The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, in modern forms usually made of plastic, originally of animal skin.
Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by African Americans and had African antecedents.[1][2] In the 19th century, interest in the instrument was spread across the United States and United Kingdom by traveling shows of the 19th-century minstrel show fad, followed by mass-production and mail-order sales, including instruction method books. The inexpensive or home-made banjo remained part of rural folk culture, but 5-string and 4-string banjos also became popular for home parlor music entertainment, college music clubs, and early 20th century jazz bands. By the early 21st century, the banjo was most frequently associated with folk, bluegrass and country music, but was also used in some rock, pop and even hip-hop music.[3] Among rock bands, the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead have used the five-string banjo in some of their songs. Some famous pickers of the banjo are Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs.
Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in Black American traditional music and rural folk culture before entering the mainstream via the minstrel shows of the 19th century.[4][5][6][7] Along with the fiddle, the banjo is a mainstay of American styles of music, such as bluegrass and old-time music. It is also very frequently used in Dixieland jazz, as well as in Caribbean genres like biguine, calypso, mento and troubadour.
The modern banjo derives from instruments that have been recorded to be in use in North America and the Caribbean since the 17th century by enslaved people taken from West and Central Africa. Their African-style instruments were crafted from split gourds with animal skins stretched across them. Strings, from gut or vegetable fibers, were attached to a wooden neck.[8] Written references to the banjo in North America and the Caribbean appear in the 17th and 18th centuries.[8]
The earliest written indication of an instrument akin to the banjo is in the 17th century: Richard Jobson (1621) in describing The Gambia, wrote about an instrument like the banjo, which he called a bandore.[8]
The term banjo has several etymological claims, one being from the Mandinka language which gives the name of Banjul, capital of The Gambia. Another claim is a connection to the West African akonting: it is made with a long bamboo neck called a bangoe. The material for the neck, called ban julo in the Mandinka language, again gives banjul. In this interpretation, banjul became a sort of eponym for the akonting as it crossed the Atlantic. The instrument's name might also derive from the Kimbundu word mbanza,[9] which is a loan word to the Portuguese language resulting in the term banza,[8] which was used by early French travelers in the Americas.[10] Its earliest recorded use was in 1678[8] by the Sovereign Council of Martinique which reinstated a 1654 decree that placed prohibitions and restrictions on "dances and assemblies of negroes" deemed to be kalenda, which was defined as the gathering of enslaved Africans who danced to the sound of a drum and an instrument called the banza.[8][11]
The OED claims that the term banjo comes from a dialectal pronunciation of Portuguese bandore or from an early anglicisation of Spanish bandurria.[12] Contrary evidence shows that the terms bandore and bandurria were used when Europeans encountered the instrument or its kin varieties in use by people of African descent, who used names for the instrument such as banza,[8] as it was called in places such as Haiti, varieties that were built around a gourd body with a wooden plank for the neck. François Richard de Tussac, a former planter from Saint-Domingue, details its construction in the book Le Cri des Colons, published in 1810, stating:[13][14]
As for the guitars, which the negroes call banzas, this is what they consist of: they cut lengthwise, through the middle, a fresh calabash [the fruit of a tree called the callebassier]. This fruit is sometimes eight inches or more in diameter. The stretch across it the skin of a goat, which they attach on the edges with little nails; they put two or three little holes on this surface, and then a kind of plank or piece of wood that is rudely flattened makes the neck of the instrument; they stretch three strings made of pitre [a kind of string taken from the agave plant, commonly known as pitre] across it; and so the instrument is built. On this instrument they play airs composed of three or four notes, which they repeat constantly.[13][14]
Michel Étienne Descourtilz, a naturalist who visited Haiti in the early 1800s, described it as banzas, a Negro instrument, that the natives prepare by sawing one of the calabashes or a large gourd lengthwise, to which they attach a neck and sonorous strings made from the filament" of aloe plants.[15] It was played during any occasion, from boredom to joyous parties and calendas to funeral ceremonies. It was the custom to also combine this sound with the more noisy bamboula, a type of drum made from a stick of bamboo covered on both sides with a skin that was played with fingers and knuckles while sitting astride.[16][14]
Various instruments in Africa, chief among them the kora, feature a skin drumhead and gourd (or similar shell) body.[17] These instruments differ from early African-American banjos in that the necks do not possess a Western-style fingerboard and tuning pegs; instead they have stick necks, with strings attached to the neck with loops for tuning.[17]
Another likely relative of the banjo is the aforementioned akonting, a spike folk lute which is constructed using a gourd body, a long wooden neck, and three strings[18] played by the Jola tribe of Senegambia, and the ubaw-akwala of the Igbo.[19] Similar instruments include the xalam of Senegal[20] and the ngoni of the Wassoulou region that includes parts of Mali, Guinea, and Ivory Coast, as well as a larger variation of the ngoni, known as the gimbri, developed in Morocco by sub-Saharan Africans (Gnawa or Haratin).
