The banjo was born in the Caribbean in the 1600s, originally created by enslaved Africans and their descendants. The first banjos were gourd-bodied instruments that were strikingly similar to the various different traditional plucked lutes with gourd or calabash bodies still found throughout West Africa today.
In recent years, banjo roots research-- that is, research into the banjo's early history, with a focus on its Afro-Caribbean origins and West African heritage -- has blossomed into a major field of study. It combines seeking out and studying related/parallel "living" music and musical instrument traditions with investigations of the historical record. In addition to classic "desk research," banjo roots researchers also engage in field research-- at present, primarily in West Africa, the wellspring of the banjo's African ancestry.
This site is part of the Banjo Roots Network, a projected series of related sites on MySpace that will explore the many different aspects of the history of the banjo family of plucked lutes as well as serve as a platform for public outreach and education through which we can share the latest findings of recent banjo roots research. The Banjo Roots Network is a 'work-in-progress' being created and hosted by Shlomo Pestcoe and Greg C. Adams. Our hope is that it will serve as a springboard for dialogue and collaboration between researchers within the banjo community as well as scholars working in different, but related disciplines.
Field recorded by Nick Bamber, Dakar, Senegal (West Africa), 07/06.
Paul Diatta (Jatta) is a young Jola musician originally from the village of Youtou in Casamance (southern Senegal), the heartland of traditional Jola culture. Paul accompanies his own singing by playing his people's folk lute, the ekonting (akonting). It's a banjo-like instrument with a skin-headed gourd body, two long strings and one top short string, similar to the short "thumb string" on the 5-string banjo and its antecedent, the 4-string early gourd banjo.
The Jola ekonting (pronounced 'eh-kon-ting'; plural, si'konting, pronounced 'see-kon-ting') is a member of the Upper Guinea Coast family of gourd lutes, a sub-group of the West African lute family. It's akin to the bunchundo of the related Manjak (also Manjago, Manjaku, Manjaco and Manjaca), found primarily in Guinea-Bissau, Gambia, and Senegal, as well as the busunde of the Pepel, the kisinta and kusunde of the Balanta, and ñopata of the Bujogo (also Bijago), all of which are from Guinea-Bissau.
Like the Bujogo ñopata, the ekonting 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.. Comparing the down-picking styles of these two West African lutes, the Jola oo'teck technique for playing the ekonting is actually the one closest to the 19th century 'stroke style' of the 5-string banjo. This is due to its incorporation of 'drop-thumbing', a technique in which the thumb alternates between the top short 'thumb string' and one of the long strings. Furthermore, in Jola ekonting music, the short 3rd 'thumb string' is used to produce an integral melody note in addition to providing a rhythmic back-beat-- as opposed to simply offering a constant rhythmic drone, which is the typical role of a short unstopped string in many styles. Remarkably enough, the banjo's short 5th 'thumb string' in the 'stroke style' was used in the exact same way as the ekonting's top 3rd string.
Moriba Koita of Koulikoro, Mali comes from a venerable griot family who, for generations, have specialized in the n'goni, the 4-string plucked lute exclusive to Maninka and Bamana griots. He employs the 2-finger up-picking technique which is pretty much standard to most griot lute players. As a specialist music artisan and a true artist, Moriba has his own distinctive style as evidenced by his extensive use of tasty variations and ornaments. Griot 2-finger up-picking-- as well as other 2-finger up-picking styles employed in playing various different ethnic non-griot artisan and folk lutes throughtout West Africa-- are strikingly similar to traditional regional American styles of 2-finger up-picking the 5-string banjo.
BUJOGO ÑOPATA SONG
Joaquim Cabritan (ñopata plucked lute, vocal)
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 nõpata 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.
Influences
BTW 1: WHAT THE FRAK IS A 'LUTE'?!?
Simply put, a lute is a string instrument that has a distinct neck (string bearer) emerging from a resonating body. The neck and body must be integral components that cannot be separated without destroying the instrument and the instrument's strings must run parallel with its body's top (soundtable).
Lutes are classified by the way their strings are sounded as either:
Plucked Lutes: Sounded by plucking the instrument's strings, either by the player's fingers or by means of a plectrum (flat pick).
Bowed Lutes: Sounded by drawing a bow across the instrument's strings. Bowed lutes are more commonly referred to by the organological term fiddle.
Of the two, plucked lutes are the oldest, the earliest evidence of this type of instrument dating back 6000 years ago to Ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia. Conversely, the idea of using a bow to play a lute is traced back to Central Asia sometime during or just before the 9th century of the Common Era.
The principal means of producing various notes on both plucked lutes and bowed lutes is by 'stopping' one or more of its 'melody' strings. On most types of lutes 'stopping' is usually achieved by depressing the given string at different places along its length with the fingers of one of the player's hands (typically, the right hand -- though some players use the left one).
Another technique for 'stopping' strings on some plucked lutes is by sliding a piece of wood, glass, or metal along the given string's surface, as in the various styles of slide guitar. On several types of bowed lutes the world over, the given fiddle's main melody strings are 'stopped' by touching the string's side with the surface of the fingernails. Examples include: the Cretan lyra and the many different regional forms of the sarangi found throughout India, Pakistan, and Nepal.
In addition to having one or more 'melody' strings that are 'stopped', a lute may also have one or more 'open' strings. An 'open' string is one which is not 'stopped' and that only produces the given note that the string is tuned to. On some lute family instruments, an 'open' string serves the function of being a 'drone'; that is, a specific single note that is sounded constantly as accompaniment to the melody or intermittently for rhythmic effect and punctuation.
When an 'open' string is not sounded directly but, rather, by the vibrations of another string, it's called a sympathetic string. Sympathetic strings are found on certain types of plucked lutes (e.g. the Indian sitar, the Bengali dotara, and the Afghani rabab) and bowed lutes (e.g. the sarangi of India, Pakistan, and Nepal and the hardingfele [hardanger fiddle] of Norway).
BTW 2: WHAT THE FRAK IS 'ETHNO-ORGANOLOGY'?!?
It is useless today, especially with the proliferation of ‘World Musics’, to study the history of the instruments of ‘our culture’ in isolation. Humanity is worldwide and, with few exceptions, each people has influenced, and has been influenced by other peoples. So it is with instruments. ‘The proper study of mankind is man’ (Alexander Pope lived before it was improper to express such sentiments in such terms) – so too of musical instruments.
Ethno-organology may be defined as "the study of musical instruments in culture." Czech musicologist Alexander Buchner (1911-2000) in Encyclopédie des instruments de musique (1980), reflecting the Eastern European perspective, offered a more narrow definition of the term: "The scientific study of folk instruments."
The discipline first emerged in Europe in the early 1960s as a fusion of ethnomusicology (the scientific study of music in the context of culture, what the leading ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam [1923-1980] termed "the anthropology of music") and organology (the scientific study of the historical development, classification, technology, and use of musical instruments). In practice, it incorporates both ethnomusicological and organological concepts and methods to research historical and contemporary musical instruments found the world over, with a focus on comparative, cross-cultural, multidisciplinary analysis.
