This site is the first of the Banjo Roots Network, a 'work-in-progress' being created and hosted by Shlomo Pestcoe and Greg C. Adams. It is a projected series of related sites on MySpace that will explore the many different aspects of the history of the banjo, its Afro-Creole origins in the Caribbean in the 17th century, and its deep roots in the West African family of plucked lutes.
The principal objective of the Banjo Roots Network is to be a platform for public outreach and education through which we can share the latest findings of recent banjo roots research. Likewise, we hope that it will also serve as a springboard for dialogue and collaboration between researchers within the banjo community as well as scholars working in different, but related disciplines.
This is a very rare video of the late Scott Didlake (1948-1994), the pioneering gourd banjo builder/scholar who sparked the contemporary gourd banjo revival. He also was a leading seminal advocate of more extensive research to uncover the banjo's obscured roots in the African Diaspora and West Africa. Here Scott is giving an impromptu talk on these topics as a participant in the panel of the gourd banjo workshop-- along with with Mike Seeger (right) and Clarke Buehling (left)-- during the historic 1992 Tennessee Banjo Institute. This video was shot by the late Theo Lissenberg (Haarlem, Netherlands) and edited by Ulf Jägfors (Stockholm, Sweden). It's published on Ulf's YouTube site, devoted to videos on banjo roots-- especially his field recorded videos shot in West Africa of traditional string instruments-- with the kind permission of Carrie Didlake.
West African Jola musician Jo Diatta (Jatta) plays his people's folk lute, the ekonting (akonting). He down-picks, using the traditional Jola playing technique called oo'teck, which is very similar to 19th century stroke style, the oldest documented style of playing the banjo, and the folk variants of stroke style--clawhammer, frailing, thumping, etc. Originally from Youtou in Casamance (southern Senegal, West Africa), Joe performs "Ampa Youtou" (Child of Youtou), a traditional song from his home village, with family and friends. His brother Paul Diatta is heard singing, off-camera, later in the film-- first in falsetto, then in his natural voice. Dakar, Senegal, 7/06.
This video was shot and edited by Swedish banjo historian Ulf Jägfors. To see Ulf's other field-recorded videos of traditional West African music and dance, please visit:
www.youtube.com/user/UlfJagfors
For more information, please visit the following sites:
At the dawn of the 20th century, the American Guild of Banjoists, Mandolinists and Guitarists proudly proclaimed:
The modern banjo is known throughout the world as the product of America, and as its National Musical Instrument.
This was written at the height of the 5-string banjo's "Classic Era" (c.1880-1920), the instrument's "Golden Age." Attaining the status of a world-class popular instrument, the 5-string banjo had made its way into the parlors and music rooms of the middle and upper classes as well as onto the "legitimate" concert stage. At the same time, modern banjo family instruments were also being absorbed into vernacular ethnic/regional musical cultures and traditions not only throughout North America, but also the Caribbean, the British Isles, and other lands the world over.
Yet, in terms of general public awareness, it was also during this period that the banjo's African and African American heritage was obscured to the point of being nearly forgotten.
In recent decades, a growing number of scholars and musicians have focused their research on the early history of the banjo, its birth in the Caribbean, and its deep roots in West Africa. This contemporary banjo roots community follows the path first blazed by Pete Seeger, the leading pioneer of the Folk Revival of the 1950s and '60s, as well as the attendant resurgence of interest in the 5-string banjo.
In his seminal work, How to Play the 5-String Banjo (1948, 1955, 1961), the first instruction book for the instrument in modern times, Seeger, with one brief statement, reasserted its African and African American ancestry:
Negro slaves brought the first banjoes over here; before that the origin is disputed.
Seeger challenged his readers to take it upon themselves to investigate the banjo's long-lost roots:
The historically minded might like to pursue this matter further.
This has intrigued generations of aspiring banjoists the world over, inspiring quite a few to delve deeper into the banjo's history to learn more of its little known heritage.
Parallel with this burgeoning awareness amongst banjoists was the emerging trend in the field of musicology to expand the scope of the study of the origins and evolution of African American music to include its sources in sub-Sahara Africa. Groundbreaking scholars of this trend include Paul Oliver, Eileen Southern,
David Evans, Gerhard Kubik, and
Samuel Charters to name but a few.
The banjo roots community today represents the confluence of all these different disciplines, trends, and perspectives. While contemporary researchers work independently and pursue their own lines of research, they come together within the community to share and exchange ideas and formation. Collaborative endeavors like this site provide a platform for public outreach and the dissemination of the latest findings on early banjo history and related living traditions found throughout Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean.
Influences
The Stedman Creole Bania Suriname, South America, c.1773-1777. (Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde [National Museum of Ethnology], Leiden, Holland)
The above instrument is considered to be the oldest example of an early banjo. It was thought to have been collected in the northeastern South American country of Suriname (also formerly known as Dutch Guiana) by Captain John Gabriel Stedman (1744-1797), sometime between 1773 and 1777. During this period, Captain Stedman served with Colonel Louis Henry Fourgeoud's military expeditionary force, made up of foreign "volunteers," sent from Holland to subdue "revolted Negroes" during the Dutch colony's First Boni Maroon War (1768-1777).
In addition to the instrument he brought back, Stedman also documented and illustrated the Creole Bania in his book, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, from 1772 to 1777 (London, 1796):
The Creole-Bania... is like a mandoline or guitar, being made of a half gourd covered with a sheep-skin, to which is fixed a very long neck or handle. This instrument has but four strings, three long and one short, which is thick, and serves for a bass; it is played by the fingers, and has a very agreeable sound, but more so when accompanied by a song.
The Prices are renowned anthropologists/historians who were among the leading pioneers of modern research into Maroon history and culture (the Maroons are communities throughout the Caribbean and Latin America founded by escaped and rebel African slaves) and African Diaspora culture in general. They're also the foremost experts on John Stedman and the African and Creole slave and Maroon cultures he encountered and documented in Suriname. Their edition of Narrative is based on Stedman's original handwritten manuscript, completed in 1790, as well as the journal he kept during his tour of duty in Suriname. This being the case, Stedman's Surinam more accurately reflects the actual book Stedman wrote and intended to publish.
Back in 1979, Richard and Sally Price were also responsible for the rediscovery of Stedman's Creole Bania in the collections of Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde [National Museum of Ethnology] in Leiden (Holland). Their extensive examination of the instrument revealed that its body was made of calabash (Crescentia cujete) rather than the more typical gourd (Lagenaria siceraria).
Detail, Plate 69, Musical Instruments of the African Negroes [of Suriname].
Stedman's Creole Bania or Kuhn's Banja?
It should be noted that there's a possibility that the instrument which Richard and Sally Price identified as the Stedman Creole Bania back in 1979 may, in fact, be another instrument collected in Suriname in the early 19th century, the Kuhn Banja. Like the Stedman Creole Bania, the existence of the Kuhn Banja would've remained unknown had it not been for the Prices' diligent, extensive research.
Dr. F. A. Kuhn first started practicing medicine in Suriname in 1816 and became the Dutch colony's surgeon general sometime in the 1820s. As the Prices noted in their article John Gabriel Stedman's Collection of 18th Century Artifacts from Suriname (Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, Volume 53 3-4, June 1979, pp. 121-139), in 1824 Kuhn presented a collection of 35 objects, mostly from Suriname, to the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities in The Hague, many of which were collected "by my late brother on an expedition to the maroons in 1818." In Kuhn's collection there was a string instrument listed as a banja. Kuhn's collection eventually ended up in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde. The Kuhn Banja was apparently mislabeled and disappeared in the 1880 reorganization of the Leiden museum.