Banjo-like instruments seem to have been independently invented in several different places, in addition to the many African instruments mentioned above, since instruments similar to the banjo are known from a diverse array of distant countries. For example, the Chinese sanxian, the Japanese shamisen, the Persian tar, and the Moroccan sintir.[19]
Banjos with fingerboards and tuning pegs are known from the Caribbean as early as the 17th century.[17] Some 18th- and early 19th-century writers transcribed the name of these instruments variously as bangie, banza, bonjaw,[21] banjer[22] and banjar.
The instrument became increasingly available commercially from around the second quarter of the 19th century due to minstrel show performances.[2]
In the antebellum South, many enslaved Africans played the banjo, spreading it to the rest of the population.[8] In his memoir With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon, the Confederate veteran and surgeon John Allan Wyeth recalls learning to play the banjo as a child from an enslaved person on his family plantation.[8] Another man who learned to play from African-Americans, probably in the 1820s, was Joel Walker Sweeney, a minstrel performer from Appomattox Court House, Virginia.[23][24] Sweeney has been credited with adding a string to the four-string African-American banjo, and popularizing the five-string banjo.[23][24] Although Robert McAlpin Williamson is the first documented white banjoist,[25] in the 1830s Sweeney became the first white performer to play the banjo on stage.[23] Sweeney's musical performances occurred at the beginning of the minstrel era, as banjos shifted away from being exclusively homemade folk instruments to instruments of a more modern style.[26] Sweeney participated in this transition by encouraging drum maker William Boucher of Baltimore to make banjos commercially for him to sell.[24]
According to Arthur Woodward in 1949, Sweeney replaced the gourd with a sound box made of wood and covered with skin, and added a short fifth string about 1831.[27] However, modern scholar Gene Bluestein pointed out in 1964 that Sweeney may not have originated either the 5th string or sound box.[27] This new banjo was at first tuned d'Gdf♯a, though by the 1890s, this had been transposed up to g'cgbd'. Banjos were introduced in Britain by Sweeney's group, the American Virginia Minstrels, in the 1840s, and became very popular in music halls.[28]
The instrument grew in popularity during the 1840s after Sweeney began his traveling minstrel show.[29] By the end of the 1840s the instrument had expanded from Caribbean possession to take root in places across America and across the Atlantic in England.[30][31] It was estimated in 1866 that there were probably 10,000 banjos in New York City, up from only a handful in 1844. People were exposed to banjos not only at minstrel shows, but also medicine shows, Wild-West shows, variety shows, and traveling vaudeville shows.[32] The banjo's popularity also was given a boost by the Civil War, as servicemen on both sides in the Army or Navy were exposed to the banjo played in minstrel shows and by other servicemen.[33] A popular movement of aspiring banjoists began as early as 1861.[34] The enthusiasm for the instrument was labeled a "banjo craze" or "banjo mania."[34]
_-_containing_the_elementary_principles_of_music,_together_with_examples_and_lessons,_to_which_is_added_a_choice_collection_of_pieces,_numbering_over_fifty_popular_(14781476931).jpg/1280px-thumbnail.jpg)
By the 1850s, aspiring banjo players had options to help them learn their instrument.[35] There were more teachers teaching banjo basics in the 1850s than there had been in the 1840s.[35] There were also instruction manuals and, for those who could read it, printed music in the manuals.[36] The first book of notated music was The Complete Preceptor by Elias Howe, published under the pseudonym Gumbo Chaff, consisting mainly of Christy's Minstrels tunes.[36] The first banjo method was the Briggs' Banjo instructor (1855) by Tom Briggs.[36] Other methods included Howe's New American Banjo School (1857), and Phil Rice's Method for the Banjo, With or Without a Master (1858).[36] These books taught the "stroke style" or "banjo style", similar to modern "frailing" or "clawhammer" styles.[36]