Lutenists playing plucked lutes. Mesopotamia, 3rd millennium BCE (Iran National Museum)
The historical record places the origins of the plucked lute some 6000 years ago in Ancient Mesopotamia, the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the southeastern region of present-day Iraq. Clay cylinder seals, figurines and other artifacts depicting the lute appear in the archaeological records of the various subsequent ancient Mesopotamian and Near Eastern civilizations. These include the Sumerians (c.5300-1940 Before the Common Era [BCE]), the Akkadians (c. 2370–2110 BCE), the Babylonians (c.1900-514 BCE), and the Hittites (c.1600-717 BCE).
The earliest known depiction of a plucked lute is a Sumerian cylinder seal showing the instrument being played by a female lutenist
(BM WA 1996-10-2-1, The British Museum). It's dated to be from Ancient Sumer's Uruk Period (c. 4000-3100 BCE). Ancient Sumer also provides us with the first documented term for the plucked lute, pantur (literally, 'little bow'). Centuries later, the ancient Greeks would dub the instrument pandoura and, after them, the Romans would call it pandura.
This bronze figurine of a nude female lutenist is thought to depict a Canaanite sacred prostitute. Joachim Braun proposed in Music in Ancient Israel/ Palestine: Archaeological, Written, and Comparative Sources (2002) that this figurine suggests "that these Canaanite prostitutes adopted the lute as their own, changing what was earlier an instrument reserved for men in the Babylonian culture into one for women."
From Mesopotamia, the pantur had traveled west to Syria and, from there, south to Canaan during the Bronze Age (c. 3200-1200 BCE). Throughout these regions are found depictions of musicians playing lutes similar to those found in Mesopotamia and Anatolia (Asia Minor, present-day Turkey), the homeland of the Hittites, for whom the plucked lute was an important instrument in their musical culture.
Ancient Near/Middle Eastern Lutes: Organology
There are no extant examples of ancient plucked lutes from Mesopotamia and the Near/Middle East nor are there any period descriptions of their physiologies. Still, we can surmise from period depictions that these instruments were what are categorized in the Hornbostel-Sachs system of musical instrument classification as spike lutes.
As specified in Hornbostel-Sachs (H-S), the defining characteristic of a spike lute is that it's "handle [neck] passes diametrically through the resonator [body]." While the necks on these ancient lutes certainly pass through the circumference of their bodies, period depictions indicate that they didn't go 'diametrically' through the wall of the given instrument's body. Rather, the instrument's neck, resting on an indention in the body's upper rim, passed over its outer wall.
This fundamental feature is found on extant examples of ancient Egyptian lutes, which were directly descended from the ancient plucked lutes from Mesopotamia and the Near/Middle East. Likewise, it's found on traditional Amazigh (Berber) plucked lutes that predate the Arab conquest of North Africa (c. 647-709 CE)-- such as the loutar and the lotar of Morocco-- as well as on many of the various different types of traditional spike lutes found throughout West Africa.
Another key feature shared by all these disparate spike lutes is a drum-like body with a soundtable (top) made of animal skin. In ancient depictions of plucked lutes in the Near East, Middle East, and Egypt, we can clearly discern the skin 'head' (soundtable) and that it was propped up by the lower part of instrument's stick neck that extended through the circumference of its body. The neck's lower part was inserted through a series of slits in the skin 'head' in an 'over-under' lattice fashion.
Lutenists playing the two principal forms of plucked lute in Ancient Egypt: one with a narrow, oblong, wooden body (left) and the other with a round body made from the shell of a tortoise (center). As depicted here, ancient Egyptian lutes typically had a plectrum (flat pick) tied to the instrument's body with a long tether. This was probably done so that the player could easily switch, back and forth, between plectrum-playing (the center lutenist) and finger-playing (the left lutenist). The Tomb of Nebamun, Thebes, 18th Dynasty (c.1540-1307 BCE). (British Museum)
The Lutes of Ancient Egypt
The plucked lute is thought to have been introduced into Ancient Egypt sometime in the late Second Intermediate Period (1640-1540 BCE) when the Heka-Khaswt (literally, ‘Rulers from Foreign Lands’) dominated the country. Known to history by the Greek reference Hyksos, these were, in fact, various nomadic Semitic tribes from Ancient Canaan (present-day Israel/Palestine) and Syria who began to settle Egypt's eastern Delta region in great numbers in the latter half of the 13th Dynasty (1783-1643 BCE).
Around 1540 BCE, Pharaoh Ahmose I expelled the Heka-Khaswt and established the 18th Dynasty (c.1540-1307 BCE). This heralded Pharonic Egypt’s ‘Golden Age’, a period of 500 years referred to as the New Kingdom or Egyptian Empire (1570-1070 BCE). And it’s in the 18th Dynasty that we first being to see the plucked lute in Ancient Egypt’s archaeological record.
At some point, Egypt's neighbors, the eastern Amazigh (Berber) tribes of Libya-- whom the Egyptians called Libu (also Lebu and Mashwash)-- adopted and adapted the ancient Egyptian plucked lute. The Libu, in turn, transmitted the plucked lute concept westward to the other Amazigh peoples throughout North Africa. Since antiquity, the various different Amazigh peoples were the majority population of Tamazgha-- North Africa west of Egypt, more commonly referred to nowadays by the Arabic term Maghreb.
Looking at the various traditional plucked lutes of Morocco, we can see very evident kinship between those of clear Amazigh origin-- namely, the pear-shaped loutar (also guimbri, gnbri) and the round-bodied lotar-- and those of Ancient Egypt, especially Late Period Egyptian lutes (664-323 BCE) which had pear-shaped bodies.
The connection to the ancient Egyptian lutes is even more apparent in the teharden of the Kel Tamashek (Tuareg)-- an Amazigh pastoralist people of North Africa and West Africa which originated in southern Libya-- and the tidinit of the Mauri (Maures, Moors) of Mauritania.
In the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, various Amazigh tribes first started migrating southwards to what's now Mauritania in northern West Africa. The Mauri (Maures, Moors), the dominant ethnic group in present-day Mauritania, are a mix of the descendants of the original Amazigh groups, other Amazigh tribes that followed in the 6th and 7th centuries fleeing Arab incursions into North Africa, and Yemeni Maqil Arabs (the Beni Hassan tribe in particular), who eventually achieved total hegemony over Mauritania in 1674.
The other major Amazigh group to move across the Sahara into West Africa were the Kel Tamashek, better know by the name Tuareg. The Kel Tamashek originated in the Fezzan region of southwestern Libya. They are descended from the Garamantes, an ancient Libyan Amazigh people who built a mighty empire (c. 500 BCE – 500 CE), centered around their capitol Garama (Germa) in Fezzan. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484 - 425 BCE) mentions them and they were trading partners with the Romans.
Starting in the 7th century CE, Arab incursions into Libya forced the various pastoralist Amazigh tribes in Fezzan to move further south, deeper into the Sahara. Two of those tribes, the Lemta and the Zarawa, together with other Amazigh groups, coalesced to form the Kel Tamashek. Eventually, groups of Kel Tamashek crossed the Sahara into West Africa, shifting their base of operations to the northern desert regions of what’s now Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The fabled city of Timbuktu in Mali began life around 1100 CE as a Kel Tamashek way station for their camel caravans traveling back and forth across the Sahara.
