The Black History of the White House

Most of us have grown up with a particular framework about American history and particularly the history of the presidencies. For the most part it has been a cleansed history, meaning that the foibles, errors and mistakes that were made by presidents were essentially not part of that history, particularly when it comes to race. Correcting that was part of the motivation for doing the book. We can see even today that this continues to be a battle. The decision in Arizona, for example, to ban ethnic studies, meaning that the histories of people of African descent, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians are more or less written out of the curriculum now in Arizona. Even more recently, this has been happening in Tennessee where a group of Tea Party activists also wants to rewrite history in a way in which only, as they see it, the positive parts of the lives of the Founding Fathers are taught, and any history related to what happened to African Americans as slaves, or what happened to Native Americans, who were frequently massacred, all of that should be written out. So we are always in a battle over how we understand and how we present history. (source: Political Affairs)

Clarence Lusane

Students, and I’ve been teaching close to 20 years now at the university level – each generation of students seems to forget what happened not only in the past, but almost immediately what has happened in front of them. The students who are coming in now, for example, are students who matured in the early 2000s, and we so have students now who think of Bill Clinton much as they think of George Washington – he’s an historic figure. So it becomes important that we revitalize and help them to either remember what they’ve forgotten or to learn what they have never learned. I think it has been a difficult transition, in many ways, for the universities, because the students who are coming in, this last generation, are coming in trained or in many ways educated through the Internet, and that means that a lot of the more rigorous kinds of book reading and learning that generations before went through, even with the imperfections, probably gave somewhat of a broader sense, or a more rigorous sense of history. Although students today have access to more information, they are coming with less knowledge. That’s what I’m finding and many of my colleagues are finding. (source: Political Affairs)

Official histories of the United States have ignored the fact that 25 percent of all U.S. presidents were slaveholders, and that black people were held in bondage in the White House itself. And while the nation was born under the banner of “freedom and justice for all,” many colonists risked rebelling against England in order to protect their lucrative slave business from the growing threat of British abolitionism. These historical facts, commonly excluded from schoolbooks and popular versions of American history, have profoundly shaped the course of race relations in the United States. (source: Teaching A People's History)

The Forum with Michael Fauntroy: Clarence Lusane from Michael K. Fauntroy on Vimeo.

The Promised Land II: By Nicholas Lemann

"The Promised Land II," by Nicholas Lemann (Vintage Press, 1992):Before World War II, the cotton planters of the Delta were absolutely opposed to black migration to the North. Hortense Powdermaker, enumerating the whites’ "creed of racial relations" in 1939, wrote that one of its main tenets was, "Negroes are necessary to the South, and it is desirable that they should stay there and not migrate to the North."

Whites kept the black school system in Mississippi inferior in part because they didn’t want sharecroppers’ children to have career options beyond sharecropping. Senator James K. Vardaman once said that educating the black man "simply renders him unfit for the work which the white man has prescribed, and which he will be forced to perform . . . the only effect is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook." In the 1920s, Clarksdale was supposed to become the site of a new black college called Delta State, but the white planters succeeded in having it moved to the town of Cleveland, fifty miles away, because they didn’t want new opportunities for blacks opening up in town.

The Hopson Plantation in the Mississippi Delta

The relocation of Delta State was a well-remembered story in black Clarksdale, and there were lots of rumors about other enterprises the planters had kept out.As late as the early 1940s, the owners of the King & Anderson plantation, an enormous spread of seventeen thousand acres just west of Clarksdale that was reputed to be the largest family plantation in Mississippi, sent two of their white managers to Chicago to see if they could get some of the sharecroppers who had left to come back home. The managers first met with John H. Jackson, the pastor of the magnificent yellow-brick Olivet Baptist Church, which was well on its way to becoming the largest black congregation in America. Jackson is probably best known now for having been the leading enemy of Martin Luther King within the black Baptist church; when the city of Chicago changed the name of South Parkway, the boulevard on which Olivet stands, to King Drive after King’s death, Jackson changed the address of the church to Thirty-first Street so he wouldn’t have to have King’s name on his letterhead. In the 1940s Jackson was willing to entertain two white plantation managers, but he said he couldn’t urge members of his flock to move back South until conditions for blacks improved there.