By 1868, music for the banjo was available printed in a magazine, when J. K. Buckley wrote and arranged popular music for Buckley's Monthly Banjoist.[37] Frank B. Converse also published his entire collection of compositions in The Complete Banjoist in 1868, which included "polkas, waltzes, marches, and clog hornpipes."[38]
Opportunities to work included the minstrel companies and circuses present in the 1840s, but also floating theaters and variety theaters, forerunners of the variety show and vaudeville.[35]
The term classic banjo is used today to talk about a bare-finger "guitar style" that was widely in use among banjo players of the late 19th to early 20th century.[39] It is still used by banjoists today. The term also differentiates that style of playing from the fingerpicking bluegrass banjo styles, such as the Scruggs style and Keith style.[39]
The Briggs Banjo Method, considered to be the first banjo method and which taught the stroke style of playing, also mentioned the existence of another way of playing, the guitar style.[40][41] Alternatively known as "finger style", the new way of playing the banjo displaced the stroke method, until by 1870 it was the dominant style.[42] Although mentioned by Briggs, it wasn't taught. The first banjo method to teach the technique was Frank B. Converse's New and Complete Method for the Banjo with or without a Master, published in 1865.[43][44]
To play in guitar style, players use the thumb and two or three fingers on their right hand to pick the notes. Samuel Swaim Stewart summarized the style in 1888, saying,
In the guitar style of Banjo-playing...the little finger of the right hand is rested upon the head near the bridge...[and] serves as a rest to the hand and a resistance to the movement of picking the strings...In the beginning it is best to acquire a knowledge of picking the strings with the use of the first and second fingers and thumb only, allowing the third finger to remain idle until the other fingers have become thoroughly accustomed to their work...the three fingers are almost invariably used in playing chords and accompaniments to songs."[40]
_for_Duke_brand_cigarettes_MET_DPB883184.jpg/1280px-Banjo,_from_the_Musical_Instruments_series_(N82)_for_Duke_brand_cigarettes_MET_DPB883184.jpg)
The banjo, although popular, carried low-class associations from its role in blackface minstrel shows, medicine shows, tent shows, and variety shows or vaudeville.[45] There was a push in the 19th century to bring the instrument into "respectability."[45] Musicians such as William A. Huntley made an effort to "elevate" the instrument or make it more "artistic," by "bringing it to a more sophisticated level of technique and repertoire based on European standards."[46] Huntley may have been the first white performer to successfully make the transition from performing in blackface to being himself on stage, noted by the Boston Herald in November 1884.[46] He was supported by another former blackface performer, Samuel Swaim Stewart, in his corporate magazine that popularized highly talented professionals.[47]
As the "raucous" imitations of plantation life decreased in minstrelsy, the banjo became more acceptable as an instrument of fashionable society, even to be accepted into women's parlors.[29][48] Part of that change was a switch from the stroke style to the guitar playing style.[29][48][43] An 1888 newspaper said, "All the maidens and a good many of the women also strum the instrument, banjo classes abound on every side and banjo recitals are among the newest diversions of fashion...Youths and elderly men too have caught the fever...the star strummers among men are in demand at the smartest parties and have the choosing of the society of the most charming girls."[49]
Some of those entertainers, such as Alfred A. Farland, specialized in classical music. However, musicians who wanted to entertain their audiences, and make a living, mixed it in with the popular music that audiences wanted.[50] Farland's pupil Frederick J. Bacon was one of these. A former medicine show entertainer, Bacon performed classical music along with popular songs such as Massa's in de cold, cold ground, a Medley of Scotch Airs, a Medley of Southern Airs, and Thomas Glynn’s West Lawn Polka.
Banjo innovation which began in the minstrel age continued, with increased use of metal parts