No later than the 3rd century BCE, nomadic Amazigh tribes began a gradual switch from a horse and oxen-based transportation system to a camel-based one. By their masterful use of Dromedary camels-- the "ships of the desert"-- one Amazigh group in particular, the Kel Tamashek (Tuareg), dominated the trans-Saharan trade routes between North Africa and West Africa for centuries, right up to the early 20th century.
Scholars agree that Islam was introduced into West Africa by the Amazigh Mauri and Kel Tamashek in the 8th century CE. By the same token, these Amazigh peoples were most likely the ones who brought the plucked lute concept to West Africa.
Throughout the Islamic sphere of influence, from the North Africa to East Asia, musical instruments of Arab, Persian, and Turkish origin were adopted by the various peoples and adapted for incorporation into the given local tradition.
West Africa is the one notable exception.
The plucked lutes found here bear no relationship to the oud, setar, tanbur, tar, and so on. In organological terms, these plucked lutes of Middle Eastern and Near Eastern origin are categorized in Hornbostel-Sachs as necked lutes (i.e. the given instrument's neck "is attached to or carved from" its body). Conversely, West African plucked lutes are spike lutes (i.e. the given instrumet's neck passes through the circumference of its body).
The instruments they bear evident kinship to are the Amazigh spike lutes of North Africa (e.g. the loutar and the lotar of Morocco) as well as the Mauri tidinit and the Kel Tamashek teharden. This is especially true of the wooden-bodied griot lutes-- they are pretty much identical to the tidinit and teharden, in terms of physiology and playing techniques, as well as the fact that they are exclusively played by the male members of specific castes.
Fiddler Ablie Mballow playing the nyanyeru, the single-string, gourd-bodied fiddle of the Fulbe (also Fula, Fulani, and Peul). Lamin, Gambia, 2004 (Photo by Ulf Jägfors)
BOWED LUTES (FIDDLES)
Scholars believe that the idea of playing a lute by drawing a horsehair bow across its strings can be traced back to Central Asia, sometime during or just prior to the 9th century of the Common Era (CE). By the 10th century, the bowed lute (fiddle) concept had spread across the Islamic and Byzantine Christian empires.
The Fiddles of North Africa
During this period, the Arabs introduced the fiddle into North Africa. There are three basic types of North African rabab (also rebab, ribab, rababa, etc.; fiddle):
Rabab Maghribi (literally, 'Western Fiddle'; from the Arabic term for North Africa, Maghreb). A 2-string fiddle that's boat-shaped in Morocco and pear-shaped in Algeria and Tunisia. In terms of Hornbostel-Sachs classification, it's categorized as being a necked lute (i.e. the instrument's neck "is attached to or carved from" its body) that's bowed. The rabab maghribi is traditionally used for Arab-Andalusian music, though in recent times it has been somewhat overshadowed by the kamanjeh (a European-style violin held vertically and bowed horizontally like a rabab).
Ribab Soussi (literally, 'The Fiddle of the Souss'; a reference to the Ishlhin [also Chleuh and Shluh], the predominate Amazigh (Berber) people in the Souss and Atlas Mountains regions of southern Morocco). A single-string spike fiddle with a round wooden body that's held vertically and bowed horizontally. (In the context of Hornbostel-Sachs classification, the term 'spike fiddle' indicates a bowed spike lute-- that is a lute on which its neck passes through the circumference of its body.) The ribab Soussi is a principal instrument of the rwais (singular, rais), the traditional professional musicians of the Ishlhin (Chleuh Berbers). It's traditionally played in tandem with the lotar, a round-bodied plucked lute which typically has four strings but may also range from three to seven strings.
The Ghugha of Libya and Tunisia (Rababa). A single-string spike fiddle with a gourd body. Unlike other North African and Near/Middle Eastern fiddles, the Libyan and Tunisian ghugha (also known as the rababa) is held and played violin-fashion. Some scholars have proposed that the term 'ghugha' may be the root of goge, as well as goje, gonje, gogue, godje, etc., the most common designations for similar single-string fiddles throughout the Central Sudanic region of West Africa (i.e. present-day Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire [Ivory Coast], Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad).
The Fiddles of West Africa
Bowed lutes were probably introduced into West Africa from North Africa in the 11th or 12th centuries. Many scholars have argued that it was the Arabs who brought the bowed lute concept to this section of sub-Sahara Africa. However, like their plucked lute relatives, the many different ethnic traditions of fiddle found throughout West Africa -- some 90 in all -- share little in common with the bowed lutes of the Middle/Near East. On the contrary, the instrument they do resemble is the North African ghugha.
This is especially true in terms of playing technique. Whereas the vast majority of Middle/Near Eastern fiddles are held upright and bowed horizontally, all West African fiddles are held either lodged between the player's arm and body with the instrument's neck projecting forwards-- or across the player's midriff, often held in place with a strap-- and bowed diagonally. In this way their playing position and approach to bowing are reminiscent of that of the North African ghugha, as well as the early European violin and many European and New World folk fiddles.
Organologically speaking, all West African fiddles are bowed spike bowl lutes with round gourd or calabash bodies. In terms of construction, they're all full-spike instruments: that is, the instrument's stick neck runs the full length of its body to pierce through its tail-end. Most of the diverse ethnic forms of West African fiddle are single-string.
The bridges vary quite a bit, ranging from a small thin block of wood to a small slotted pyramid-shaped carved solid wood piece to a larger piece with two thin stick legs formed into an inverted "v," the string resting on the apex. As for the skin 'head' topping the fiddle's drum-like body, most often they're made of the skin of some kind of reptile like a lizard or snake. By way of example, the head of the Hausa goge is traditionally made from the skin of the Nile monitor lizard.
The immense family of West African fiddle can be divided into two major regional types:
Western Sudanic (referring to the western half of West Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Mali).
Central Sudanic (eastern West Africa: Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivore [Ivory Coast], Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad).
The main difference between the fiddles of the Western Sudan and those of the Central Sudan seems to be the placement of the soundhole. Generally speaking, on Western Sudanic fiddles like the Fulbe nyanyeru (Gambia), the Mandinka susaa (Gambia), the Wolof riti (Senegal), and the Tukulor gnagnour (Senegal), the sound hole is typically placed in a side of the fiddle's gourd body. Conversely, on Central Sudanic fiddles-- e.g. the Hausa goge (northern Nigeria), the Yoruba goje (southern Nigeria), the Dagbamba gondze (Ghana), the Frafra duringa (northern Ghana)-- the sound hole is on the skin head.
Another important difference is body type. While in both divisions gourd is the favored body material, the gourd bodies on Eastern Sudanic fiddles tend to be larger and more bowl-like then those on Western Sudanic fiddles.
For more information on the West African fiddle family, please see:
Central Africa: String Instruments, Yes... Plucked Lutes, No
In addition to West Africa, the other principal African source of slaves for the New World was Central Africa. Most came from Congo and Angola, but some were also transported from the lands that are now the modern nation states of The Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Zaire. Something like 23% of all slaves came from this region.
However, organologically-speaking, there's very little that connects the early gourd banjo of the New World to Central Africa.
