Case Study 2: The African American Roots of the Banjo and Mountain Music

The Instrument You Think You Know

Pick up a banjo. Hold it. Feel the weight of it — the drum-like body, the long neck, the five strings (four long, one short — that distinctive short fifth string that starts partway up the neck). Pluck a string. Listen to the sound: bright, metallic, instantly recognizable. This sound — more than any fiddle tune, any ballad, any yodel — is the sound that the world associates with Appalachian music, with hillbilly culture, with the white rural South.

Now consider this: the instrument in your hands is African.

Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract, theoretical sense. The banjo — its design, its construction principles, its playing technique, its musical function — originated in West Africa, traveled to the Americas in the minds and hands of enslaved people, existed for more than a century as an exclusively African American instrument, and was adopted by white musicians only in the mid-nineteenth century. The most "Appalachian" instrument in the world is, at its root, African. And the story of how that fact was forgotten — deliberately, systematically, and for specific cultural and political reasons — is one of the most revealing stories in American cultural history.

The African Ancestors

The banjo did not arrive in the Americas fully formed. It evolved from a family of West African stringed instruments that share essential structural features: a gourd or calabash body covered with animal skin to create a resonating membrane, a wooden stick or pole serving as a neck, and strings made of plant fiber, horsehair, or gut.

The instruments that scholars have identified as the banjo's closest ancestors include:

The akonting (also spelled "ekonting"), played by the Jola people of Senegambia (modern-day Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau). The akonting has a gourd body covered with goatskin, a bamboo neck, and three strings — two long melody strings and one short drone string that begins partway up the neck, precisely mirroring the fifth-string arrangement that would become the banjo's defining feature. The akonting is played with a downstroke technique — the hand striking downward across the strings — that is fundamentally the same motion as the clawhammer banjo technique still practiced in Appalachia today.

The ngoni (or "xalam"), played by the Mande and Wolof peoples of West Africa. The ngoni is a larger, more complex instrument than the akonting, with up to five strings and a more resonant body, but it shares the essential skin-over-gourd construction and the downstroke playing technique.

The kora, a 21-string instrument played by Mande griots (hereditary musicians and oral historians). The kora is more sophisticated than the direct banjo ancestors, but it belongs to the same family of African stringed instruments and demonstrates the depth and complexity of the musical tradition from which the banjo emerged.

These instruments were not primitive. They were products of highly developed musical cultures with centuries of accumulated knowledge about instrument construction, tuning systems, playing techniques, and repertoire. The musicians who played them — particularly the griots, who served as historians, storytellers, and cultural custodians in West African societies — were trained professionals whose skills were passed down through family lineages.

The Middle Passage and Musical Survival

When enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas — through the brutal violence of the Atlantic slave trade that lasted from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries — they were stripped of almost everything: their freedom, their families, their languages, their names. But they carried their music.

The earliest documented references to African American stringed instruments in the Americas date to the seventeenth century. The Frenchman Father Jean-Baptiste Le Pers described enslaved people in Martinique playing a "banza" in the 1690s. The English physician Sir Hans Sloane documented a "strum strump" played by enslaved people in Jamaica in 1688. The instrument appears under various names — banjar, banjer, banza, bangoe — in accounts from the Caribbean and the American South throughout the eighteenth century.

These instruments were built by enslaved people from materials available to them — gourds, animal skins, horsehair, wood — reproducing as closely as possible the instruments they remembered from Africa or had learned from other enslaved Africans. The construction was an act of cultural survival: in the midst of the most dehumanizing system of exploitation in modern history, enslaved people maintained their musical traditions, built their instruments, and played their music.

The banjo-type instrument served multiple functions in enslaved communities. It was entertainment — played at dances and social gatherings. It was communication — rhythmic patterns and melodic phrases could carry coded messages. It was resistance — the maintenance of cultural identity in the face of a system designed to destroy it. And it was art — the expression of creativity, skill, and human dignity in circumstances designed to deny all three.

The Black Banjo Tradition in America

For most of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century, the banjo was understood in America as a Black instrument. The association was so strong that white Americans rarely played it. Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1781, described the "banjar" as the instrument of the enslaved: "The instrument proper to them is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa." Period illustrations consistently depict Black musicians playing banjo-type instruments at dances and celebrations.

The music that enslaved African Americans played on these instruments was not simply African music transplanted. It was a new creation — a synthesis of African rhythmic and melodic traditions with the musical influences available in the Americas: European hymns and folk songs, Indigenous musical elements, and the creative innovations of the musicians themselves. The result was a distinct African American musical tradition that was, from the beginning, the product of cultural exchange and creative adaptation.

This tradition included distinctive playing techniques that would shape American music for centuries. The most important was the downstroke or stroke style — the technique of striking the strings with the back of the fingernail in a downward motion while the thumb played the short fifth string as a rhythmic drone. This technique, which clearly derives from the playing style of West African instruments like the akonting, would later be called clawhammer or frailing by white banjo players, and it remains one of the two dominant banjo playing styles in Appalachian music today.

The Crossover: Minstrelsy and Appropriation

The banjo's transition from a Black instrument to a white instrument — and, eventually, to an instrument associated primarily with white Appalachian culture — occurred through two channels: the minstrel stage and direct cross-racial musical exchange.

The minstrel show — a form of theatrical entertainment in which white performers in blackface makeup caricatured African American music, dance, and speech — was the most popular form of entertainment in America from the 1830s through the 1870s. Minstrel performers adopted the banjo as their signature instrument, and through the minstrel stage, the banjo entered white American popular culture on a massive scale.

The irony was cruel and deep. The minstrel show degraded and ridiculed African American culture while simultaneously spreading African American musical traditions — including the banjo and its playing techniques — to white audiences across the country. The very instrument that enslaved people had built and played as an act of cultural survival was now being used to mock and dehumanize them on the popular stage. And the white performers who played the banjo on the minstrel stage were rarely credited with learning from Black musicians — the transmission was hidden, denied, or presented as white innovation.

Joel Walker Sweeney of Virginia is often cited in popular accounts as the "inventor" of the five-string banjo. This claim is false. What Sweeney did was popularize the banjo among white audiences through his minstrel performances in the 1830s and 1840s. He may have added the short fifth drone string to an instrument that previously had four strings, or he may have simply adopted a feature that already existed in African American instruments. The historical evidence is unclear. What is clear is that Sweeney learned to play the banjo from the enslaved Black musicians on his family's farm in Appomattox County, Virginia — a fact that was documented in his own time but that later accounts tended to minimize or omit.

The second channel of transmission was direct musical exchange between Black and white musicians, particularly in the rural South and in Appalachia. In the mountain regions, where Black and white people lived in proximity (see Chapter 6), musical exchange was a constant, ongoing process. Black and white musicians heard each other play, learned from each other, and borrowed techniques and tunes. This exchange was real, creative, and mutual — but it was also asymmetrical. Black musicians received little or no credit for their contributions to what was increasingly being called "white mountain music," while white musicians who borrowed from the Black tradition were celebrated as innovators.

The Whitewashing of the Banjo

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the banjo was undergoing a profound cultural rebranding. As African Americans moved away from the banjo — partly because of its association with minstrelsy and degradation, partly because new instruments (particularly the guitar) became available — white musicians, especially in the Appalachian Mountains, adopted it and made it their own.

The folklorists who came to the mountains in the early twentieth century — Cecil Sharp, Olive Dame Campbell, and their successors — completed the whitewashing. They were looking for a "pure" Anglo-Saxon folk culture, and they had no interest in the African American musical traditions that were part of the mountain soundscape. Sharp explicitly avoided Black singers during his Appalachian collecting trips. The folk music collections that resulted from this era of fieldwork presented Appalachian music as a European tradition — English and Scots-Irish in origin, white in practice — with no African American component.

This erasure was not innocent. It served specific cultural and political purposes. The construction of Appalachian music as "pure white folk culture" reinforced the racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow era. It provided a cultural foundation for the idea that Appalachia was a racially homogeneous region — an idea that, as this textbook has documented, was never true. And it deprived African American musicians of credit for one of their most significant cultural contributions to American life.

