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, and in modern forms is usually made of BOPET, where early membranes were made of goat skin.
Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by the "African diaspora" and had African antecedents. In the 19th century, interest in the instrument was spread across the United Kingdom and United States by traveling shows of the highly popular traveling blackface minstrel shows, followed by mass production and mail-order sales, including instructional books. The inexpensive or home-made banjo remained part of rural folk culture, but five-string and four-string banjos also became popular for home parlor music entertainment, college music clubs, and early 20th century jazz bands. By the early 20th century, the banjo was most frequently associated with folk, blues, cowboy music, and country music.
By mid-century it had come to be strongly associated with bluegrass. Eventually it began to be employed occasionally and sporadically in various kinds or other kinds of popular music. Some famous American bluegrass players 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.Winship, David."The Black American Music Tradition in Country Music ." BCMA, Birthplace of Country Music Alliance. Retrieved 2 August 2007."Old-time (oldtimey) Music What is it? ." TML, A Traditional Music Library. Retrieved 02-08-2007. 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 twoubadou.
Etymology The term banjo has several possible etymological origins. One theory links it to 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, which is a loan word to the Portuguese language resulting in the term banza, which was used by early French travelers in the Americas. Its earliest recorded use was in 1678 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.
The OED claims that the term banjo comes from a dialectal pronunciation of Portuguese bandore or from an early anglicisation of Spanish bandurria. 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, 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:
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.
History
Early origins
The modern banjo was tethered directly from West African lute instruments that have been recorded in use for almost a millennia. These instruments were crafted from split gourds with animal skins stretched across them. Strings, from gut or vegetable fibers, were attached to a wooden neck.
The earliest European 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 which some consider to be similar to the banjo.
They have little varietie of instruments, that which is most common in use, is made of a great gourd, and a necke thereunto fastned, resembling, in some sort, our Bandora; but they have no manner of fret, and the strings they are either such as the place yeeldes or their invention can attaine to make, being very unapt to yeeld a sweete and musicall sound, notwithstanding with pinnes they winde and bring to agree in tunable notes, having not above sixe strings upon their greatest instrument.The earliest surviving physical banjo-style instrument from the New World is the " Creole Bania", crafted by an enslaved person in Suriname and dated to the 1770s. This instrument was collected by Scottish-Dutch mercenary John Gabriel Stedman during his time in Suriname and is now archived in the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen in the Netherlands . Although there are older documented references to instruments described as similar to the Banjo, such as the "banza" in Martinique and Jamaica, Musicologists generally agree that the "Creole Bania" is the oldest surviving Banjo in the New World.
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. 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.
Various instruments in Africa, chief among them the kora, feature a skin drumhead and gourd (or similar shell) body. These instruments differ from early 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.
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 played by the Jola tribe of Senegambia, and the ubaw-akwala of the Igbo. Similar instruments include the xalam of Senegal 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.
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.
Banjos with fingerboards and tuning pegs are known from the Caribbean as early as the 17th century. Some 18th- and early 19th-century writers transcribed the name of these instruments variously as bangie, banza, bonjaw, banjer and banjar. A British tourist's 1812 description of a gambling hall in Wheeling, Virginia mentions bangies: "Would that Hogarth had lived to see that room! One corner was occupied by a portion of the assembly, engaged in the fascinating games of all-fours, three-up and cribbage; in another stood a table of refreshments, whiskey and biscuit, surrounded by a crowd of drinkers and smokers; a group of noisy politicians held possession in the third; and in the fourth was stationed the music which consisted of two bangies played by negroes nearly in a state of nudity, and a lute through which a Chickasaw breathed delightful harmony."
The instrument became increasingly available commercially from around the second quarter of the 19th century due to minstrel show performances.
Minstrel era, 1830s–1870s
In the antebellum South, many enslaved Africans played the banjo, spreading it to the rest of the population. 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. 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.Metro Voloshin, The Banjo, from Its Roots to the Ragtime Era: An Essay and Bibliography Music Reference Services Quarterly, Vol. 6(3) 1998. Sweeney has been credited with adding a string to the four-string African-American banjo, and popularizing the five-string banjo. Although Robert McAlpin Williamson is the first documented white banjoist,Gibson, George R. and Robert B. Winans. "Black Banjo Fiddle and Dance in Kentucky and the Amalgamation of African American and Anglo-American Folk Music." In Banjo Roots and Branches, 224. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. in the 1830s Sweeney became the first white performer to play the banjo on stage. 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. Sweeney participated in this transition by encouraging drum maker William Boucher of Baltimore to make banjos commercially for him to sell.
In 1949, Arthur Woodward credited Sweeney with replacing the gourd with a wooden sound box covered in skin, and adding a short fifth string around 1831. However, modern scholar Gene Bluestein pointed out in 1964 that Sweeney may not have originated either the 5th string or sound box. 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.
The instrument grew in popularity during the 1840s after Sweeney began his traveling minstrel show. 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. 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. 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. A popular movement of aspiring banjoists began as early as 1861. The enthusiasm for the instrument was labeled a "banjo craze" or "banjo mania."