To be sure, one finds a great variety of different types of string instruments throughout Central Africa: musical bows, mouth bows, harps, zithers... even bowed lutes (fiddles) and bow-lutes (also known as a pluriarc, a bow-lute is comprised several single-string musical bows housed in a single resonator). However, nowhere in this region have indigenous traditions of plucked lutes ever been found.
There's simply no evidence of plucked lute traditions in either the extant aural folklore or in the historical record of Central Africa.
The smallest percentage of slaves came from East Africa and the Indian Ocean islands off the coast of East Africa. In these regions, the principal sources of slaves transported to the New World were the southeastern country of Mozambique and Madagascar (off of Mozambique's Indian Ocean coast).
In East Africa and the Indian Ocean islands there are only a handful of traditional plucked lutes, all of which are descended from the qanbus of San'a, Yemen (southern Arabia). They include the 7-string kibangala (Mombasa [Kenya] and the Swahili Coast), the 5-string gabbus (Zanzibar), the 4-string gambusi (Comoro Islands), and the kabosy (Madagascar).
The qanbus was brought to Mombasa (Kenya) and Zanzibar along East Africa's Swahili Coast, as well as Comoros and Madagascar, by Yemeni traders, probably in the 18th century. It's a short-neck lute with a pear-shaped body. The neck and body of the qanbus are one piece, carved from a single piece of fir tree wood. Its soundboard is a piece of lambskin stretched over the body's open top. The qanbus has seven strings: three double courses (pairs of strings) and one single string. Traditionally, the qanbus is played with a plectrum (flat-pick) made from the quill of a crow's feather.
This being the case, East African/Indian Ocean lutes all share similar physiologies and are generally played the same way-- that is, with a plectrum. Unlike West African plucked lutes-- which are categorized as spike lutes (i.e. the instrument's neck goes over or through the circumference of its body)-- East African qanbus-type plucked lutes are classified in Hornbostel-Sachs as necked lutes (i.e. the instrument's neck "is attached to or carved from" its body). Like the qanbus, the neck and body of all these instruments are one piece, carved out of a single piece of wood. Likewise, their soundtables are stretched animal skin tacked-on to their bodies.
The kabosy of Madagascar stands out as being unique and distinct from its East African/Indian Ocean siblings. In its earliest forms, the kabosy came in two basic varieties: 1) qanbus-style and 2) an all-wooden instrument with a wood box body and a wooden plate face that reflected both European-- mainly, the Portuguese cavaquinho-- and East Asian influences. Today, the kabosy is more guitar-like-- typically, with a very distinctive square or rectangular wooden box bodt.
It seems highly unlikely that the East African lutes could have played a role in the initial development of the early gourd banjo of the New World. For one thing, the earliest evidence of these instruments can only be traced back to the 19th century. For another, they're radically different in construction from the early gourd banjos, which were spike lutes, like traditional West African plucked lutes.
A drawing by Charles Bell depicting a Khoikhoi (Hottentot) woman playing an early ramkie. The Cape Colony, South Africa, 1834. (Museum Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa. Grove Music Online)
The Khoikhoi Ramkie of South Africa
The early Khoikhoi (Hottentot) ramkie of southern Africa was a unique African hybrid lute that was contemporaneous with the early gourd banjo. Although similar in appearance and morphology to the early banjo, the early ramkie had a very different heritage. The roots of this instrument were in East Asia-- in particular, India-- rather than West Africa. O. F. Mentzel, writing in the journal of his 1733-1741 stay in the Dutch East India Company's colony on the Cape, described the ramkie "as an imitated instrument which the slaves of Malabar [Portuguese India] brought with them, from whom some Hottentots [Khoikhoi] copied it." Other accounts give more detailed descriptions of the instrument indicating that the early ramkie was a gourd-bodied lute with a sheep-skin head and a fretless flat stick neck that had three strings affixed to wooden friction tuning pegs.
Some scholars have suggested the Khoikhoi ramkie itself may have been a source for the early gourd banjo in the New World. However, this is highly improbable as the historical record makes it pretty clear that South Africa was in no way whatsoever a source of slaves for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Slavery and a slave trade did exist in South Africa from the earliest period of Dutch colonization in the 17th century on. However, it mostly revolved around the importation of slaves into the nascent Dutch colony. While some slaves were brought from further up the western coast of sub-Sahara Africa, most came from India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, as well as from Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands of Bazaruto, Benguerra, and Inhaca off the coast of Mozambique.
In terms of probable sources of inspiration for the Khoikhoi ramkie, one instrument that stands out is the dotara, considered to be the national folk instrument of Bengal. From 1658 on, the largest percentage of Indian slaves in the early Cape Colony were imported from Bengal in northern India, with the Malabar coast a close second. The Bengali dotara is a fretless plucked lute with a skin-headed wooden body, primarily associated with the Baul religious sect but is also used in general rural folk music.
The term dotara literally means "two strings," however, most forms of the instrument typically have four metal strings. Some variants have sympathetic strings in addition to the four stopped melody strings like the larger sarod.
If the dotara was, indeed, the source of inspiration for the Khoikhoi ramkie, then the Khoikhoi may have built their version of the Bengali lute with a gourd body because that was probably the preferred local material. Also, it's highly likely that the Khoikhoi ramkie also incorporated other influences, especially those of contemporary European lutes (plucked and bowed) brought into to the Cape colony by the settlers and visiting sailors. The conventional wisdom is that the term ramkie itself may have been a derivation of the Portuguese term rabequinha (literally, "little rebec" [fiddle]), as evidenced by other documented names for the Khoikhoi lute such as rabouquin and rabekin. (Interestingly enough, there are various different types of single-string spike fiddles in Mozambique and Malawi that are called rabeka or rebeca.)
One more possible source of inspiration for the ramkie is the Indonesian kroncong (pronounced ker-ong-chong), a ukulele-like little 3-string guitar that gave its name to Indonesia's centuries-old urban popular music form. The kroncong evolved from the Portuguese cavaquinho which was introduced into Indonesian musical culture shortly after the Portuguese arrived in 1511.
The MP3s presented here come from a variety of sources. For more information and credits, please check out our play list in the left-hand column of this page. Enjoy!
Gwari musicians play large gourd-bodied kaburu plucked lutes and goge fiddle. Lagos, Nigeria, c.1960. (Collection of Shlomo Pestcoe)
West Africa: The Wellspring of the Banjo's African Heritage
In September 1687, British physician/naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) visited Jamaica while traveling through the West Indies. Twenty years later, he published an account of his sojourn in Jamaica that includes what is arguably the first contemporary description of early gourd banjos, the original genus of the banjo, born in the Caribbean in the 17th century:
“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....”
For Sloane and the other European and European American observers who left us reports of the early gourd banjo (c. 1620-1840) there was no doubt as to where the roots of this unique African American instrument could be found: AFRICA.
However, Africa is a very large place-- it's the second largest continent. With an overall population of 922 million, it's also the second most populous continent after Asia. Culturally-speaking, there are more than a thousand distinct languages and cultures with at least as many musical traditions, if not more.
Where, then, in the great expanse that is Africa is the banjo's ancestral home?
To begin with we need to look at Africa below the Sahara Desert. This is where the millions of enslaved Africans came from.
