Sounding the Well of Souls (4)

The BIB editor writes:

A substantial part of Well of souls is dedicated to showing the development of the cultures of black enslaved people in the New World. It is a task for which Gaddy feels her being white may disqualify her, but which she sees as a necessary reparation for the ways in which those cultures have been ignored or misrepresented in the past.

In this overall cultural survey, the banjo at times falls out of sight and hearing. As regards sight, the publishers could have partly remedied this. They chose, however, to print illustrations on the same paper as the text; this works well enough with line drawings and diagrams, but much less so with monochrome reproductions of paintings, where clarity is easily lost. As regards hearing, it does appear that though the banjo was a recognised part of ritual and sacred activity, it was not indispensable. But for those who want to hear music of a kind that was played on the banjo long before white musicians took it up, some of the earliest documenation of the instrument includes transcriptions of music played in Jamaica in the 1680s, and these pieces can be heard on the Musical Passage website, which presents them in their historical background.

© Richard Hawkins