Not all of 35 items that Kuhn gifted to the Royal Cabinet in 1824 were collected by his brother on his "expedition to the maroons in 1818." In fact, there's no indication as to the specific provenance of the banja (1600), which apparently disappeared in the reorganization of the Leiden museum in 1880 and was subsequently replaced by a 'Mandingo' 16-string harp-lute from West Africa. In his letter of 1824 which accompanied the donation, Kuhn described the original lute as follows: "A musical instrument of the Negros, the body of which is a covered calabash. It resembles a kind of mandolin and the Negroes call such an instrument Banja."
This description seems to more aptly describe the instrument which the Prices identified as Stedman's Creole Bania (5696) back in 1979. Another key point to consider is the fact that it was the Prices, rather than the museum curatorial staff, who made the call that this instrument was, indeed, the Creole Bania that Stedman had brought back from Suriname:
Although the central catalogue assigns this object to the 'Japan and Asia' department and gives it no specific provenience, the object itself (as well as correct data on provenience) is located in the South American department. Comparison of the museum object with Stedman's description and drawings suggests that this is indeed the stringed instrument which he collected. The wooden neck of the banja [sic] is now broken off in two places at its carved end and at the peg for its shortest string.... (Richard & Sally Price, 1979: p.131)
This being the case, could it be that the instrument that the Prices found in the collections of the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden was actually the long-lost Kuhn Banja and not Stedman's Creole Bania?
The lute that the Prices identified as being the Creole Bania brought back from Suriname in 1777 differs significantly from Stedman's description and illustration of the Creole Bania in his Narrative. Stedman described the instrument as having a body "made of a half gourd covered with a sheep-skin." His depiction of the Creole Bania in the book's illustration, Plate 69, Musical Instruments of the African Negroes [of Suriname] (see the above illustration), the instrument's body is large and appears to be made of an oval, ovoid, or teardrop-shaped gourd (Lagenaria siceraria). Conversely, the instrument the Prices found in their 1979 investigation of the collections of the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (National Museum of Ethnology. Leiden, Holland) has a smaller round body made of calabash (Crescentia cujete).
Another glaring discrepancy: Unlike the Leiden instrument, the full-spike stick neck on the Creole Bania depicted in the book does not go through the sides of the instrument's gourd body to pierce through the body's tail-end. On the contrary, the illustrated lute's neck appears to rest on parallel indentations in the top rim of the instrument's body, thereby, enabling it to transcend over the body's outer walls and, rather than pierce through them.
Interesting to note, these two very different neck-to-body assemblies are found on traditional West African plucked spike lutes. In looking at the many different plucked lutes found throughout West Africa in terms of the "over-the-rim" or "through-the-body" issue, there's a very clear regional divide between the plucked lutes of West Africa's Western Sudan region (i.e. Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea) and those of its Central Sudan region (i.e. Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivore [Ivory Coast], Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad). All Western Sudanese plucked lutes-- regardless of whether they're folk lutes or griot lutes, full-spike or semi-spike, or gourd or wooden bodied-- have the "over-the-rim" feature. Conversely, in the Central Sudan, semi-spike lutes, regardless of body or bridge type, are "over-the-rim" jobs, while full-spike lutes of the region are "through-the-body" instruments.
By way of example, compare the 'over-the-rim' assembly apparent on the Creole Bania depicted by Stedman in his Narrative to the photo below of the 3-string gourd-bodied ekonting (akonting), with a full-spike neck, made by Jola master ekonting player/maker Esa Jah-Jarju. Both instruments are full-spike lutes with ovoid-shaped gourd bodies. Likewise, the necks on both lutes rest on indentations in the top rims of their gourd bodies in an 'over-the-rim' assembly.
The 'over-the-rim' assembly feature was also found on the plucked spike lutes of Pharonic Egypt as well as those of the ancient Middle East/Near East, going all the way back, some 6,000 years ago, to the very first documented type of plucked lute, the pantur of Ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia. On the other hand, the 'through-the-body' assembly seen on the Leiden instrument is employed on some full-spike plucked lutes in Nigeria, such as the 3-string calabash-bodied gullum of the Kilba (see photo below) and the 2-string gourd-bodied gurmi of the Hausa.
Detail, the peghead and fingerboard of the Creole Bania. Note the grooves incised into the instrument's fingerboard.
(Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde [National Museum of Ethnology], Leiden, Holland)
Perhaps the most perplexing and troubling thing about the Leiden "Creole Bania" is that it was clearly made to be a display piece rather than a working instrument. The instrument is totally unplayable due to three deep grooves, incised down the length of the fingerboard, which are apparently there to receive and hold in place the instrument's three long strings.
According to Richard and Sally Price in the introduction of their 1992 edition of Stedman's Narrative, this instrument was "collected by Stedman from a slave in Suriname" (Price & Price, 1992: xxv). Yet, as pointed out, the Leiden instrument is clearly meant to be a non-functioning display piece, something a common slave would probably not have in their possession or make, unless s/he was a master craftsman.
One possible explanation for this might be that Stedman specially commissioned an enslaved master woodworker to create the piece. However, there's no evidence to suggest that Stedman ever contracted such a commission.
As the Prices also noted, Stedman used his journal to keep a meticulous record of his daily life in Suriname:
Stedman's log of daily events during his years in Suriname recorded details of his personal life (from dinners with planters to nights spent wenching), military activities, and anecdotes about the natural and social worlds around him....
Faithfully, he kept on-the-spot notes-- sometimes jotted down on cartridges or even on "a Bleached bone" when writing paper was not available (1790/1988, 578; cf. p. 299)-- and then strung them together in a small green notebook... On the final page of his "small green almanack," covering 29 October 1772 to 29 April 1774, he wrote, "This Small Journal is written with the greatest attention, founded on facts allone by Captt. John G. S--n, who Shall explain it more at large one day, if Providance Spares him in life."
This being the case, it stands to reason that if Stedman had, indeed, commissioned the manufacture of the instrument, he would have made note of this in his "small green almanack." Likewise, the Prices-- who have been incredibly exacting and thorough in their very comprehensive research as well as super meticulous in their writing-- would have noted this fact rather than simply saying that it was "collected by Stedman from a slave in Suriname."
To sum up, the instrument in Leiden's Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde is, in no uncertain terms, the oldest extant early banjo. This is regardless of whether or not it is actually the Stedman Creole Bania or the Kuhn Banja, and regardless of whether or not it is an actual playable instrument. Furthermore, we owe the Prices a great debt of gratitude for rediscovering and documenting this wonderful-- if not, intriguingly mysterious-- instrument.
Detail, the gourd body of an ekonting (akonting) made by Jola master ekonting player/maker Esa Jah-Jarju. (Photo by Ulf Jägfors)
Note the remarkable similarity of Jah-Jarju's ekonting to the Creole Bania depicted by Captain John Stedman (1744-1797) in the illustration Plate 69, Musical Instruments of the African Negroes [of Suriname] (see above) from Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, from 1772 to 1777 (London, 1796). Both instruments are full-spike lutes with ovoid-shaped gourd bodies. Likewise, the necks on both lutes rest on indentations in the top rims of their gourd bodies in an 'over-the-rim' assembly.
