: I’m smiling a lot because that is exactly what I wanted people to pick up on without being too explicit about it. Can you talk about the culture that surrounds the banjo?

There are similar activities happening, separated by centuries and hundreds of miles, and yet there is this recurrence of this kind of dance and instrument. The way that your book is structured, it’s story after story, vignettes from different times and places, and they rhyme. So you have all of these elements that make up a banjo, from where people were taken in Africa, in West Africa across the continent to East Africa, and those elements come together–in the same way you have creolized languages or creolized foodways, you have a creolized instrument, and a creolized style of music that brings in lots of these traditions to create something new.īFB: You went in search of banjos and pulled up all these things that were attached to the banjo. But in East Africa, where people were also taken from and enslaved in the Americas, you do have five and seven-string plucked instruments that have flat fingerboards, but usually they have wooden bodies. With a guitar, with a flat fingerboard, can have six strings. But because the neck is so thin, you can’t have a ton of strings. KG: Yes, it’s like a pole that they are putting their fingers on. The West African instruments don’t have a flat fingerboard– People think of the akonting as “the ancestor” of the banjo because it looks a lot like a banjo and the playing technique is very similar to the playing technique called clawhammer or downstroking. For example, the akonting played by the Jola or played by the Ngoni, they’ll have long strings and a short drone string. Another thing that is really common are those long and short strings. But, what you do have in West Africa are gourd-bodied lutes, which have their own names depending on the culture or the ethic group that they come from. There is nothing that is built in the same way as a banjo that anyone has found in Africa. KG: So you hear a lot “The banjo is from Africa,” which isn’t true because the first time you see something that looks like a banjo it is in the Americas. Can you talk a bit about those instruments and where they came from? Yet there are antecedents–related instruments in Africa.

But first, as you describe it in the book, the banjo is an African American instrument, broadly defining American as the Caribbean, South America, Central America, North America. These decorations had a ritual purpose they were religious symbols.īFB: I want to come back to that. KG: Just like banjos today can be highly decorative, both images and surviving banjos have decorations on the fingerboard and soundholes that are carved in the body of the instrument in the shape of crosses. They look a little different, but functionally they are the same.īFB: I’ve noticed some of them have designs on the fingerboard. But most typically they have three long strings and one short string 5-string banjos have four long and one short string.

#Alvarez banjos history skin#

Kristina Gaddy: Banjos before that period had gourd or calabash bodies that made the sound chamber they still have the skin head, they still have flat fingerboards, they still have long and short strings like 5-string banjos do today.

Mostly this book talks about the banjo before that form took shape. The interview was conducted by history nerd and amateur banjo player Tom Chalkley, and edited and condensed to account for the ramblings of interviewer and interviewee.īaltimore Fishbowl: Most of our readers are conscious of banjos in the modern form that it took on 150 years ago when it was manufactured here in Baltimore, a steel hoop or wooden hoop and a skin or a piece of plastic stretched over that, a flat neck, and frets for a European scale. Centuries-old journals and illustrations provide glimpses of life under plantation slavery, where disparate peoples of African descent preserved elements of their ancestral cultures while evolving new rituals, dances, and musical forms. Norton has just published Baltimore author Kristina Gaddy’s new book “Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History.” This deeply researched work assembles fascinating findings and an array of primary sources to place this uniquely African-American instrument in the context of early Black history in the Americas.