Of all of sub-Saharan Africa, West Africa is the only region which has extant plucked lute traditions that predate first contact with Western European explorers and the subsequent emergence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the late 15th century.
The many different kinds of traditional plucked lutes found throughout West Africa-- more than 60 known distinct ethnic traditions-- are unique in that they are all classified as spike lutes. A spike lute is distinguished by having its neck pierce through or go over the wall of its body. The pantur of Ancient Mesopotamia and its Hittite, Syrian, and Canaanite offspring were all 'spike lutes', as were those of Ancient Egypt. So were the earliest forms of the banjo that first appeared in the Caribbean in 17th century.
For more on the lute family of string instruments and its origins, please see the Influences section in the left hand column of this page.
West African Sources of Slaves for the New World
Most of those who were enslaved and transported to the New World came from the coastal lands of West Africa. The principal West African centers of the slave trade were:
Greater Senegambia (an appelation coined by the eminent West African historian Boubacar Barry, this historic region includes present-day Senegal, Gambia, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea Bissau, and Guinea. A major gateway into West Africa, Greater Senegambia was also an early principal source of slaves for both the trans-Saharan slave trade and the later trans-Atlantic slave trade.)
The Rice Coast (also known as the
Upper Guinea Coast, the coastal and riverine lands along the Atlantic Coast stretching from the Gambia River on down to Sierra Leone)
The Windward Coast (Sierra Leone)
The Grain & Ivory Coast (Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire)
The Gold Coast (Ghana)
The Bight of Benin (also referred to as The Slave Coast, it included present-day Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria)
The Bight of Nigeria (eastern Nigeria and Cameroon)
Scholars categorize the modern-day countries that comprise West Africa as belonging in either one of two main geographical/cultural sections of greater Africa below the Sahara:
Western Sudan (western West Africa): Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Mali.
Central Sudan (eastern West Africa): Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivore (Ivory Coast), Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad.
Traditions of plucked spike lutes are found in most of these countries. As stated before, at present, the West African family of plucked lutes is comprised of more than fifty different known traditions.
Various West African musical instruments. From Travels in Western Africa in the Years 1818, 19, 20, and 21, from the River Gambia, through Woolli, Bondoo, Galam, Kasson, Kaarta, and Foolidoo, to the River Niger by Major William Gray and Staff Surgeon Dochard (London, 1825).
The instrument depicted in the lower right corner is an unidentified full-spike lute with a round gourd body. This is perhaps the earliest depiction of a Western African plucked lute. It appears to be a now-rare type of 4-string griot lute akin to the Diawara kola lemme of Mali. At the top of the lute's full-spike neck (i.e. the neck runs the full length of the instrument's body to pass over or pierce through its tail end) is a thin flexible metal blade with small metal rings all along its sides to rattle as the instrument is played. This device is mostly found on traditional music artisans' plucked lutes and harp-lutes (also known as bridge-harps), a form of harp that's unique to West Africa.
To the left of the plucked lute is the 18-string gourd-bodied soron of the Maninka jeliw (singular, jeli; griots, hereditary music/word artisans). Scottish explorer Mungo Park called it a korro in his account of his travels through West Africa, 1795-1797. Like its kin, the 21-string kora of the Mandinka jalolu (singular, jali; griots), the soron is a harp-lute.
West African Plucked Lutes: Origins
The plucked lute concept most likely came to West Africa from across the Sahara around the same time as the introduction of Islam, which was probably sometime in the 8th century of the Common Era (CE). The first two major empires in the region were Soninke empire of Wagadou (c.750-1100 CE), better known as The Kingdom of Ghana, based in the southern region of present-day Mauritania, northern Senegal, and southeastern Mali and its neighboring rival Takrur (800-1285 CE), located in the middle of the Senegal River valley. Around 1033, Takrur became the first West African kingdom to adopt Islam as its official state religion.
Ancient Ghana (Wagadu) and Takrur were principal gateways into West Africa in the earliest days of the trans-Saharan Trade. As such they were the epicenters of the cross-cultural exchange and development that led to the emergence of the many distinctive indigenous forms of the plucked lute in the region. Their successor, the Mande empire of Mali (c. 1235-1500), proved to be the crucible for the creation of jaliya, the griot tradition.
The first documentation of plucked lutes in West Africa appears in 1337, when Arab historian al-'Umarī (1301-1349) in his work, Masālik al absār fī mamālik al amsār, (Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises) describes the fabulous wealth and majesty of the Mali Empire, considered then to be one of the richest kingdoms in the known world. Drawing on reports from contemporary Arab travelers and traders, al-'Umarī wrote:
When the king of this kingdom [Mali] comes in from a journey, a jitr [parasol] and a standard are held over his head as he rides, and drums are beaten and tunbūr and trumpets, well made of horn, are played in front of him.
Tunbūr is an Arabic term which is generally taken to mean a long neck plucked lute, tanbūr. However, the word 'tunbūr' was originally used to denote the lyre, a harp-like string instrument on which the strings run upwards from the body (resonating sound chamber) to a horizontal yoke suspended between two parallel arms. The conventional wisdom is that al-'Umarī was referring to plucked lutes since lyres are not found in West Africa. They're common to East Africa (Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda) and northeastern Africa (southern Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia), as well as the coastal regions of the Arabian Peninsula.
Ibn Battūta of Morocco (1304-1369), the first foreign visitor to Mali to leave us a first-hand account of his visit, wrote in the memoir of his journey in 1352 a detailed description of the royal court of Mansa Sulayman, who ruled from 1341 to 1358 and was the brother of the renowned Mansa Musa. According to Ibn Battūta, when the mansa (the Mande term for supreme ruler) went into the palace yard for a royal audience:
The sultan is preceded by his musicians, who carry gold and silver guimbris, and behind him come three hundred armed slaves.
Many scholars contend that Ibn Battūta's use of the word guimbri is, in fact, a reference to plucked lutes because in Ibn Battūta's homeland Morocco Amazigh (Berber) and Jbala Arab musicians play a teardrop-shaped lute known as the guimbri.
The term is also akin to guinbri, the most common name for the 3-string plucked spike lute of the Gnawa, a North African Islamic community comprised primarily of descendants of slaves and mercenaries brought to Morocco and Algeria from West Africa. According to Gnawa tradition, the guinbri (also known as the sintir or hajhuj) is of West African origin. The gombri of Tunisia is another North African plucked spike lute with roots in West Africa. It’s 3-stringed with a full-spike neck and a very large round drum body. The gombri is played by descendants of the Sudan Tunis (West African slaves and mercenaries brought across the Sahara to Tunisia) and is mostly associated with stambali, a trance dance ritual, probably derived from the pre-Islamic bori ritual of the Hausa (Nigeria). Both the guinbri and the gombri are down-picked, a playing technique of West African origin that also came to the New World during the Transatlantic Slave Trade and was the earliest documented technique for playing the banjo.
West African Plucked Lutes: Organology
The West African family of plucked lutes encompasses a broad diversity of ethnic forms. These various different traditional lutes are distinguished by the materials they're made from, the ways they're played, and the sociocultural contexts they're used in. Still, in organological terms, all these traditional instruments are categorized as spike lutes in the Hornbostel-Sachs system of musical instrument classification.