Jola tradition-bearer Esa Jah-Jarju playing the ekonting (akonting) which he made (see the previous photo above). Gambia, 2002 (Photo by Ulf Jägfors)
The 3-string gullum plucked lute of the Kilba of Nigeria. This non-griot folk/artisan lute has a body made of calabash (Crescentia cujete) rather than gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), which is more typical of non-wooden-bodied West African lutes. Another interesting characteristic of the gullum is that it's full-spike neck employs the 'through-the-body' assembly to extend the full length of the instrument's body to pierce the tail end of the instrument's body. (Collection of Shlomo Pestcoe)
Sounds Like
Click on each passing image for captions and credits. Enjoy!
Back in 1960, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation undertook to make a film, Music of Williamsburg, depicting the various different kinds of music that might have been heard on a single day in 1768 in Williamsburg, the capitol of Virginia from 1699 to 1799. CWF hired seminal folklorist Alan Lomax (1915-2002) to coordinate traditional folk music for the film.
The performers Lomax brought into the film project were some of the foremost tradition-bearers of traditional African American and Appalachian music:
The filming took place in Williamsburg, Virginia, and united a remarkable cast of talented folk musicians representing early Southern music, including the Sea Island singers [Bessie Jones, John Davis, Henry Morrison, Alberta Ramsay, Emma Ramsay]; Bahamian drummer Nat Rahmings, who had come up from Miami; Mississippi hill country fife player Ed Young; Virginia Tidewater jawbone player Prince Ellis; and Virginia mountain multi-instrumentalist Hobart Smith.
After the film was shot, the folk musicians stayed on for what turned out to be a day of extraordinary music-making and musical cross-fertilization.... The Sea Islanders sang with slavery-era accompaniment; the [cane] fife, the one-headed drum, and a replica of the four-string, fretless banjo. Hobart Smith picked the bowl-shaped "slave" banjo with abandon, Ed Young blew thrilling litany phrases on his cane fife, and Nat Rahmings played a drum of a type once used in St. Simons [the second largest of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and the home of the Georgia Sea Island Singers] and still played in the Bahamas. I cannot swear to the authenticity of this reconstructed music, but the musically conservative Sea Island singers gave it their enthusiastic approval.
Interesting to note, the song "Reg'lar, Reg'lar, Rollin' Under" was not from the traditional repertoire of the Sea Islands singers. Apparently, Lomax found the song in the course of his research:
Looking through the literature on African-American folk music for what seemed the oldest published black dance song from Virginia, Lomax found this tune. He taught it to the Sea Island singers and the group who recorded the music for the film about Colonial Williamsburg. It was an immediate hit, and soon they were improvising on as if they had always known it.... The text is enigmatic, except for Bessie Jones' explanation of what it tells us about the slave experience: "The slave didn't want snow water, that is, white folks' water. The slave drinks out of a gourd dipper, whereas the whites ["the snows"] drink from all kinds of receptacles." Thus, here the drinking gourd is a symbol of the ways in which African slaves were able to circumvent, or "roll under" white domination.
The Sea Islander's lead singer Bessie Smith Jones (1902-1984) had a special personal connection to this project: her step-grandfather Jet Sampson, who was born into slavery, had been a slave in Williamsburg. Jet Sampson was the father of her beloved step-father James Sampson-- as Jones put it, "The man I call Poppa." According to Jones, Jet "was the one who mostly brought me up." While she was growing up in rural Georgia, Jones learned about the old slavery times from her step-grandfather. Likewise, Jet had taught her many of the songs and traditions he had grown up with.
The Sampsons were a particularly musical family with a strong banjo tradition:
All the men in the family played the guitar and banjos. They made their own banjos, too....
Poppa [Jones' step-father James Sampson] and them used to make them, great big African banjo we called it. They made them out of wood, and I don't know where they got the string from, but they made them and then they put rattlesnake rattles in them.... It makes a great tone....
--Bessie Jones, For the Ancestors: Autobiographical Memories, Collected and Edited by John Stewart (University of Illinois Press, 1983)
Speaking of banjos, the gourd banjo used here was specially commissioned for this particular project. This may have been the first modern attempt to create an actual reproduction of an early 4-string gourd "slave" banjo.
That said, however, the replica created for the Williamsburg film project had several major inaccuracies and anachronisms in its design, chief among them was the configuration of its strings. Way back in 1960, the common wisdom was that the 4-string banjo evolved into the 5-string banjo in the 1840s by the addition of the short "thumb string" drone. We now know this to be an erroneous misconception. Evidence in the historical record clearly shows that the early banjo's 4-string configuration was 3 long strings and one short "thumb string." The string added that resulted in the latter 5-string banjo was the 4th bass string.
Because the gourd banjo used in the Williamsburg film project was designed and built to reflect the prevalent thinking in 1960, it had 4 long strings of equal length. In this sense the instrument was more like a modern 4-string plectrum banjo than known 4-string early banjos from the 18th century such as the Creole Bania (Suriname, c. 1773-1777) or the instrument depicted in the painting The Old Plantation (South Carolina, c.1790).
This is borne out by photos of Hobart Smith (1897-1965) playing the instrument as he jammed with flute player Ed Young during the impromptu session at Williamsburg at which this recording was made. Smith's left hand fingers a "C" chord with an open 4th string. This clearly indicates that the banjo was tuned in standard "C" tuning (CGBD) with the 4th string tuned to middle "C" as its open note. Standard "C" was the most common tuning for the 5-string banjo (gCGBD) during the instrument's Classic Period (c.1880-1920). In the early 1900s, the banjo's short 5th "thumb string" was removed to create the plectrum banjo, a 4-string version of the standard banjo designed to be played with a flat pick plectrum. The plectrum's neck had the same scale length of the standard 5-string banjo and its four strings were tuned like a standard banjo minus the 5th string (CGBD).
Listening to Smith play the banjo on this recording, we hear him strumming chords. There's no evidence in the historical record to suggest that this was how the early banjo was played.
To be sure, strumming as a playing technique may well have been used in early banjo playing, which, for the most part, was undocumented prior to advent of minstrelsy in the 1830s and '40s. One clue that leads us to this conclusion is the fact that many of those enslaved came from the eastern regions of West Africa, especially modern-day Ghana and Nigeria, which have a variety of traditions of 2-string plucked lutes. Examples include the koloko (also known as the koliko or kologo) of the Frafra of northern Ghana, the konde of the Bissa of Burkina Faso, the garaya and komo of the Hausa. The most common technique for playing these instruments is strumming with a plectrum (flat pick), typically a piece of hardened cowhide. However, in these traditions of strumming the player does not form chords. Rather, the melody is played on the first string while the top second string serves as an open drone.
Still, for all that, the fact remains that the earliest documented banjo playing style was down-picking, a technique in which the melody is played by the fingernail of a single finger (either the index or middle finger) striking a long melody string in downward stroke. This action is immediately followed-up with the thumb providing a syncopated rhythmic "back-beat" accompaniment on the instrument's top string.
