Sounding the Well of Souls (2)

The BIB editor writes:

Kristina R. Gaddy's book Well of souls: uncovering the banjo's hidden history can be seen as a companion to the collaborative volume Banjo roots and branches, ed. Robert B. Winans (2018), in which ten scholars meticulously examined the source material by which the stages in the early development of the banjo, from the seventeenth century, can be plotted. Gaddy presents much of the same material in the form of reconstructions of the lived experience of the people involved in each of those stages.

This understandably involves frequent use of phrases such as 'perhaps', 'surely', 'may have been', 'may have used', 'may have come from', and (200) 'How they actually felt is impossible to know'. The book is meant to be a work of reparation, so where different interpretations of an event are possible, Gaddy takes care to put forward one that white readers may find less comfortable. She acknowledges (p. 177):

These experiences I've told you about, reader, may not be as connected as I think they are. I might be seeing deep references to Black history and culture where there are none. [...] But what I realized [...] was that I had to open my eyes to the reality that Black history and culture have been so suppressed and misunderstood by white culture that I wouldn't see connections unless I looked hard. But why had they been suppressed? How had we lost all this information? Why was it that an instrument constantly described as 'Black' and 'African' came to be thought of as a white instrument? The story can't stop here.

*

One answer to the last question may occur to anyone who was in the UK in the mid twentieth century. At that time the minstrel show - decadent, fading, but not completely dead - preserved an idea of a link between banjos and African-Americans; the revival of 'traditional' jazz, in which the plectrum banjo was a distinguishing feature, brought black New Orleans jazz veterans back into prominence; and the 'Banjo' chocolate wafer bar, on the market till 1954 and briefly reintroduced in the 1970s, carried on its wrapper a stylised logo of a chocolate-brown singing face. Moreover, Pete Seeger's How to play the 5-string banjo clearly informed the many thousands of 'folk' enthusiasts who learned from it that the banjo had African and African-American roots (a point also made in one of the comments on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiP8Tfa8bB8)

In the sixty years since then, however, all the people and all the cultural events prominently associated with the banjo have been white - the Seegers, the Kingston Trio, Earl Scruggs, Bill Keith, Bela Fleck, 'The Beverly Hillbillies', 'Bonnie & Clyde', 'Deliverance', 'O brother' - and in that context a musician of the stature of Taj Mahal could be seen as one more offshoot of the folk revival.

© Richard Hawkins