Where the Banjo Comes From

Every tune in this course is Southern, and so is the banjo, but its roots go back much further. Here is the short version, told plainly. It has proud chapters and painful ones, and both belong to the instrument you are learning.

West African roots

For many centuries, musicians in West Africa have played lutes made from a gourd with an animal skin stretched over it and a long wooden neck: instruments such as the akonting of the Jola people (Senegal, the Gambia and Guinea-Bissau), the xalam and the ngoni. The akonting is one of the banjo’s closest living relatives. It has two long melody strings and one short drone string, and it is played by striking down with a fingernail and then sounding the short string with the thumb. If that sounds like clawhammer banjo, it should.

In the Americas

Enslaved Africans carried that knowledge with them. In the Caribbean and in North America they built gourd-bodied banjos with skin heads, and written records mention instruments called banza, banjar and similar names from the 1600s on. The oldest banjo that survives, the “Creole Bania,” was made by an enslaved musician in Suriname in the 1770s. In the American South, the banjo was above all the instrument of Black musicians, played for dances and gatherings, and it was from Black players that white Southerners first learned it.

The minstrel stage

In the 1830s the white performer Joel Walker Sweeney, who had learned from African American musicians, took the banjo onto the stage. (He is often said to have added the short 5th string; historians doubt it, since the drone string is older than he is.) From the 1840s, blackface minstrel shows, in which white performers mocked Black people, made the banjo famous across America and Britain. This is an ugly part of the story and should be called what it was. The shows spread the instrument, factory-made banjos and the first banjo instruction books, while they caricatured the people who had created it.

Later in the century, “classic” banjo players played parlor music and marches with their fingers, and in the early 1900s jazz bands took up four-string banjos played with a pick.

Old-time music

Through all of this, the banjo stayed at home in the rural South, played by Black and white musicians alike. In the Southern mountains, the fiddle and the banjo together became the sound of country dances. The downstroke style, which grew from the African way of playing, is called clawhammer or frailing; some players picked with two or three fingers instead. When record companies began recording rural Southern musicians in the 1920s, these string bands were the music they found. Today we call it old-time music.

Bluegrass

In 1945 a young banjo player from North Carolina, Earl Scruggs, joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. Scruggs played with picks on his thumb and two fingers, in fast, rolling patterns that carry the melody inside a stream of notes. He named the North Carolina player Snuffy Jenkins among his influences. His three-finger style became the sound of bluegrass and remains the most common way to play the banjo.

Today

Both styles are alive and well, at jams, dances and festivals all over the world. In recent years musicians such as Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons and Jake Blount have drawn on old recordings of Black banjo players and string bands, and the Library of Congress has gathered those recordings in a research guide on African American banjo players. When you play a tune in this course, you are joining a very long line of players.

Hear the two styles

The same G chord, played the two ways this course teaches. First clawhammer: strike, brush, thumb. Then a three-finger roll: thumb, index, middle.

Sources: Wikipedia’s articles “Banjo,” “Akonting,” “Clawhammer,” “Scruggs style” and “Earl Scruggs”; the Library of Congress Folklife Today post “New Research Guide: African American Banjo Players” (2023) and its research guide, African American Banjo Players.