Copyright 2016 by Laurent Dubois
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jacket design: Tim Jones
Jacket image: Closeup of Banjo Being Played, 1941 Eric Schall/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
978-0-674-04784-6 (alk. paper)
978-0-674-96883-7 (EPUB)
978-0-674-96882-0 (MOBI)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Dubois, Laurent, 1971 author.
The banjo : Americas African instrument / Laurent Dubois.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. BanjoHistory. 2. Banjo musicHistory and criticism. 3. African AmericansMusicHistory and criticism. 4. MusicSocial aspectsUnited States. 5. MusicUnited StatesHistory and criticism. I. Title.
ML1015.B3D83 2016
787.8'81909dc23
2015031048
THE BANJO HAS HAD MANY NAMES.
Banza | Banjar | Kitt |
Bangier | Banja | Bangil |
Bonja | Strum strum | Bonjour |
Banjaw | Banjou | African bango |
Banjah | Bangoe | Merrywang |
Bonjoo | Bandjo | Banjee |
Creole bania | Bonjaw | Banjor |
Congo banjo | Banza ng Guine |
But they all name one sound: the sound of strings humming over skin. That is the sound a banjo makes, the sound that defines it. That sound has accompanied songs and stories, consoled lonely souls, and electrified crowds. It has had many meanings: it is the sound of Africa, the sound of slavery, the sound of blackness, the sound of progress, the sound of protestthe sound of America. But most of all, the banjo has been the sound of solidarity, of gathering in the midst of exile, of being together and in so doing being able to recount the past and imagine a future. This book is about that sound.
When you step back and take a good look, the banjo is a rather strange concoction. A drum on a stick, it might be called. But the stick is a neck. And the neck has that odd peg sticking out of the top to hold a little short string. And the drumhead itself requires elaborate tacks or screws or brackets to hold it together. More often than not, banjos hum and buzz. They get out of tune, it seems, just to cause a hassle. When they are in tune, it isnt always obvious. And people cant quite agree on what in tune means on the banjo in any case. How did it end up so strange? And why, even though it is so strange, have so many people persisted in picking it up and playing it? How is it that this awkward kid has ended up one of the great stars of musical life in the Americas?
The banjos journeyfrom its African inspirations, to its Caribbean and North American invention, through its humming in a bewildering array of music movements and formsis our journey. In this curious instrument lives a history of American culture, a culture born out of the layered encounters between Africa, Europe, and the diverse societies of the Americas, from north to south. This is a story about its unexpected appearance in unlikely places, where it turns out to be just what is needed. And so it is befitting to begin our journey through the banjos history in an unexpected place: not in the Appalachian Mountains or the Piedmont or New Orleans or Philadelphia, but rather on the banks of the Mediterranean, sometime in the 1920s.
*
Wandering the port town of Marseilles with a ragtag group of men from Senegal, the Caribbean, and the United States, Lincoln Agrippa Daily makes what little money he can by playing the banjo. But the instrument is more than his livelihood; it is his identity. His friends call him Banjo; and, caressing the instrument, he declares that he will never part with it: it is more than a gal, moh than a pal; its mahself.
Banjo, the eponymous main character of a novel published in 1929 by Claude McKay, is a child of the Cotton Belt who has wandered all over America: his life is a dream of vagabondage that he was perpetually pursuing and realizing in odd ways, always incomplete but never unsatisfactory. Wanting to go to Europe, he hit upon the unique plan of getting himself deported. The problem was convincing immigration officials that he was a foreigner. They had all been thunderstruck when he calmly announced that he was not American. Everything about himaccent, attitude, movementshouted Dixie. Despite his insistence on his foreign parentage, he could never convince any American, especially a Southern-knowing one, that he was no Aframerican. The immigration officials nevertheless helped him find passage on a boat headed across the Atlantic, which dropped him in Marseilles.
McKay, one of the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Jamaica and traveled a great deal in Europe and North Africa. In his poetry and novels, he tried to capture the dramas, humor, and struggles of the far-flung African diaspora. In Banjo, inspired by his time in Marseille and completed in Morocco, he found a way to use the instrument as the perfect symbol for the history of wanderings and encounters that had connected Africa, the Americas, and Europe. The instrument from which McKays character got his name has long followed its own dream of vagabondage, which it has realized in odd ways, changing shape and sound across time and space. Like the characters in his novel, the instrument is difficult to pin down. It is rooted everywhere and nowhere in particular. Is it American? African? Caribbean? African-American? Is it southern? White? Rural? For all its untethered movement and circulationor perhaps because of itit is nevertheless an instrument that seems (just like McKays character) to be fundamentally Americas instrument, which is what its late nineteenth-century boosters called it. Trying to deport it from our culture would be a joke. And yet it is an instrument with no birth certificate. It has seemed fundamentally at home in so many places because it is truly at home nowhere.
This book is a biography of the banjo. Its protagonist is the instrument itself, its plot the story of the complicated and layered meanings that resonated out of the instrument over the centuries. It is the story of an instrument with character, character deeply grounded in a range of contexts, but one that (thankfully) cannot really be pinned down.
McKay understood that the banjo is in fact a perfect object through which we can understand the meaning of what is American, precisely because it has its roots in the institution that was, for hundreds of years, the central pillar of the American economy: slavery. It is so deeply American because, like the slaves who crossed the Atlantic from Africa, it was uprooted. The banjo embodies a story of crossings and exchanges that go far beyond the mainland United States, highlighting the constant connections between the Caribbean and North America in a world shaped by plantation slavery. It is at once African, Caribbean, and North American, its history a cartography that respects no national borders, but rather maps a story of unruly movement and unpredictable encounters. By following the banjo, we get a privileged view of American history as a crossroads, a story defined as much by the intensive exchange between cultures as by a profound, violent, and ongoing set of struggles between the communities that ultimately collaborated in creating its sound.