Recovery: The Carolina Chocolate Drops and Beyond

The recovery of the African American banjo tradition has been one of the most important developments in American music scholarship and performance over the past three decades.

The scholar Laurent Dubois, in his book The Banjo: America's African Instrument (2016), traced the full history of the banjo from its West African origins through its American evolution, documenting the instrument's African roots with meticulous scholarship. The musicologist Sule Greg Wilson and the performer Tony Thomas have conducted extensive research on the Black banjo tradition, including fieldwork in West Africa documenting the akonting and its relationship to the American banjo.

The Black Banjo Gathering — first held in Boone, North Carolina, in 2005 — brought together Black banjo players, scholars, and enthusiasts to celebrate and recover the African American banjo tradition. The gathering, organized by Tony Thomas and others, was a landmark event that made the African origins of the banjo visible in a way that decades of scholarship alone had not.

And the Carolina Chocolate Drops — founded in 2005 by Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson — brought the African American string band tradition back into the mainstream of American music with electrifying performances and Grammy-winning recordings. The Carolina Chocolate Drops played old-time music — fiddle tunes, banjo songs, string band numbers — with the technical skill and emotional power of the tradition's greatest practitioners. And they were Black, which meant that their very presence on stage was a corrective to a century of erasure.

Giddens, who has gone on to a remarkable solo career as a singer, instrumentalist, and scholar, has been the most prominent advocate for the recovery of the African American roots of Appalachian and southern music. Her MacArthur Fellowship, her opera Omar, and her public advocacy have made the African origins of the banjo — and, more broadly, the multiracial foundations of American roots music — a matter of wide public knowledge for the first time.

What the Erasure Means

The whitewashing of the banjo is not merely a matter of historical inaccuracy. It is a case study in how cultural narratives are constructed, maintained, and used.

When the banjo is presented as a white instrument — when the standard story of Appalachian music begins with English ballads and proceeds through white musicians to Nashville — Black people are erased from a cultural tradition they helped create. This erasure reinforces the idea that Appalachian culture is white culture, which in turn reinforces the invisibility of Black Appalachians (see Chapter 6, Chapter 12, Chapter 19). It deprives African Americans of credit for a foundational contribution to American cultural life. And it impoverishes the understanding of Appalachian music itself — because a tradition understood as purely European is a tradition only half understood.

The recovery of the banjo's African roots does not diminish the white musicians who have played it brilliantly for generations — Earl Scruggs, Ralph Stanley, and their successors. It contextualizes them. It places them within a richer, more complex, more honest history — a history in which the music of the Appalachian Mountains was always, from its very foundations, the product of cultural exchange between Africa and Europe, between Black and white, between traditions that the racial ideologies of America insisted must be kept separate but that, in the hollows and on the porches, were constantly, creatively, and beautifully intertwined.

Discussion Questions

1. The banjo's transformation from a Black instrument to a white cultural symbol occurred over more than a century. What were the key mechanisms of this transformation? How did minstrelsy, folklorist collecting practices, and the country music industry each contribute to the erasure of the banjo's African origins?

2. Thomas Jefferson described the "banjar" as the instrument "proper to" enslaved Africans in 1781. By 1927, the banjo was the signature instrument of the white Carter Family. What does this transformation tell us about how racial identities are projected onto cultural forms? Can an instrument or a musical tradition have a racial identity?

3. The chapter describes the recovery of the African American banjo tradition by scholars, performers, and organizations like the Black Banjo Gathering and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. What is the significance of this recovery? Does knowing the African origins of the banjo change how you hear the instrument? Should it?

4. Bill Monroe acknowledged the influence of Arnold Shultz, a Black blues guitarist, on his musical development. Earl Scruggs's three-finger picking style evolved from techniques used by Black banjo players in the North Carolina Piedmont. How should the contributions of Black musicians to bluegrass and country music be recognized and honored? What forms should that recognition take?

5. The erasure of Black contributions to Appalachian music is paralleled by the erasure of Black contributions to many other forms of American culture — including rock and roll, jazz, and the American culinary tradition. Is there a pattern here? What does this pattern reveal about the relationship between cultural creation, racial power, and historical memory in America?