Referred to as stroke-style in the first banjo "tutors" (instruction books) of the 1850s and 1860s, down-picking was the technique that European American performers had initially learned from African American banjo players in the early 19th century. It survived in rural folk tradition under a variety of names like clawhammer, frailing, thumping and so on. Parallels can be found in the playing techniques of the various living West African traditions of finger-played plucked lutes with short 'thumb strings', such as the Jola ekonting (also akonting. Casamance [southern Senegal], Gambia, Guinea-Bissau) and Bujogo
nõpata (Guinea-Bissau). Another parallel would be the 3-string guinbri of the Gnawa of Morocco and Algeria, which, like the New World banjo, is also of West African descent and is also down-picked.
Growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Smith learned to down-pick the 5-string banjo from his parents, who both played. He referred to this style as "old-time long rapping." Another major influence on Smith's banjo playing was a local player by the name of John Greer. Greer, in turn, had learned his distinctive "double-noting" form of down-picking from Henry Hays, an African American banjoist from Laurel Fork, VA.
The fact that Smith, a recognized master of traditional banjo down-picking, did not down-pick the Williamsburg 4-string gourd banjo is quite telling. It clearly indicates that he had to radically change his own playing style to make allowance for the instrument's lack of a short "thumb string" drone, crucial to Smith's down-picking technique.
In the Music of Williamsburg, Smith is first heard in the opening sequence as we see stills of some of the various different musical instruments that will be highlighted later on in the film. As the camera focuses on the gourd banjo, hanging from the rafters of a barn, we hear Smith playing a bit of his signature tune, The Banging Breakdown (also known as John Greer's Tune and Buck Dance), on his modern 5-string banjo. The tune features his right thumb and "striking" finger "banging" out a syncopated rhythm on the banjo's head as part of the tune's melody.
When next we see that gourd banjo, it's at a night time slave "frolic" as part of the band playing Reg'lar, Reg'lar, Rolling Under for the dancing. Curiously enough, Smith is actually playing the banjo but doesn't appear in the scene. Rather, the banjo is in the hands of a Black actor. Smith does make an appearance in an earlier scene, wearing a brown periwig and playing Devil's Dream (Smith's name for Brown's Dream) on the fiddle.
For more information, please visit the following sites:
Field recorded by Nick Bamber, Soga Island, the Bijago Islands, Guinea Bissau (West Africa), 8/06.
Here Bujogo (Bijago) tradition-bearer Joaquim Cabritan sings and plays his people's folk lute, the
ñopata.
The Bujogo ñopata is a 3-string gourd-bodied plucked akin to the Jola ekonting (akonting) and Manjak bunchundo. Like the traditional Jola oo'teck technique for playing the ekonting, the Bujogo ñopata is down-picked in a fashion reminiscent of 19th century stroke style, the oldest documented banjo playing technique, and the folk variants of stroke style-- clawhammer, frailing, thumping, etc.
ROUSTABOUT ("BUFFALO")
Dink Roberts (clawhammer 5-string banjo, vocal)
Field recorded by Cece Conway & Scott Odell, 2/21/74, Haw River, Alamance County, North Carolina.
Dink Roberts was a traditional African American banjo player from the Piedmont region of North Carolina, an area that has been a major stronghold of African American fiddle and banjo traditions since the 19th century. When this field recording was made, Dink was close to eighty years old. He had learned this tune from his family when he was 15. It's considered to be "one of the most important showpiece tunes in the Black banjo repertory." (Conway & Odell, liner notes, page 25, Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina & Virginia)
Fiddler Joe Thompson (1918- ) and his late musical partner, banjoist Odell Thompson (1911-1994) represented one of the last traditional African American fiddle and banjo duos. The earliest mention of a banjo and fiddle duo comes down to us from July 1774. In a journal entry, Englishman Nicholas Creswell (1750—1804) described a barbecue and dance party on the banks of the St. Mary's River as being "a great number of young people met together with a Fiddle and Banjo played by two Negroes...."
Joe and Odell were first cousins who came from farming families in northeastern Orange County in the North Carolina Piedmont. Joe's father, John Arch Thompson (1879-1968), was the eldest of three brothers-- the youngest being Odell's father Walter (1882-?)-- who all played fiddle and 5-string banjo. The Thompson brothers were highly-acclaimed musicians, much in demand to play for the social gatherings and dances of both the white and black communities throughout the area.
In the mid-1920s, the next generation of Thompsons began playing local house parties and "frolics" (rural African American dance parties). The principal performers were John Arch's boys-- Joe on fiddle and his older brother Nate (1916-1997) on banjo-- with Walter's son Odell sitting in on either fiddle or guitar.
Throughout the 1920s and '30s, African American frolics in the rural Piedmont featured both square dancing to fiddle and banjo music and "round dancing" (couple dances) to blues finger-picked on the guitar. However, by the late 1940s, the old-time fiddle and banjo music-- as well as the early blues guitar music-- were overshadowed by R&B and the other forms of mainstream contemporary pop.
In the early '70s, Joe and Odell teamed up again to perform the old-time fiddle and banjo music of their youth, which they had learned from their fathers. By the 1980s, the duo had become popular performers on the folk circuit, playing festivals throughout the country and Australia up until Odell's death in 1994. They were recipients of the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award in 1991.
This jaunty little number is from an impromptu little jam that took place after the
2nd Annual Antietam Early Banjo Conference, Pry House, Antietam Battle Field, Sharpsburg, MD, September 14-16, 2007. The tune, Jake Bacchus' Reel is from Buckley's New Banjo Method (1860) by James Buckley (1803-72), the eminent British immigrant banjo player and teacher. (Buckley was one of the first banjoists to advocate playing European classical art music on the instrument.)
It's down-picked in stroke style, the oldest known banjo playing technique. This is the style which the first European American players had learned from African American banjoists in the early 19th century. Stroke style was the prevalent way of the playing the banjo from the 1830s, when the instrument was first introduced on the popular stage, on through the emergence of "guitar style" up-picking (finger-picking) in late 1860s.
Appropriately enough, the banjos here are accompanied by djembe drum. African-style drums were the first documented accompaniment for the earliest forms of the banjo. (For more on this, please read Shlomo Pestcoe's blog on this page: The Early Banjo & African-Style Drums)
Mento is Jamaica's traditional social dance music. It first emerged in the 19th century as a fusion of African, European, and older Jamaican Creole styles and influences. In the Jamaican countryside, a typical mento band would consist of banjo, guitar, mambo and bongo drums, and rumba box (also known as marimba box or
marimbula, a gigantic "thumb piano" that serves as the bass instrument). In many cases, the lead instrument may be a fiddle, cane flute, harmonica, and/or bambasax (bamboo "saxophone").
By the 1930s, the banjo of choice in mento music was the modern, plectrum-played, 4-string tenor banjo. The tenor banjoist heard here, Eddie Brown, was a master virtuoso of the mento style.
Solas Market is an old Jamaican folk song. Reynolds' Calypso Clippers perform it in the rural mento style that was popular in the 1950s. It was first issued as a 78 rpm record, produced by Stanley Motta (1915-1953) on his MRS (Motta's Recording Studio) label, Kingston, Jamaica, between 1951 and 1956. Shortly after its initial release, this number also appeared on a British LP compliation, Authentic Jamaican Calypsos, on the London International label.
For more information on Jamaican mento music, please visit: www.mentomusic.com
LINKS
Ekonting: A Link to the Banjo's West African Heritage. Our sister site on MySpace devoted to the ekonting (akonting)-- the 3-string gourd-bodied folk lute of the Jola, found primarily in Casamance (southern Senegal), Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau-- and other members of the West African plucked luted family. It's chock full of videos and MP3s field recorded in West Africa as well as the latest information on the living akonting tradition. Created and hosted by Shlomo Pestcoe.
The Banjo Sightings Database. An online "banjological" resource center offering free access to an incredible wealth of historic period art, illustrations, and documentation tracing early banjo history from the instrument's beginnings in the Caribbean in the 17th century on through the American Civil War. It's the project of Greg C. Adams and acclaimed early banjo maker/historian George Wunderlich.
The MP3s presented here come from a variety of sources. For more information and credits, please check out our play list in the "Sounds Like" section of the left column of this page. Enjoy!
An African American Instrument of West African Heritage
"This instrument is the invention of, and was brought here by the African Negroes...."
-- John Luffman, A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua (1789)
The story of the banjo begins in the Caribbean in the 17th century. This is when the first documentation appears in the historical record of enslaved Africans and their Afro-Creole descendants making and playing unique plucked spike lutes with drum-like gourd bodies and fretless necks.
We now recognize these instruments as early gourd banjos, the progenitors of the modern banjo family we know today.
That said, the early gourd banjo did not come across the Atlantic from Africa 'as-is' and unadulterated. Rather, it embodied a syncretic synthesis of traditional West African form and design with Western European-inspired innovations and accoutrements resulting in a uniquely African American construct and creation.
West African Roots
The earliest banjos were strikingly similar to the many different traditional plucked spike lutes with gourd or calabash bodies still found throughout West Africa today. This is especially true of those which, like the early Afro-Caribbean plucked spike lutes, have full-spike necks-- that is, the given lute's stick neck extends the full length of its body to either pass over or pierce through the body's tail end. Another feature shared by both the early Afro-Caribbean instruments and West African full-spike plucked lutes is a 'floating' (movable) string bridge that rests on the given instrument's skin 'head' (soundtable).
In terms of extant West African traditional instruments that have all of these features, let's start off with a group of six very similar 3-string gourd-bodied folk lutes. Constituting a unique subgroup within the West African plucked spike lute family, they come from the Upper Guinea Coast region of Greater Senegambia (the eminent West African historian Boubacar Barry's appellation for the historic lands that include present-day Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali, and Mauritania):
The ekonting (akonting) of the Jola (Casamance [southern Senegal], The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau)
The bunchundo of the Manjak (Guinea-Bissau, Gambia, Senegal)
The ñopata of the Bujogo (Bijago Islands [Guinea-Bissau])
The busunde of the Papel (Guinea-Bissau)
The kisinta and kusunde of the Balanta (Guinea-Bissau).
The top third string (the one closest to the player's chest) on these plucked lutes is a short 'open' string. The one exception to this rule is the Balanta kusunde on which the short 'open' string is the first string (the one closest to the player's lap). This feature is also shared in common with some other kinds of West African plucked lutes, especially 3-string griot lutes (e.g. the terharden of the Kel Tamashek [Tuareg]). 4-string and 5-string griot lutes actually have two short 'open' strings: the top string and the first string, which is the shortest of the two.
The top short 'open' string on all these West African plucked lutes is akin to the short 'thumb string' found on the 4-string early gourd banjo (the most commonly documented banjo type from the 1690s on through the 1840s) and its offspring, the 5-string wood-rim banjo, which first appeared in the United States in the early 1840s.
Other examples of West African plucked spike lutes with full-spike necks and floating bridges include:
The 5-string geseré of the Wolof xalamkats (griot lutenists; Senegal), the 5-string xalam geseré of the Mandinka jalolu (singular, jali, griot; The Gambia), and the 4-string kola-lemme of the Diawara geserun (singular, geseré, griot; Mali). Like all other griot lutes, these three instruments are played exclusively by griot specialist musicians, employing the same typical techniques common to all griot lutenists (see below). However, they're extremely rare instruments. While they're strung and played in typical griot fashion, they have features not found on the standard wooden-bodied, semi-spike griot lutes: namely, a round gourd body, a full-spike neck, and a floating bridge that sits on the body's skin head.
The 3-string calabash-bodied gullum of the Kilba (Nigeria)
The 2-string gourd-bodied gurmi
of the Hausa (Nigeria)
The calabash-bodied gurumi of Niger, Nigeria, and Chad, which is either 2-string or 3-string, depending on ethnic tradition.
All of the above instruments are mentioned here only as examples of the type of plucked spike lute currently found in West Africa that must have inspired and informed the creation of the early gourd banjo in the West Indies back in the 17th century.
There are more than 60 different 'living' traditions of plucked spike lutes found throughout West Africa today. While we may recognize similarities and parallels between the early gourd banjo and certain specific kinds of West African plucked spike lute, there's simply not enough concrete information in the historical record to claim that the banjo is specifically descended from any one of these extant instruments.
For more information on the West African family of plucked spike lutes, please visit our sister site: Banjo Roots: West Africa
The Fusion of African & European Elements
As we've shown the early gourd banjo was specifically based on West African models. We see this in its drum-like body (typically made of gourd, but, occasionally, out of calabash), its fretless full-spike neck, and the top short 'thumb string'.
Yet, the early gourd banjo also incorporated several European-derived design features: namely, a flat fingerboard, wooden tuning pegs-- fitted into a distinct peghead-- and string nut (situated at the top of the fingerboard to facilitate the strings passing over to the peghead). The sources of inspiration for the adoption of these elements were, no doubt, the plucked lute/guitar-family instruments of Spain and Portugal that were brought to the New World, beginning in the early 16th century.
The first European plucked lute to be brought to the New World was the vihuela (also biguela [Spanish] and viola or viola da mano [Portuguese, Italian]), a guitar-like instrument with a figure-8-shaped body and twelve strings arranged in six courses (pairs of strings).
The vihuela was documented throughout the Spanish and Portuguese colonies from the early 1500s on. The earliest report of the instrument in the New World is that of a Spanish conquistador playing his vihuela on horseback as part of the expedition that seized the island of Hispaniola in 1503. Nine years later, Alfonso Buenaño brought a vihuela with him to Spain's burgeoning colony of Puerto Rico. Around 1583, the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Fernão Cardim (1549-1625) reported that in Christianized villages in Brazil, Amerindians were being taught to play the viola (vihuela) in Jesuit-run 'singing schools'.
The cavaquinho (also machete and braguinha) of Portugal as well as the related 4-string tiple (literally, "treble;" also called guitarillo) of Spain and the 5-string timple of Spain's Canary Islands also contributed to the birth of the incredible variety of indigenous plucked lute and guitar family instruments found throughout Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean.
Perhaps the earliest report of distinctive lutes played by the slaves is that of Alonso de Sandoval (1577-1652), a Spanish Jesuit who did missionary work amongst the African slaves in Cartagena de Indias. Cartagena, the port city on the Caribbean Sea in the present-day South American country of Colombia, was the hub of the Spanish slave trade in the New World during the early colonial period. In his treatise De instauranda Aethiopum salute ("On Restoring Ethiopian Salvation," Seville, 1627), Sandoval described enslaved West Africans from Greater Senegambia playing “guitars similar to our Spanish-style guitars, although [the instruments' tops] are made of rough sheepskin…”
Sandoval's description seems to indicate that the instruments he had observed were plucked spike lutes with drum-like bodies topped with soundtables made of sheepskin. Unfortunately, he didn't give us enough information to determine whether these lutes were early gourd banjos or unadulterated West African spike lutes.
De instauranda Aethiopum salute also provides us with the first appearance of the term banza, which would eventually become the most common appellation for the early gourd banjo in the French and Spanish colonies. In his 1627 treatise, Sandoval uses the term to describe a string instrument played by slaves from the Central African land of Angola:
[The Angolans] have naturally happy hearts and play little guitars called banzas, played by placing the head of the guitar on the breast in a very delicate and graceful way.
Here Sandoval seems to have used the word "guitar" as a broad generic designation for a plucked string instrument, rather than a plucked lute. An indication of this is Sandoval's description of the banza being played "by placing the head of the guitar on the breast." This sounds more in keeping the techniques used to play some ethnic types of pluriarc (also referred to as a bow-lute, basically an instrument comprised of several single-string musical bows mounted in one resonator), such as that of the 3-string pluriarc of the Fan of Gabon. Early European travelers frequently referred to pluriarcs, harp-lutes (bridge-harps) and other plucked string instruments as 'guitars' when they had no other common points of reference to describe these strange instruments. More to the point, there's no evidence in either the historical record or extant folklore to suggest that there were ever traditions of plucked lutes anywhere in Central Africa: string instruments, yes; plucked lutes, no!
The earliest contemporary report of the early gourd banjo can be traced back to Jamaica in 1687. In September of that year, visiting English physician/naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) observed: “The Negroes… will at nights, or on Feast days Dance and Sing;… They have several sorts of Instruments in imitation of Lutes, made of small Gourds fitted with Necks, strung with Horse hairs, or the peeled stalks of climbing Plants or Withs” (Sloane 1707: Volume I, page xlviii). In A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christopher and Jamaica (London, 1707), Sloane published the first depiction of early gourd banjos, two gourd-bodied plucked lutes which he designated as Strum-strumps (see above). In the illustration, both 'Strum-strumps' are missing their string bridges and are strung with two strings. However, each instrument has two holes on the upper portion of the fingerboard, perhaps to receive two additional pegs for strings.
What follows is a sampling of various different names for the early gourd banjo that appear in the historical record:
Strum-strump (Jamaica, 1687)
Bangil (Barbados, 1708; Jamaica, 1739)
Banger (New York City, 1736, the earliest report of the banjo in North America)
Strum-strum (Jamaica, 1740)
Bonja (Maryland, 1748)
Bangio (South Carolina, 1749)
Banjo (Pennsylvania, 1749; Maryland and Virginia, 1774; North Carolina, 1787)
Though they differed in what they were called, these plucked spike lutes all shared certain structural characteristics:
A drum-like gourd body (either round, oval, or teardrop-shaped) topped with a skin head (soundtable).
It should be pointed out that there were instances when the given instrument's body was made from calabash
(Crescentia cujete) rather than the more typical gourd
(Lagenaria siceraria). Case in point would be Stedman's Creole Bania (Suriname, c. 1773-1777), the world's oldest extant banjo (see the 'Influences' section in the left hand column of this page).
Wood-rim banjos-- that is, banjos with a 'pot' (body) made from thin wooden staves bent to form a hoop, sometimes made out of cheese boxes and grain measures-- were first documented in the United States in the early 1840s.
A full-spike neck which ran under the head for the length of the gourd body to transcend over or pierce its tail end.
The playing surface of the neck was a smooth flat fingerboard without frets.
The tuning mechanisms to which the instrument's strings were affixed were usually wooden pegs.
This is in sharp contrast to the New World banjo's West African ancestors. On West African lute-family string instruments-- such as plucked spike lutes and harp-lutes (bridge-harps)-- the given instrument's strings are tied to sliding tuning rings (made of either leather, cloth, or knotted cord) that are slid into place on the instrument's neck and held there by friction. On most of the many different single-string bowed spike lutes [fiddles] found throughout West Africa, the string may be affixed to the neck by means of a loop, but it's tuned by inserting a wedge underneath the lower end of the string.
The early banjo's wooden tuning pegs reflect the influence of European lute-family string instruments, in particular those of Portugal and Spain.
A floating (movable) string bridge—typically, bipedal-- which sat upright on the body’s skin head.
The Stedman Creole Bania. Suriname, South America, c.1773-1777. (Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde [National Museum of Ethnology], Leiden, Holland)
The Early 4-String Gourd Banjo
From the 1690s on through the emergence of the wood-rim 5-string banjo in the early 1840s, the most commonly documented form of the early gourd banjo throughout the New World was an instrument with a 4-string configuration: three long strings of equal length with a short ‘thumb string’ as the top fourth string. While there were a few reports of early gourd banjos with three strings, most period descriptions refer to 4-string instruments.
The earliest report of the 4-string early gourd banjo in the Antilles
actually comes down to us from 1698. Jean Baptiste Labat (1663-1738), a French Dominican monk who served as a missionary in France's Caribbean colonies from 1694 to 1709, noted in his journal that the slaves played a 4-string "espece de guitarre" ("kind of guitar") with a body made from half a calabash topped with a piece of animal skin. An entry by the mysterious 'le Romain' in the 1765 edition of the Encyclopédie identified these 4-string "guitars" of the slaves by using the term banza, marking the first time this word appeared in print as a designation for the early gourd banjo.
We find all the aforementioned common design elements present in the only known extant 4-string early banjos: the Stedman Creole Bania (see above photo; for more information, see the Influences section of the left hand column on this page) and the Schoelcher Banza (see the photo below). The Creole Bania-- considered to be the oldest example of an early banjo and the only one known to have had a body made of calabash, rather than gourd -- was collected in the northeastern South American country Suriname (also formerly known as Dutch Guiana) by Captain John Gabriel Stedman (1744-1797), sometime between 1773 and 1777. French abolitionist writer Victor Schoelcher (1804-1893) acquired the Banza in Haiti during his 1840-41 sojourn through the Caribbean. Likewise, these features are evident in the instrument depicted in the The Old Plantation (anonymous folk painting, South Carolina, c.1780-1790), the oldest and most detailed depiction of an early 4-string gourd banjo in North America (see illustration above).
The short 'thumb string', in particular, is a feature that connects the banjo to its West African heritage. It's also found on West African plucked spike lutes like the Jola ekonting (akonting), the Bujogo ñopata, and the Manjak bunchundo as well as those lutes that are exclusive to specialist griot music artisans, such as the Bamana (Bambara)/ Maninka n'goni, the Wolof xalam (also khalam, pronounced "cha'lahm"), the Fulbe hoddu, and the Soninke gambaré, to name but a few.
The Schoelcher Banza. Haiti, c. 1840-1841.
(Musée de la Musique,
Cité de la Musique, Paris, France)
The Early Gourd Banjo in North America
Looking over the various accounts of the early gourd banjo in the historical record, we can see that during the 18th century it had spread from the Caribbean to the Dutch colony of Suriname in northeastern South America and to the British colonies in North America that would eventually become the United States.
To the best of our research, the earliest evidence of the early gourd banjo in North America comes from New York City in 1736. On March 7th of that year, a piece in John Peter Zenger's New-York Weekly Journal described Africans and African Americans dancing to the music of the banger-- as well as African-style drums and small wicker-basket rattles-- during a Pinkster celebration in the fields just outside of the city limits of New York in southern Manhattan. Twelve years later, a runaway slave advertisement in the Annapolis Maryland Gazette for "a Negro Fellow called Toby" stated that Toby took with him when he ran "a new fiddle" and a "a Bonja, on both which he at times plays."
By the turn of the 19th century, the instrument had also made it to the southernmost section of the French and Spanish colony of Lower Louisiana, what is today the state of Louisiana. In 1819, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820)-- the celebrated architect who designed the White House and Capitol building in Washington, D.C.-- was visiting New Orleans. On a Sunday he happened on the regular weekly "assembly of Negroes" in New Orleans' Common, known to posterity as Congo Square:
Approaching the common I heard a most extraordinary noise.... I found... a crowd of 5 or 600 persons assembled in an open or public square.... They were formed into circular groups in the midst of four of which... was a ring, the largest not 10 feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands, & set to each other in a miserably dull & slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument... which no doubt was imported from Africa. On the top of the finger board was the rude figure of a Man in a sitting posture, and two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a Calabash. It was played upon by a very old man, apparently 80 or 90 Years old.
In Latrobe's description of the "stringed instrument... which no doubt was imported from Africa" he had observed, Latrobe specified that "on the top of the finger board was the rude figure of a Man in a sitting posture, and two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened." This would seem to imply that it was a 2-string instrument. However, in Latrobe's sketch of the lute, on the same journal page as the excerpt quoted above, he clearly shows the instrument as having three long strings of equal length. This is the first and only depiction of such a string configuration on an early gourd banjo.
Banjo Evolution
From the Gourd-Bodied 4-String Banjo to the Wood-Rim 5-String Banjo
Up until the early 19th century, the early gourd banjo had been an African American folk instrument, made and played exclusively by black vernacular musicians. This began to change in the 1830s when white popular stage and circus performers in the United States began to adopt the 4-string gourd banjo and the stroke style down-picking playing technique, learned from African American banjoists. As they typically donned blackface makeup in crude parody of their 'Ethiopian' sources, these European American performers became known as blackface minstrels.
The 1840s marked a major watershed in the evolution of the banjo. In the first years of the decade, the 4-string gourd-bodied instrument gave way to a new form, the 5-string banjo.
While the fingerboard on the banjo's neck remained fretless, its original 4-string configuration (one short 'thumb string' + three long strings) was modified by the inclusion of an additional long string, the fourth bass string. The gourd body was replaced with a 'pot' (body) made from a round thin wood rim.
Joe Sweeney (born Joel Walker Sweeney, c. 1810-1860)-- who in 1836 became the earliest documented professional banjo performer on the popular stage-- is thought to have introduced and popularized the new 5-string banjo around 1840. And it was the 5-string banjo that was thrust unto the world stage on February 6, 1843 with the first public performance of The Virginia Minstrels at New York City's famed Bowery Amphitheatre.
The Virginia Minstrels' debut marked the transition of blackface minstrelsy from being relegated to minor side acts in traveling circuses to commanding top billing in popular theaters as troupes performing full-blown variety shows. It also established the combination of fiddle, 5-string banjo, tambourine, and bones (clappers) as the standard instrumentation of the 'minstrel line'.
In May of 1843, the troupe arrived in England to debut their unique minstrel show format at London's prestigious Adelphi Theatre on June 19. A year earlier, Sweeney had introduced the minstrel-style banjo to audiences throughout England. He would later team up with the Virginia Minstrels for their limited tour of Scotland.
These premiere performances in the UK by Sweeney and the Virginia Minstrels heralded the arrival of minstrelsy as America's first homegrown 'pop' music export and the first one to spark a world-wide craze. As a result, the banjo was embraced overseas and became a world-class instrument. This was especially true in Britain, where the banjo became a central fixture of early British pop from the 1840s on through the early 20th century.
An anonymous folk painting from the early 19th century depicting a gourd banjo player accompanying a jig dancer. (Collection of Roddy & Sally Moore)
The banjo player seen here is clearly down-picking, the oldest documented technique for playing the banjo.
Another interesting thing to note here is the fact that the dancer is depicted as dancing on a board called a 'shingle'. Thomas F. DeVoe, in The Market Book: A History of the Public Markets of the City of New York (1862), described slaves from Long Island using 'shingles' when they danced in Lower Manhattan at Catherine Market on Catherine Slip, prior to the abolition of slavery in New York State in 1827: "Being several together in parties, each had his particular 'shingle' brought with him as part of his stock and trade. This board was usually about five or six feet long, of large width, with its particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end."
Down-Picking The Banjo: A West African Legacy
The banjo's West African heritage is also evident in the traditional playing techniques that have come down to us from the instrument's early days. This is especially true of down-picking, the earliest documented banjo playing style.
Down-picking is the playing technique that the first European American banjo players initially learned from African American musicians in the early 19th century. Referred to as
stroke style, it was the most prevalent form of playing the 5-string banjo until the advent of the guitar style of up-picking in the late 1860s. (In some period banjo literature, up-picking was also called finger-picking, the term we use nowadays.) Nineteenth century 'stroke style' was 'folk-processed' and survives to this very day in the folk down-picking traditions of both the black and white communities of the rural South, where it's commonly referred to as frailing, clawhammer, thumping, and so on.
In down-picking (also referred to as down-stroking), the melody is played by the fingernail of a single finger (either the index or middle finger) striking one of the given instrument's long strings in a downward motion, like a plectrum. The 'down-picked' string is a melody string that's noted by the fingers of the player's other hand 'stopping' the string at various points along its length to produce different notes. This action is immediately followed by the player's thumb catching on the top short 'thumb string' to create a rhythmic back-beat accompaniment. In some forms of down-picking, the thumb also comes down to pluck one of the longer strings in a technique Pete Seeger dubbed drop-thumbing.
Gambian Jola folklorist/musician Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta playing his people's folk lute, the ekonting (akonting), Stockholm, Sweden, 1999. Behind him is a print of The Banjo Player (1856) by America's first noted genre painter
William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) of Setauket, Long Island (New York). Here we can see that both Daniel and the banjo player depicted in the painting are down-picking their instruments. Daniel is using oo'teck, the traditional Jola technique for playing the ekonting, while the banjo player employs stroke style, the earliest documented form of playing the 5-string banjo. For a comparative analysis of these two forms of down-picking, please check out Greg C. Adams' blog: Starting A Conversation-- Early Banjo & West African Ekonting Playing Techniques. (Photo by Ulf Jägfors)
The latest findings of recent field research indicate that the down-picking playing technique probably originated in West Africa. It's the primary playing style for several West African plucked lutes such as the Jola ekonting (also akonting. Casamance [southern Senegal], The Gambia, Burkina Faso), the Bujogo ñopata (Guinea-Bissau), and the Dogon konou (Mali). In Senegal and The Gambia, some Wolof griot lute players, known as xalamkats, also use down-picking in place of or in addition to the standard griot 2-finger up-picking technique for playing their xalam lutes. Likewise, single-string griot lutes (e.g. the Mande/Tukulor molo, the Songhai jurkel [Burkina Faso] and n'jurkel [Mali]) are generally down-picked.