First published in 1914 in the journal Zeitschrift für Ethnologie as Systematik der Musikinstrumente: ein Versuch (A System for Classifying Musical Instruments: An Attempt) by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (1877-1935) and Curt Sachs (1881-1959), the Hornbostel-Sachs (also 'Sachs-Hornbostel') system is the universal standard in the fields of ethnomusicology and organology-- as well as in the more recent fusion of these two disciplines, ethno-organology, the scientific study of musical instruments in the context of culture.
According to Hornbostel-Sachs, the defining characteristic of a spike lute is that it's "handle [neck] passes diametrically through the resonator [body]." More recently, scholars have broadened the H-S parsing of the designation 'spike lute' to include those instruments on which the neck actually passes over the body's top rim.
Taking all of this into consideration, there are certain 'genetic' traits that are common to all spike lutes in the West African family of plucked lutes:
A drum-like body topped with a skin 'head' (soundtable). Typically West African lute bodies are made either from a carved piece of hollowed-out wood or a dried gourd. There are some instrument bodies that are made out of calabash (Crescentia cujete) as well as recycled metal containers (e.g. wash basins, tin cans)... even plastic jugs are used. However, the vast majority of non-wooden-bodied plucked lutes found throughout West Africa are made from gourd (Lagenaria siceraria).
Stick Neck. The instrument’s “spike” neck is a plain round stick without frets. It’s most often made from papyrus sedge (Cyperus papyrus; also referred to as ‘reed’ or ‘bamboo’), which is known throughout Greater Senegambia by the Mande term bang (also bangoe, bangjolo, etc.) and in northern Nigeria by the Hausa term gora.
The necks on West African plucked spike bowl lutes come in two different spans:
Full-Spike: The instrument's stick neck runs under its body's skin 'head' for the full length of the body to pass over or pierce through its tail end.
Semi-Spike: The instrument's stick neck doesn't extend the full length of the lute's body.
It's interesting to note that while West African semi-spike plucked bowl lutes may have either wooden or non-wooden bodies, depending on the given ethnic tradition, all full-spike plucked bowl lutes throughout West Africa invariably have non-wooden bodies, traditionally made of gourd or calabash. Accordingly, every kind of West African full-spike lute must have a ‘floating’ bridge.
Neck-To-Body Construction. On West African plucked bowl lutes, there are two basic ways in which the instrument's stick neck is affixed to its body:
Over-The-Rim. The neck goes over the body's top rim. On a semi-spike lute, it rests on an indentation in the top rim at the front of the body, while on a full-spike instrument it sits on parallel indentations at the body's front and tail-end. In this mode of construction, the neck is permanently held in place by being inserted into a single slit or is 'laced' through several slits in the skin 'head' (soundtable) that tops the instrument's body. In fact, the skin 'head' actually rests on the portion of the stick neck passing over the body and it's the pressure of the tightened 'head' bearing down directly that holds the neck in place.
The 'Over-The-Rim' method can be traced back over 6000 years ago to the earliest plucked lutes, those of Ancient Mesopotamia. It was carried on in the plucked lutes of Ancient Syria, Canaan, and Egypt. Likewise, it's found on North African plucked spike lutes, such as the guimbri and lotar of Morocco, as well as the Gnawa guinbri (also known as sintir or hajhuj).
Through-The-Body. The neck pierces the body. This mode of construction is found on full-spike plucked lutes from the Central Sudan region of West Africa as well as on all of the 90 known bowed lutes (fiddles) found throughout West Africa. It's also used on the North African gombri of Tunisia.
....
String Bridge. The piece over which the lute's strings run to physically raise them and transmit their vibrations to the instrument's soundtable. On West African plucked lutes, string bridges are divided into two principal categories:
Floating Bridge. A movable bridge that sits on the instrument’s skin ‘head’ (soundtable).
Slip-On Bridge. A type of stationary bridge found primarily on semi-spike lutes exclusive to griot lutenists. Typically with a fan-shaped convex top, it’s inserted into the instrument’s soundhole-- made in its skin ‘head’ (soundtable), situated right above the spot where the lute’s semi-spike neck terminates within its body-- to slip unto the pointed end of the neck. Examples include: the 5-string xalam of the Wolof gewel (griot; in Wolof, a griot lutenist is also referred to as a xalamkat), the 4-string n'goni of the Bamana and Maninka jeliw (singular, jeli), the 4-string gambaré of the Soninke geserun (singular, geseré) and the hoddu of the Fulbe wambaabe (singular, bambaado), which may have three to five strings.
Floating bridges on West African full-spike plucked bowl lutes come in three basic varieties:
Cylinder Bridge. This may be either a small piece of a stick or wood, or a hollow tube filled with seeds or pebbles for a rattle effect. This type of bridge is pretty much the norm on all of the various plucked lutes of the Central Sudan region of West Africa, regardless of neck or body type. Examples include: the 2-string gourd-bodied gurmi of the Hausa (Nigeria), the 3-string calabash-bodied gullum of the Kilba (Nigeria), the 2-string calabash-bodied gurumi of the Toubou (Niger) and the 2-string calabash-bodied molooru (also molo) of the Fulbe cattle herders (Niger).
Upright Bipedal Bridge. Shaped like an upside down 'U', to date, this type of bridge has only been found on the remarkably similar full-spike folk lutes of neighboring peoples in Casamance (southern Senegal), The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau: namely, the ekonting (also akonting) of the Jola, the bunchundo of the Manjak, the kusunde of the Balanta, and the ñopata of Bujogo (Guinea-Bissau’s Bijago Islands). All of these 3-string instruments are full-spike and gourd-bodied.
Thin Block Bridge. This type of bridge is unique to a very rare form of griot lute: an instrument with a gourd body and full spike neck. Like the slip-on bridge found on standard semi-spike griot lutes, the thin block movable bridge has a fan-shaped convex top. To date, only three examples of such a griot lute have been documented: the 4-string kola lemme of the geserun (singular, geseré) of the Diawara (Mali), the 5-string geseré of the gewel of the Wolof (Senegal), and the xalam geseré of the jalolu (singular, jali) of the Mandinka (The Gambia).
As noted, all West African full-spike lutes have some kind of ‘floating’ bridge. By the same token, all of the various non-griot semi-spike plucked lutes found throughout the Central Sudan region of West Africa, regardless of body type, also have floating bridges, which are invariably some form of cylinder bridge. Examples include: the 2-string wooden-bodied garaya of the Hausa (Nigeria), the 3-string wooden-bodied duru (also known by the designation molo, the same as the nearly identical Hausa version of this lute) of the Yoruba (Nigeria), the 3-string gourd-bodied kaburu of the Gwari (Nigeria), the 2-string gourd-bodied koliko (also koloko and kologo) of the Frafra (Ghana), and the 2-string gourd-bodied konde of the Bissa (Burkina Faso).
It should be noted that the only Central Sudanese plucked lutes known not to have cylinder bridges are the wooden-bodied semi-spike lutes exclusive to the griots of those peoples who originated in West Africa's Western Sudan section, such as the 3-string molo (also molooru) of the Songhai jeserey (singular, jeseré) in western Niger.