The King and Anderson Plantation sharecropper's children deprived of education

Then the managers held a long meeting with former King & Anderson sharecroppers in an apartment on the South Side. The managers announced that the plantation had undertaken a series of reforms, including electrifying sharecropper cabins and providing sharecroppers with regular written statements of their accounts so they would not be surprised at the settle. The former sharecroppers said they already knew all that, along with all the other recent news from the plantation; the Mississippi-Chicago grapevine was very active. They complained about having been swindled on King & Anderson and other plantations, and about having been abused, degraded, and beaten by plantation managers and policemen. They showed no interest in coming home.

King and Anderson Plantation in the Mississippi Delta

When the managers got back to Clarksdale and told the owners of the plantation what had happened, the owners arranged a meeting in Clarksdale to discuss the situation. After the meeting, the white leaders of Clarksdale asked the black leaders of Clarksdale to draw up a list of grievances, which they did. No good jobs. Cheating at the settle. Lynchings. Being denied the courtesy titles of "Mister" and "Missus." Poor schools. No hospitals. No sidewalks, gutters, or garbage collection in the black neighborhoods. Confronted with all this, the whites did nothing; the list of grievances could have been resubmitted virtually intact in the early 1960s.

King and Anderson Plantation sharecroppers

When word got around about the demonstration of the mechanical cotton picker on the Hopson plantation, though, the attitude of the whites toward black migration changed almost instantly. A plantation didn’t need hundreds of field hands any more; a handful would do. It didn’t matter if sharecroppers moved to Chicago. In fact, it helped to solve the problem of where the sharecroppers would go after their jobs were abolished.

Besides, the more far-sighted whites in the Delta had begun to detect a slight crumbling in the citadel of segregation. The New Deal was a generation old by now, and while politically it represented an accommodation between Northern liberals and Southern segregationists, the Delta’s planters perceived Franklin Roosevelt as a threatening figure. During his reign, various critics of the sharecropper system who at least raised segregation as an issue had emerged, and millions of Northern blacks had been recruited into the Democratic coalition. World War II had exposed thousands of young black men from the Delta to places where segregation didn’t exist, and, having fought for their country, they seemed to feel entitled to things they didn’t have in Mississippi. In Greenville, just after the end of the war, four black veterans went to the county courthouse and said they wanted to register to vote. The registrar said they hadn’t paid their poll tax for 1944. They came back with the money the next day, and the next, and the next, and every day they got a different excuse. Finally they filed a complaint with the FBI in Washington, and two agents came down to Greenville, interviewed the veterans, had them sign a complaint, and got them registered.

The implications of blacks voting were not happy ones for Mississippi whites, especially in the Delta, which was three-quarters black. In 1935, there were more black people living in Coahoma County alone than in the states of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada combined. Most middle-aged whites had been raised on their parents’ and grandparents’ horror stories about life during Reconstruction, when blacks were enfranchised. By the 1940s, the school-desegregation issue had reached the notice of white planters, as well as Aaron Henry. A few civil rights activities had started to pop up here and there. All in all, the idea of getting the numbers of blacks and whites in the Delta a little closer to equilibrium began to seem attractive to whites on Political as well as economic grounds. The best, the only, means to that end was black migration to the North. As Aaron Henry puts it, "They wished we’d go back to Africa, but Chicago was close enough."

On the Hopson plantation, the idea of a looming civil rights crisis was very much on the mind of the Hopson family; it gave a new urgency to the long-running efforts to get the mechanical cotton picker ready for full-scale production. Howell Hopson’s brother Richard, who ran the plantation office, wrote a long, impassioned letter to the local cotton industry association in April 1944, a few months before the public demonstration of the picker, which makes clear the plantation’s thinking on the picker’s political implications. He wrote (via registered mail – an indication that he meant to make an important statement): "I am confident that you are aware of the acute shortage of labor which now exists in the Delta and the difficult problem which we expect to have in attempting to harvest s cotton crop this fall and for several years to come. I am confident that you are aware of the serious racial problem which confronts us at this time and which may become more serious as time passes." After a little more discussion, he arrived at the solution: "I strongly advocate the farmers of the Mississippi Delta changing as rapidly as possible from the old tenant or sharecropping system of farming to complete mechanized farming….Mechanized farming will require only a fraction of the amount of labor which is required by the share crop system thereby tending to equalize the white and negro population which would automatically make our racial problem easier to handle.