Down-picking is also used to play the
guinbri (also known as the sintir or hajhuj), the 3-string plucked lute of the Gnawa of North Africa, primarily Morocco and Algeria. The Gnawa are a North African Muslim brotherhood-- as well as a distinct ethnic group with its own language-- made up of descendants of slaves and soldiers brought across the Sahara from West Africa. Tradition has it that the guinbri-- the principal instrument in Gnawa music-- is West African in origin. Similarly, descendants of the Sudan Tunis (West African slaves and mercenaries brought across the Sahara to Tunisia) also play a 3-string plucked lute of West African heritage called the gombri. It's distinguished by having a very large round cylindrical body literally made from an old drum. Like the Gnawa guinbri, the gombri is down-picked.
A Wolof griot xalamkat (literally, 'lute player'). Dakar, Senegal, c.1905.
(Collection of Shlomo Pestcoe)
2-Finger Up-Picking: Another West African-Rooted Banjo Technique
Up-picking (more commonly referred to as finger-picking) is any technique in which the fingers of the playing hand pluck upwards. The thumb is the one exception to this rule as it invariably plucks in downward motion.
(Note: In some up-picking styles, one or all the playing fingers may also brush down all the strings in a downward strum as an immediate follow-up to the up-picking action. This downward brushing strum should not be confused with down-picking, the very different technique described above.)
In the context of 5-string banjo playing, there are distinct traditions of 2-finger (thumb and index finger) and 3-finger (thumb, index, and middle finger) up-picking. Originally referred to as 'guitar-style', 3-finger up-picking eventually supplanted 'stroke-style' down-picking as the most prevalent technique for playing the 5-string banjo from the late 1860s on. With the emergence of the 5-string banjo's Classic Era (c. 1880 -1920) and the classical music-oriented 'artistic' or 'concert' banjo style, 3-finger up-picking predominated among banjo players the world over.
Sometimes maligned as a 'bastardization' of its more illustrious 3-finger sibling, 2-finger banjo up-picking is actually a traditional folk technique. Since at least the late 19th century, it has been found primarily in the rural South in a diversity of distinctive regional traditions and idiosyncratic approaches, the same as 3-finger up-picking and down-picking.
Across the Atlantic ocean in West Africa, 2-finger up-picking, in various forms, is perhaps the most common technique for finger-playing plucked lutes. Examples of different ethnic traditions that employ 2-finger up-picking include the 3-string gourd-bodied bunchundo of the Manjak (Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Gambia); the 2-string calabash-bodied gurumi of the Toubou (Niger); and the 2-string gourd-bodied gurmi
and the 3-string wooden-bodied molo (also tafashe) of the Hausa (Nigeria).
2-finger up-picking is also the principal technique for playing griot lutes, a unique subgroup within the West African lute family. Exclusive to specialist griot musicians, examples include the Bamana (Bambara) ngoni, the Wolof xalam, the Fulbe hoddu, and the Soninke gambare, among others.
It's important to note that in the context of griot 2-finger up-picking this technique is primarily used on instruments with three or more strings. The most typical string configurations on griot lutes are 3-string (two long stopped melody strings and a short open drone string), 4-string (two long melody strings and two short drone strings-- the top fourth 'thumb string' and the first string [closest to the player's lap], which is the shortest of the two), and 5-string (the same as the 4-string configuration but with the addition of an additional unstopped long drone as its second string). There are also single-string variants, on the one hand, an versions with seven or more strings (typically, variations on the 4-string and 5-string configurations that incorporate the doubling up of the principal strings in courses [pairs]), on the other. Single-string griot lutes like the Mande and Tukulor molo and the Songhai jurkel are usually down-picked.
The standard griot approach to 2-finger up-picking is the index finger leading off by plucking upwards on a long melody string, immediately followed by the thumb catching the top string. The index finger usually completes this sequence by brushing up-and-down the strings in a flicking motion. As griot lute players are specialist music artisans by definition, naturally, each musician adapts and enhances the basic standard picking pattern with variations and flourishes to create his own 'signature' style. Typical griot 'tricks-of-the-trade' include percussively tapping the instrument's skin 'head' to punctuate musical phrases and augmenting the fundamental thumb and index finger picking pattern with the third finger brought in on occasion to pluck the first string. Sometimes down-picking is also incorporated into the standard 2-finger up-picking pattern. Typically, it's used intermittently to emphasize certain melodic passages.
Non-griot styles of 2-finger up-picking are pretty much similar to the basic griot approach described. In all likelihood, the popular West African 2-finger up-picking palmwine style of playing the guitar-- first introduced in the early 1900s, disseminated by Kru sailors from Liberia up-and-down the West African coast-- was inspired and informed by these traditional lute techniques. This is suggested by the fact that in Nigeria the immediate forebear of the later guitar-based pop forms of palmwine, juju and highlife music was sakara, an Yoruba urban pop style of the early 20th century, founded on traditional instrumentation, with the 3-string wooden-bodied duru (sometimes referred to by the term molo, the appellation of the similar Hausa plucked lute) as the lead instrument. Like the Hausa molo, the Yoruba duru is also played by 2-finger up-picking.
The striking similarities between traditional West African 2-finger up-picking styles and those found in American old-time 5-string banjo traditions-- especially those 2-finger up-picking styles with an index finger lead-- indicate a strong connection. Evidence in the historical record suggests that early African American banjoists were employing 2-finger up-picking as well as the more prevalent down-picking technique that the first European American banjo players picked up from them in the 1830s and '40s and popularized as 'stroke style'.
Frank Converse (1837-1903)-- a leading early 5-string banjoist whose New & Complete Method for the Banjo With or Without a Master (1865) heralded the transition from 'stroke style' down-picking to 'guitar-style' 3-finger up-picking-- offers us a tantalizing eyewitness account of African American 2-finger banjo up-picking prior to 1850. As a boy growing up in the Upstate New York town of Elmira, Converse's first exposure to the banjo was provided by an itinerant black banjoist who frequently 'busked' on Elmira's streets. As Converse later recalled, the street performer's playing technique was "limited to the thumb and first finger-- pulling or 'picking' the strings with both." 'Pulling' was Converse's term for up-picking. Clearly what he was describing was 2-finger up-picking.
At the turn of the 20th century, as the guitar was making inroads into African American communities throughout the South, the various local 2-finger up-picking styles used to play the 5-string banjo were most likely transferred to the new instrument. This may account for the prevalence of 2-finger up-picking among African American ragtime and blues guitarists from the early 1900s on.
Banjo Roots: Banjo Beginnings's Friend Space (Top 40)
Looking forward to seeing you at Uncle Dave Macon Days, July 10-12, 2009 in Murfreesboro, TN. 2009 Heritage Award Winner -- Bill and Janice Birchfield of The Roan Mountain Hilltoppers and 2009 Trail Blazer Award Winner -- Old Time Buckdancer, Thomas Maupin. www.uncledavemacondays.com
Thanks a million Banjo Roots for joining our ministry of Blues. It's all about peace, love, understanding, and GROOVE! Hope to perform for you sometime. Thanks for keeping our history alive. Wishing you the very best in Blues and life! -Big Daddy
Online Now!
