Banjar

By George Wunderlich

The Banjo Lesson 1	Jimi Hendrix

“Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains." -Paul Whiteman, “the King of Jazz”, b. 1890

The first Africans enslaved and brought to America by the Portuguese in the 1700s were peaceful people, gatherers and traders known for the palm wine that they made. In Africa, their song and dance was accompanied by the akonting — a stringed instrument made from a special kind of bamboo (called in Mandinkan banjo) and a hollowed out gourd. Other African peoples permitted only elite priests or historians to build and play similar instruments, and these peoples also became enslaved during that dark chapter of history.

In America under slavery, these two traditions collided. Some slaves were accustomed to music being the creation of the whole community, while others felt it was the role of a privileged few. Looking for any form of respite from the hardships of their lives, those who advocated music for all won out, and this was the birth of American popular music.

Having brought the African instruments with them in their memories and in their souls, slaves cobbled together what was available to them — a sturdy board, gourds, animal skin, and horsehair wound into strings. These instruments were different than any of the instruments from their homelands in the West African Senegambian River Valleys. It was not an akonting or a xhalam or any of the numerous other stringed instruments that they had known there. It was still a drum-like stringed instrument with a neck, but both an evolution and something different, something new, something entirely African-American. By the early- to mid-1700s, the instrument it evolved into was called the banjo.

Maryland has the distinction of being one of the earliest known homes of the banjo. In 1756, we have a reference to the instrument in the small town Namjamoy on the western shore. In that same year, a white man named Mr. Holliday who lived near Easton, Maryland, wrote about his desire and attempts to play the banjo. He was the first white man that we have evidence of attempting to play the instrument, and he was also the first to make it an American export. Mr. Holliday had one of the slaves on his plantation build a banjo for him to send to a family in England with instruction about how to play it. By 1763, a banjo appears in a woodcut called Instruments of the Diaspora that was published in London, where anti-slavery sentiment ran high.

The banjo probably spread through Frederick County very early in 1800s. We know, for instance, that a slave woman from the Eastern Shore of Maryland named Ellen Snowden, traveled on the national road through Frederick county as she headed to Mt. Vernon, Ohio, in Knox County, where she would eventually settle as freewoman. By that time, the banjo was a well-established instrument on the Eastern Shore and was becoming popular in Frederick, but it was not yet well known in Ohio. Mrs. Snowden’s two sons would eventually form a popular traveling minstrel troupe and family singing group centered in Mt. Vernon where they would entertain on banjo, fiddle, guitar, tambourine, and dulcimer. Here we can see a mother’s influence. That the first instrument her son chose was the banjo suggests that the mother — and many, many others like her — carried a love of, knowledge of and sound of the instrument with her from her enslavement to freedom.

By 1810, still early in the county’s history, the banjo was well known enough among the white populations of America that authors no longer felt the necessity to describe the instrument. Within a few years, the interaction of rural black and white Americans began to move the instrument from a purely African-American to a truly American phenomenon. First brought to wide prominence by a white performer named Joel W. Sweeney, this instrument took America by storm in the 1840s. Certainly Frederick, with its long musical tradition, entertained many of these banjo performers, starting in the 1840s and reaching a pinnacle of popularity around 1910.

In the 1840s and 1850s, William Esperance Boucher, Jr. built banjos in Baltimore and sold the inexpensive instruments to the public. They were wildly popular and spread across the young nation. Most of the lumber used was brought up the C&O canal and stockpiled in Frederick before it was sent to Boucher in Baltimore. The lumberyard that stored it in Frederick was part of White Hill & Company Undertakers, a casket making company. That building is now the Civil War Medical Museum on Market Street.

Prior to the Civil War, traveling minstrel shows took banjos from regional cultural significance to a somewhat national experience. Minstrel shows would travel from town to town and perform in hotels, taverns and fire halls — really anywhere people could gather. But still, in the young, mainly rural country, many poor and geographically dispersed people did not have access to a minstrel stage.

The Civil War changed everything, and here again Frederick became the crossroads of culture. In the Civil War camps, men from different regions of the country would meet and swap stories of many aspects of their lives as well as share their style of banjo playing. This was a process of cross-linking and cross fertilization of ideas and customs.

Sketch of Civil War hospital in Frederick Courtesy the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Frederick, MD

In the major hospital centers, of which Frederick was one, men from both sides of the conflict would lay side by side for many months. They would listen to entertainment, including banjo music, as part of their therapeutic regime, and they also had a lot of time to talk with each other and play music themselves. These hospitals were great melting pots of culture, and then, eventually, all those people went home with new influences and knowledge.

Except for the subsequently insular Appalachia, after the Civil War we see a homogenization of the style of banjo playing. The syncopation evident in the natural style of banjo playing influenced the very first American music, popularized by performers like Steven Foster, Dan Emmit, TD Rice, and Joel Sweeney. Almost all current American popular music — blues, rock & roll, country-western, bluegrass, hip hop, ragtime, jazz— traces its routes back to that music and that instrument once made by the rough hands of people in bondage; they’re all branches of the same tree – a tree that grew from an African seed.

The banjo became one of the great cross-cultural bridges in America.

1. The Banjo Lesson, Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 1893 Courtesy of Hampton University Museum, Virginia