Sliding tuning rings. Unlike most other lute-family string instruments the world over, the traditional tuning system on West African lutes has the given instrument's strings 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.
The sliding ring tuning system is used not just on plucked lutes but also on Harp-Lute (also known as bridge-harp), a form of harp that's unique to West Africa.
As for bowed lutes (in the case of West African fiddles, spike lutes that are played by drawing a bow across their strings), the great variety of fiddles found throughout West Africa-- most of which are single-string with full-spike necks and with round bodies made of gourd or calabash -- use a different approach to tuning. While the fiddle's string may be attached to its neck by a ring or a knot, tuning is done by slipping a wedge (typically, the tip of an animal's horn or a stick) in between the string and the instrument's skin head. One notable exception is the anzad (also imzad), the single-string gourd fiddle of the Kel Tamashek (Tuareg). This fiddle is tuned using the sliding ring system.
Unlike all other known West African plucked lutes, the konigai has a wooden square box body with a wood top. The konigai’s neck is attached to its body, rather than ‘spiking’ into or across the body’s sidewall. Like all other West African plucked lutes, the neck’s fingerboard is fretless. However, the konigai’s fingerboard is flat, a decidedly non-West African feature. Unlike any other West African plucked lute, the konigai’s three strings are attached to the neck and tuned with wooden friction pegs, housed in a distinct peghead and accessed by means of a string nut at the top of the fingerboard.
Looking at the instrument in the context of the Hornbostel-Sachs system, the konigai would be categorized as a “necked box lute or necked guitar." The reference “necked lute” is defined as a lute on which “the handle is attached to or carved from the resonator, like a neck.”
This being the case, the konigai may very well be a more recent development. It probably first emerged after the Western European guitar was introduced into Sierra Leone in the early 1900s by Kru sailors from neighboring Liberia. One indication of this is the fact that the 2-finger up-picking technique employed to play the konigai is basically the same approach that’s pretty much universal for playing the guitar throughout West Africa. Kru musicians first developed this 2-finger style—an adaptation of one of the most common techniques for playing traditional West African plucked lutes-- to play their ‘palm wine’ guitar music. During the 1920s and ‘30s, palm wine music, together with the Kru 2-finger guitar style, had spread up and down the West African coast. It laid the foundation for the emergence of the many different regional forms of modern West African popular music such as maringa in Sierra Leone, highlife in Ghana, and juju in Nigeria.
Tradition-bearer Francis Mendy plays the bunchundo, the 3-string gourd-bodied folk lute of the Manjak. He's accompanied by Abu Lawrence Mendy drumming on a glass palm wine bottle with two thin sticks. The combination of bunchundo and palm wine bottle drum is the traditional instrumental duo for Manajk vernacular social/dance music. Banjul, Gambia, 2004. (Photo by Ulf Jägfors)
Seeking Out Living Traditions: Taking An Ethno-Organological Approach
Beginning in the 1960s, European and American scholars and writers, searching for the roots of the blues and jazz, traveled to West Africa. Their hopes were to find the relatives -- if not, the sources-- of these African American music forms in extant West African "living traditions."
In Mali, the various countries along West Africa's Upper Guinea Coast (Senegambia down to Sierra Leone), and Niger, they encountered griots. The word griot (originally spelled guiriot, pronounced gree-oh) made its first appearance in the travelogue Relation du voyage du Cap-Verd (1637) by French missionary Alexis de Saint-Lô, recounting his travels in Senegal two years earlier. The performers that Saint-Lô referred to as "guiriots" were hereditary male musicians and praise-singers who belonged to the middle artisan caste of a rigid tripartite caste system shared by certain West African ethnic groups, such as the various Mande peoples (e.g. the Mandinka, Maninka, Bamana [Bambara], etc.) as well as the Wolof, Soninke, Songhai, Fulbe, and so on. Female members of griot families are called griottes. In the context of griot music, griottes are primarily vocalists rather than instrumentalists.
Hereditary music/word artisans-- traditional performers whose primary vocations are music-making and 'praise-singing' (composing and performing songs to honor clients and their lineage in exchange for gratuities)-- are integral to many different ethnic cultures throughout West Africa as well as the rest of sub-Sahara Africa. However, they're not all griots. As stated, the term 'griot' only accurately describes those who belong to the middle artisan caste of certain Islamic peoples-- e.g. Mandinka, Maninka, Bamana (Bambara), Wolof, Fulbe [Fula, Fulani], etc.-- with similar tripartite caste systems. Conversely, the traditional music/word artisans that belong to ethnic groups which don't have the specific type of caste system that engenders a griot caste and tradition are not griots and should not be designated as such.
Case in point, the marok'a (singular, marok'i; 'praise-singers') and maka'da (singular, maka'di; professional and semi-professional musicians) of the Hausa (an Islamized people found primarily in northern Nigeria and southern Niger) are often labeled 'griots'. However, while there are some similarities between these performers and griots, the Hausa have a different social system; therefore, their traditional music/word artisans are not griots.
That said, Hausa marok'a and maka'da lutenists play an amazing variety of plucked lutes. These range from the wooden-bodied 2-string garaya and 3-string molo to the komo and gurmi, both of which are 2-string instruments with gourd bodies.
A Wolof griot xalamkat (literally, "lute player"). In Wolof, a specialist griot musician who plays the xalam lute is also sometimes referred to as a gawlo, a Fulbe term for 'griot'. However, in the context of Fulbe tradition 'gawlo' denotes a griot 'praise singer' who sings a cappella rather than an instrumentalist. Dakar, Senegal, c.1905. (Collection of Shlomo Pestcoe)
Griot Lutes
In the context of jeliya (literally, "the art of the griot"; traditional griot arts and music), plucked lutes are played exclusively by specialist male musicians from certain families. The lutes they play are quite distinctive and constitute a unique subgroup within the West African lute family. Examples of griot lutes include: the Bamana (Bambara)/ Maninka n'goni, the Wolof xalam, the Fulbe hoddu, and the Soninke gambaré, among others.
Most ethnic forms of the griot lute share similar physiologies:
A carved wooden body, hollowed-out from a single piece of wood. Typically, oblong and narrow, in either a canoe-shape or a 'figure-of-8'-shape.
A semi-spike stick neck (e.g. the neck doesn't extend the full length of the lute's body)
A fan-shaped slip-on bridge that's inserted into a hole in the body's head to slip onto the pointed end of its semi-spike neck.
Typical griot lute string configurations 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.
5-string: the same as the 4-string configuration but with the addition of an additional unstopped drone as its second string.
The 4-string and 5-string configurations are perhaps the most common, though the 3-string configuration is favored in quite few ethnic traditions such as the tahardent of the Kel Tamashek (Tuareg) enad (singular, inadan: griots, word/music artisans) and the hoddu of the Fulbe (Fula, Fulani) wammbaa'be (singular, bammbaa'do: griot lutenists and fiddlers). There are also single-string griot lutes such as the Mande/Tukulor molo (Senegambia) and the Songhai jurkel (Burkina Faso) and n'jurkel (Mali). By the same token, there are some griot lutes with seven or more strings.
