A friend of ours is a fan of bluegrass music, and it came up in a discussion a while back that bluegrass is mostly associated with the Appalachian region. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but he mentioned that the banjo was an important part of bluegrass music and that most people think that banjo players are complete and utter morons. I don’t know if that’s true either, but I guess that the banjo probably doesn’t get the “respect” of most other musical instruments.
So why the bad press for the banjo? Unlike other instruments like violins or guitars, the sight of a banjo seems to trigger ridicule in many, otherwise kindly, people. This might be due to the banjo’s early history in American entertainment as a prop for stage comics that strummed on the old “banjar” during their routine.
But it turns out that the banjo wasn’t born in America. Drums with strings stretched over them (which is what a banjo is) can be traced throughout western Africa as well as the Far and Middle East almost from the beginning of recorded history. Those primitive instruments could be played like the banjo, with a bow like a violin, or plucked like a harp — depending on the style of music.
The banjo as we know it most likely began in southwestern Africa. The original instrument is thought to have been called an “akonting,” but scholars and historians have found countless entries in diaries of 17th century British explorers that refer to instruments with names surprisingly close to the modern word “banjo” — like banjar, banza, and banshaw.
The earliest African version of the instrument was a gourd sliced in half, with an animal skin membrane stretched tightly across the opening to which a wooden neck and twine or animal gut for strings were attached. It might have had as few as two or as many as ten strings, depending on local custom. Westerners were first exposed to the banjo through the slave trades, beginning in the 1600s.
In the 1830s, minstrel shows featured banjo-playing whites in blackface. The minstrel show first developed as a way for whites to explore what they perceived to be the “mystery” of African-American culture. When they began, minstrels weren’t the mean-spirited, racist parodies they became by the 1890s and early 1900s. They were billed as “Ethiopian (African) characterizations” and the performances of music, dance, and comedy were based more on whites’ perceptions of Africans than on the reality of African-American slave life.
The mistral show’s comic descendant continued the tradition of the witless banjoist into the 20th century. I’m old enough to remember a TV show called Hee-Haw and comics like Grandpa Jones popping out of the cornfield, plugin’ away on the old banjo.
So for these, or maybe some other reason(s) the banjo has become associated with the whole Appalachian hillbilly image that is — deservedly or not — a bad image in in the more “advanced” areas of the country, where rap music and hip hop is “respected” for its intellectual content and artistic quality that banjo music lacks.
So if you like banjo music, or play the banjo stick to it — it could be worse…. you could be playing a ukulele — or an accordion.
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