The Banjo from Africa to America

A Program By Russ Childers

• a West African style gourd banjo
• a hand-carved fretless mountain banjo
• a 1922-manufactured resonator banjo.

As an illustration of African syncopation, audiences learn to pat juba. Or they may learn to drone like a bagpipe, another cultural import that effected a change in banjo construction. Even banjo construction materials-from gourd to real-life groundhog skin to recycled tin can-help audiences understand how early banjo creators made music with what is at hand. A fascinating mini-history lesson comes with the banjo: who were its first players? What negative impact during the Minstrel Era changed all this? And what does Rock and Roll have to do with it? With a live performance of the music to illustrate the migration of the banjo from Africa to the Appalachian highlands, audiences gain an insight into the rich cultural diversity reflected in one of America's oldest traditional music forms.

Bibliography - Teacher Resources

• Altamont: Black Stringband Music from the Library of Congress. CD. Rounder Records.
• Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia. Produced and annotated by Cece Conway and Scott Odell. CD. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1998.
• Conway, Cecelia. African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions. University of Tennessee Press, 1995
• Fink, Cathy, and Marcy Marxer. Making and Playing Homemade Instruments. VHS. Homespun Video.
• Gura, Philip F. and James F. Bollman. America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century. University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
• Linn, Karen. That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture. University of Illinois Press, 1994.
• Thornburg, Robert. About Gourd Banjos. http://www.gourdbanjo.com/GBhtml/about.html
• Webb, Robert Lloyd. Ring the Banjar! The Banjo in America from Folklore to Factory. MIT Museum, 1984.
• Wigginton, Eliot, ed. Foxfire 3. Anchor Books, 1975.
• Wigginton, Eliot, ed. Foxfire 6. Anchor Books, 1975.
• Wunderlich, George. Wunder Banjo Company - The Finest Handcrafted Early Banjo Reproductions. http://www.wunderbanjo.com/index.htm

Activities

Make Musical Instruments

• Make a tin canjo. Visit Russ Childers' website at http://home.fuse.net/russchilders for directions.
• Make an oatmeal box banjo. See the video Making and Playing Homemade Musical Instruments by Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer from Homespun Video.
• Make a bleach bottle banjo. Find instructions in You Can Teach Yourself to Make Music with Homemade Instruments by Mark Nelson, Mel Bay, 1995.

Try One of These Gourd Projects

• Grow long-necked gourds from seed. To order old-fashioned long-necked gourd seeds online, contact one of the websites:

  Lewis Mountain Herbs

  http://www.bright.net/~mtherbs/

  Rachel's Decorative and Ornamental Seed List

  http://www.seedman.com/Rachel/Gourds.htm

• Craft your own gourd project. Besides banjos, other things have traditionally been made from gourds, i.e., birdhouses, water and soap dippers. See Thornburg's website for a discussion of gourds: http://www.gourdbanjo.com/GBhtml/about.html
• One of the code songs from Underground Railroad days was "Follow the Drinking Gourd." Slaves found their way to freedom by following landmarks and stars according to the directions given in the song. A children's book by Jean Winters called Follow the Drinking Gourd gives a brief history along with the music for the song.
• Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians by Jean Ritchie describes "The Old Soap-Gourd" as a play-party dance and song. The play-party may also be found in Jean Ritchie's Swapping Song Book.

Experiment with Musical/Rhythmic Exercises; Demonstrate the Banjo's Percussive Heritage

• Practice Celtic droning. One half of class sings tune while other half drones a sympathetic note, e.g., like bagpipes. This imitates the droning effect that the short fifth string on the banjo has from the influence of its Irish-Scots players.
• Work on some body percussions from African tradition (see Bessie Jones' Step It Down; Making Musical Things by Ann Wiseman; Traditional American Dance Book by Rick Meyers) in order to understand the banjo's syncopation:
  1. Juba
  2. Hambone
• Teach the "Indian," a mountain clog dance step inspired by Eastern Cherokee dance tradition. Traditional American Dance Book by Rick Meyers and Clog Dance in the Appalachians by Jerry Duke both describe the Eastern Cherokee/African tie-in to Appalachian music.