The 1970s on through the '90s marked a period when extensive field research was focused on these griot lute traditions by such notable scholars as
Michael T. Coolen,
Eric Charry,
Lucy Duran and Joseph Hill. The wealth of valuable information garnered from these studies of the griot lute traditions had gone a long way to reestablishing the New World banjo's connection to West Africa. But it also posed an intriguing challenge:
Could there be more living lute traditions in West Africa still yet to be discovered?
Gambian Jola scholar/musician Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta on his people's folk lute, the ekonting (akonting), jams with Swedish banjo historian Ulf Jägfors on his fretless 5-string banjo from the 1860s.
New Discoveries, New Directions
The answer to this mystery presented itself in 2000 at the 3rd Annual Banjo Collectors Gathering in Concord, Massachusetts. (The Banjo Collectors Gathering is an annual international conference of the foremost collectors, scholars, players, and present-day makers of 19th and early 20th century banjos, which also serves as the principal forum for presentations of new research on the banjo's history and organology.) There Swedish banjo historian Ulf Jägfors introduced West African folklorist/musician
Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta in a presentation entitled The Akonting: One Possible Ancestor to the Banjo.
In the mid 1980s, Jatta, a Jola from The Gambia, pioneered the research and documentation of his people's folk lute, the ekonting (akonting), as well as the bunchundo, a similar folk lute of the neighboring Manjak. Both the Jola and Manjak are rice-farming peoples found primarily in Casamance (southern Senegal), The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. They have similar non-hierarchical, communal societies without a tripartite caste system. As they have neither griot nor 'praise-singing' traditions of any kind, music-making in these societies is a social pastime that's performed by non-professional vernacular musicians.
What has intrigued the banjo community most about the Jola and Manjak lutes is the fact that they bear striking resemblance to period descriptions and images of the early gourd banjo. Like the earliest forms of the banjo, they're both gourd-bodied plucked lutes with a full-spike fretless neck and upright footed bridge that sits on the skin 'head' (soundtable) of the instrument's gourd body. Even more telling is the fact that they're both 3-string instruments with the top string (the one closest to the player's chest) being a short unstopped 'open' string, akin to the "thumb string" on the 4-string early gourd banjo and its offspring, the 5-string banjo.
Bujogo (Bijago) tradition-bearer Joaquim Cabritan playing his people's folk lute, the ñopata, Soga Island, the Bijago Islands, Guinea Bissau, 8/06.
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. (Photo by Nick Bamber)
The revelation of the Jola ekonting and Manjak bunchundo-- coupled with previous knowledge of the griot lutes as well as some other lutes associated with non-griot music/word artisans (e.g. the various different plucked lutes of the Hausa: the garaya, gurmi, komo, and komo) -- has given us a new appreciation of just how extensive is the diversity of traditions that comprise the West African plucked lute family.
Looking at the immense family tree of different West African plucked lutes, we now can discern three distinct limbs:
Griot Lutes. Instruments which are exclusive to the specialist musicians of the griot castes of the various different ethnic groups that have the requisite tripartite caste system and a griot tradition. Most griot lutes share the specific physical characteristics described above.
Non-Griot Artisan Lutes. These are instruments that are primarily associated with non-griot traditional music/word artisans but are not exclusive to them.
Folk Lutes. Instruments played by non-professional vernacular musicians.
Awareness of the Jola and Manjak folk lutes had driven home the realization that the vast family of diverse plucked lute traditions found throughout West Africa bears further investigation. This has sparked more field-research in West Africa, resulting in some incredible 'discoveries' of previously unknown living traditions:
The 5-string geseré of the Wolof xalamkats (griot lutenists; Senegal), the 5-string xalam geseré of the Mandinka jalolu (singular, jali; The Gambia), and the 4-string kola-lemme of the Diawara geserun (singular, geseré; 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. 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. American ethnomusicologist Michael T. Coolen, who did field work in Senegambia in the 1970s, first reported the Wolof geseré and the Diawara kola-lemme; in 2006, American old-time banjoist Ben Nelson first encountered in The Gambia, the xalam geseré, the Mandinka version of the Wolof geseré.
The ñopata of the Bujogo (also Bijago) and the kusunde of the Balanta, the Bijago Islands of Guinea Bissau. These two 3-string gourd-bodied folk lutes are nearly identical to the ekonting of the Jola, the bunchundo of the Manjak, the busunde of the Papel, and the kisinta of the Balanta. This fact indicates that all these instruments constitute a distinct subgroup within the West African lute family. First encountered and documented by British classic banjoist/banjo historian Nick Bamber in August 2006.
The 2-string konou of the Dogon, Mali. The konou is guite the revelation on several counts. First, it's the only known wooden-bodied, semi-spike lute with more than one string found that has a fan-shaped bridge that is not a griot lute. Secondly, its 2-string configuration is pretty much only found on plucked lutes as you get further east in West Africa. Examples of these 2-string lutes include the gourd-bodied Bissa konde (Burkina Faso), the gourd-bodied Frafra koloko (also kologo and koliko. Ghana), the wooden-bodied Hausa garaya (Nigeria, Niger, Ghana), and so on. Another exciting point to consider about the Dogon konou is its playing technique: it's down-picked in a fashion similar to the Jola ekonting (Casamance [southern Senegal], The Gambia, Burkina Faso) and Bujogo ñopata (Guinea-Bissau). The fact that the Dogon konou is a 2-string instrument that is down-picked may indicate that it's a "missing link" that connects the lute traditions of the western region of West Africa to those of the eastern region. Initially discovered by Canadian banjoist Marc Nerenberg in 1981. Marc also encountered another plucked lute of the Dogon that was previously unknown, the single-string gourd-bodied kona, which is also down-picked. The konou was rediscovered and documented for the first time by another Canadian banjoist Jayme Stone in April 2007.
All these recent discoveries have enriched and increased our knowledge and understanding of the diversity of the immense family of West African plucked lute traditions, the principal wellspring of the banjo's African heritage. Yet, all this also drives home the hard fact that there's still so much more to do.
As we revisit and expand our studies of known West African plucked lute traditions, we need to seek out those that may have passed 'under the radar' and had been obscured. By the same token, we need to look at related string instrument traditions throughout sub-Sahara Africa -- Central Africa, East Africa, and southern Africa as well as West Africa -- especially lute family instruments like bowed lutes (fiddles),
harp-lutes; (bridge-harps), and bow lutes (pluriarcs). Likewise, the plucked and bowed lute traditions of southern Africa, East Africa (including Zanzibar, Madagascar, and the Comoros), and North Africa-- as well as those of the Caribbean and South America-- need to be considered.
For more on the plucked lutes of South Africa and East Africa, please see the 'Sounds Like' section of the left hand column of this page.
Thanks a million Bajo Roots for joining our ministry of Blues. It's all about peace, love, understanding, and GROOVE! Hope to perform for you sometime. Enjoyed your tunes. Wishing you the very best in Blues and life! -Big Daddy
Thanks for finding a little space in your heart for a yodeling banjo player. I'm real happy to be here. Most Sincerely, Curtis P. Eller ---- Curtis Eller's American Circus www. curtiseller. com
M A M Y K Ô 