Within a few years after the end of World War II, the mechanical picker was coming into general use on the plantations, and the share-cropper system was ending. Usually a plantation would build up its stock of machines until it had enough to harvest the whole crop, and then it would announce to the sharecroppers that it was switching over to an all-day-labor system to handle the shopping, which was still done by hand. One by one the plantation commissaries were closed down. The more established and paternalistic planters, such as King and Anderson and the Stovalls in Clarksdale and the Percys in Greenville, allowed their sharecroppers to stay in the cabins if they wanted to, but not to make a crop of their own.

A lucky few got salaried jobs as tractor drivers; the rest who stayed had to work as day laborers, get jobs in town, or retire. Some planters forced their sharecroppers out by informing them that the garden spots they used for raising vegetables and keeping livestock would now have to be plowed over and planted to cotton. The smaller and rougher planters simply kicked out their sharecroppers and lift them to fend for themselves. Often, when a sharecropper family left, the planter would bulldoze the cabin and grow cotton where it had stood. Sharecropper cabins were understandably not in demand as housing. If the cabin wasn’t on arable land, it usually just sat unoccupied, slowly sagging and giving way to vines. The Delta today is dotted with nearly spectral sharecropper cabins, their doors and windows gone, their interior walls lined with newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s that once served as insulation. They are humbler than what you’d ordinarily think of as the ruins of a vanished civilization, but that is certainly what they are.

Evicted sharecropper on the side of the highway

The sharecroppers who left the plantations sometimes moved directly to Chicago. More often they settled first in the town of Clarksdale, either in preparation for the second phase of their migration or to become day laborers and continue to work in the cotton fields. Day labor as a large scale employment base was doomed in the long run, though, because in the late 1950s the cotton planters embarked on a second phase of their industrial revolution that was just as significant as the introduction of the mechanical picker: the development of chemicals that killed the weeds between cotton plants so reliably as to make hand chopping unnecessary. Within ten years, virtually all the former sharecroppers had to find some entirely new way to live.

Mass evictions of sharecroppers

The white people in the Delta were well aware that a massive displacement of people was under way, and that it would have enormous consequences – not necessarily for them, since the consequences would be played out largely in the North. Writing in 1947, David Cohn issued the following dire prediction, which, to say the least, did not rivet the attention of a nation that was consumed with resuming a normal life after the war and wasn’t inclined in any case to pay much heed to jeremiads issued by an obscure Southern apologist:

Evicted Southern Sharecroppers

The coming problem of agricultural displacement in the Delta and the whole South is of huge proportions and must concern the entire nation. The time to prepare for it is now, but since we as a nation rarely act until catastrophe is upon us, it is likely we shall muddle along until it is too late. The country is upon the brink of a process of change as great as any that has occurred since the industrial Revolution….Five million people will be removed from the land within the next few years. They must go somewhere. But where? They must do something. But what? They must be housed. But where is the housing?

Mass evictions of sharecroppers

Most of this group are farm Negroes totally unprepared for urban, industrial life. How will they be industrially absorbed? What will be the effect of throwing them upon the labor market? What will be their reception at the hands of white and Negro workers whose jobs and wages they threaten?

There are other issues involved here of an even greater gravity. I f tens of thousands of Southern Negroes descend upon communities totally unprepared for them psychologically and industrially, what will the effect be upon race relations in the United States? Will the Negro problem be transferred from the South to other parts of the nation who have hitherto been concerned with it only as carping critics of the South? Will the victims of farm mechanization become the victims of race conflict?

There is an enormous tragedy in the making unless the United States acts, and acts promptly, upon a problem that affects millions of people and the whole social structure of the nation.
A few years earlier Richard Wright, who viewed the situation from the completely different perspective of a black man, a migrant to the North, and a Communist, sounded an uncannily similar, and similarly unheeded warning:

Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city; we were barely born as a folk when we headed for the tall and sprawling centers of steel and stone. We, who were landless upon the land; we, who had barely managed to live in family groups; we, who needed the ritual and guidance of institutions to hold our atomized lives together in lines of purpose; we, who had known only relationships to people and not relationships to things; we, who had had our personalities blasted with two hundred years of slavery and had been turned loose to shift for ourselves – we were such a fold as this when we moved into a world that was destined to test all we were, that threw us into the scales of competition to weigh our mettle.

(continued....)

An interview with Nick Lemann

Nick Lemann talks about "The Promised Land", a book about the migration of African-Americans from the South to northern cities, which is being made into a documentary film for the Discovery Channel

HARD TRUTHS: THE ART OF THORNTON DIAL

Carol Kino's article, "Letting His Life’s Work Do the Talking," from the 17 February 2011, New York Times states:

THORNTON DIAL has never been one for talking much about his artwork. Ask him what inspires his monumental assemblages, made from twisted metal, tree branches, cloth, plastic toys, animal bones and all manner of found materials, and he is likely to respond tersely, as he did while showing me around his studio here one bone-chilling day last month.

“I mostly pick up stuff,” he said. “I start on a picture when I get a whole lot of stuff together. And then I look at the piece and think about life.”

Now 82, Mr. Dial has had a lot of life to think about — especially over the last year, during which he endured hernia surgery, pneumonia, a stroke and heart problems. Only recently did he return to making art in this cold and cavernous space at the back of Dial Metal Patterns, a fabrication shop run by his children. As he huddled in a chair, looking frail and slightly wary, his three sons hovered about him protectively.

Artist Thornton Dial

For one paintinglike piece, made on canvas-covered plywood, Mr. Dial had used branches, metal, clothing, paint and a pair of work boots to create a lean figure fording through a tall jungle. “That’s Obama,” he said. “I show the struggle he got through without getting bit.”

Another, saturated with powdery white pigment, presented a baby doll nested in a field of cotton-covered twigs and twisted steel. A rope encircled the doll’s neck, suggesting a noose or an umbilical cord. “That’s the way they come,” Mr. Dial said, chuckling, when asked about the rope’s significance. “You probably see many things in my art if you’re looking at it right.”

Because Mr. Dial is self-taught and illiterate, he has generally been classified as a folk or outsider artist. But that pigeonhole has long rankled his admirers, because his work’s look, ambition, and obvious intellectual reach hew so closely to that of many other modern and contemporary masters, from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat. “If anybody else had created a major opus of this scope,” said Joanne Cubbs, an adjunct curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, “he or she would be recognized as a major force in the art world. Instead Dial struggles at the margins.”

But his marginalization may not last much longer. Mr. Dial’s first career retrospective, “ Hard Truths,” opens at the museum in Indianapolis on Friday. And on March 19 the Andrew Edlin Gallery in Chelsea will open Mr. Dial’s first solo gallery show in New York in 11 years. “This feels like the moment when the cultural world is ready to understand Mr. Dial and perhaps to embrace him,” said Ms. Cubbs, who organized the museum survey.

That exhibition, which runs through Sept. 18 before traveling to New Orleans; Charlotte, N.C.; and Atlanta, includes examples from many different periods, starting with the pictures that made Mr. Dial’s name in the early ’90s, when he used the tiger to symbolize the struggles and triumphs of African-American life. He has continued to invoke the specter of slavery, in pieces like “High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man),” a large 2002 construction in which a grinning Mickey Mouse toy is chained to the hull of a ship.

The show also includes work he made in response to the 2001 World Trade Center attack and the gulf war: sculptures like the monumental “Crosses to Bear (Armageddon),” dated 2001-4, in which a nine-foot-high expanse of rusty iron crosses is festooned with rag and rubber detritus; and paintings that appear to be made from torn and bloodied American flags, like “Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together” (2003).

“The power and clarity of his work measures up to any artist of any color in the last decades,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the museum, noting the works’ superficial resemblance to those by Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer. “But unlike those figures this work is imbued with an experiential dimension. For Dial, politics is personal.”

Certainly Mr. Dial has one of the more amazing art historical biographies on record. Although he had little formal schooling, he developed an intimate acquaintance with postmodernist art-making materials early in life.

Born in 1928 in a cornfield in the tiny rural hamlet Emelle, Ala., and raised by his great-grandmother, Mr. Dial went to work as soon as he could walk, harvesting sweet potatoes and corn, and gathering twigs and “the stuff my great-grandmother needed to make fire,” he said. After her death Mr. Dial and his younger half brother went to live with another relative in Bessemer, a small industrial town, where he hauled ice, poured concrete, raised cattle, did carpentry and laid bricks, among other things, until he found employment as a metalworker at the local Pullman-Standard boxcar factory. He worked there on and off until it closed in 1981.

All the while — throughout his long marriage to Clara Mae Murrow, who died in 2005, and the birth of his five children (one daughter died at 28 from cerebral palsy) — Mr. Dial was quietly observing and honing his skills. “I was just watching people that make stuff,” he said. “I watch everything.”

He was also making things himself, from the functional, like fishing nets and lures, chimneys, bricks, funerary monuments, furniture and houses (“I made a whole lot of them and tore them down,” