Banjo Roots and Branches, edited by Robert Winans, is a comprehensively researched and pathbreaking piece of banjo roots scholarship. This book is dedicated in memoriam to banjo scholar Dena J. Epstein, who lived from 1916 to 2013. Her influential scholarship called for the application of library-science methods to the study of the banjo. The ten authors included in this book heed Epstein’s call by investigating primary-source documents to construct a richer banjo history. Banjo Roots and Branches is also dedicated in memoriam to one of its authors, Shlomo Pestcoe, who passed away in 2015. Pestcoe is this book’s principal contributor, authoring or co-authoring six of its seventeen chapters.
The research presented here is an example of “ethno-organology,” which combines the ethnography and cultural analysis of ethnomusicology with organology’s historical approach to the construction and performance of instruments. The expansive range of this project invites multiple perspectives to construct a fuller account of the early gourd banjo, the direct ancestor of the five-string banjo. Any banjo player or enthusiast will find something of interest in these pages. This volume also contributes broadly to the study of American folk music, African American and diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, organology, history and historiography, geography, and museum studies. Despite the diversity of methodologies and data in this volume, the authors converse coherently across its chapters to construct an empirically grounded and richly contextualized early banjo history. Each contribution across these many fields yields new insights or corrects false conclusions from earlier scholarship.
Part I consists of one introductory chapter situating the new insights of this book in broader trajectories of banjo roots research. Shlomo Pestcoe and Greg C. Adams trace what they term the “banjo genome,” defined here as “the sum total of the various design concepts, morphological characteristics, and musicological factors that have defined the banjo family over the course of its historic continuum, stretching back to its African ancestors” (4). Tracing the banjo genome highlights its dynamic flows across geographic and ethnic barriers, findings which contrast with the inert and agentless tendencies of classic organology.
In Part II, Shlomo Pestcoe gives an overview of West African plucked spike lutes, explaining their use in social life, their construction, and their connection to early gourd banjos. He identifies the Jola enkonting as the early gourd banjo’s closest relative in Africa. Then, Chuck Levy reports on interviews with Senegalese enktoning players Ekona Diatta and Sana Ndiaye. Each musician is directly quoted at length, discussing how he came to play the enkonting, what social settings it is most often performed in, and other topics related to the instrument and Jola society. Greg C. Adams and Chuck Levy’s chapter, “The Down-Stroke Connection,” compares the playing techniques of Jola enkonting performers with those put forth in nineteenth-century five-string banjo manuals. They find remarkable similarities in forms of down-stroke playing, which further suggests that the enkonting is a predecessor to the five-string banjo. Nick Bamber, a private banjo researcher, found similar gourd lutes in the Bijago Islands of Guinea-Bissau that were less influenced by Islam than other West African areas and thus more likely to maintain traditional instruments.
Part III explores banjo history in the Caribbean. Saskia Willaert, curator of the African Collections at the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels, describes her encounter with the Haitian banza while assembling an exhibit. Early banjo expert Pete Ross visited Brussels to inspect the banza. He situates the Haitian banza in the broader “banjo genome,” finding that it shares important characteristics with early gourd banjos in the United States, such as the instrument depicted in a 1780’s painting from South Carolina that depicts an early gourd banjo, The Old Plantation. Also, in this section, Pestcoe analyzes seventeenth-century accounts of the early gourd banjo in Jamaica and on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. He makes the case that the “strum strumps” illustrated by European explorers bear striking resemblance to other early gourd banjos.
In Part IV, Shlomo Pestcoe, Robert Winans, and Greg C. Adams examine the early history of the banjo in North America. The opening chapter transports us to another unlikely destination in banjo studies, New York City, as Pestcoe and Adams recount a newspaper account of a black man playing banjo for a festival in 1736. They attempt to identify the author of the anonymous letter and determine the holiday the banjoist was celebrating. In the next chapter, Pestcoe corrects long-held misinterpretations of The Old Plantation; none other than Melville Herskovits erroneously concluded the dance depicted in the painting was a “jumping-the-broom” ceremony common at weddings in the African diaspora. Furthermore, for years the instrument was falsely identified as “an African molo,” “which resembles a banjo” (176-177).
Winans undertakes two major historical projects in this section. First, using more than 12,000 runaway slave advertisements from over 300 eighteenth-century newspapers, he compiles data on 761 musicians, finding only a small number of banjo players represented, clustered in the Chesapeake Bay region. In the following chapter, he maps over eighty instances of banjo playing between 1736 and 1840 mentioned in available sources. These chapters provide comprehensive and empirical insights into the general state of banjo performance in pre-Civil War America.
Part V, the final section of the book, looks closely at repertoires and playing styles of banjoists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These chapters demonstrate the complex ways the banjo moved across black and white communities and how its performance techniques evolved in new contexts. George Gibson challenges the prevailing narrative that whites picked up the banjo through racist minstrel shows, arguing instead that the substantial black population in Appalachian Kentucky introduced the banjo to white folk culture prior to 1840’s minstrelsy. Then, Jim Dalton surveys several mid-nineteenth-century banjo instruction books. He documents a shift from just intonation to tempered intonational methods to explain the addition fretboards in banjo construction.
Tony Thomas, a specialist in African American banjo history, contributes a chapter on the playing style of competitive banjoist Gus Cannon. Cannon’s technique and repertoire show that he was at the confluence of many popular banjo styles, mainly ragtime and classical guitar, and was not an isolated or unorthodox folk musician. The following chapter, by Robert Winans, continues Thomas’s discussion, showing that the “big world of the banjo” influenced banjoists in the Piedmont region of North Carolina and Virginia. The musicians Winans interviewed were influenced by two-finger-style guitar of African American guitarists.
Banjo Roots and Branches opens up many new avenues of research into the banjo and offers new possibilities for applications in numerous fields. Aside from its important insights and corrections to banjo scholarship, this book contributes to key theoretical discussions on globalization, colonialism, race, tradition, and music.
--------
[Review length: 1113 words • Review posted on April 2, 2020]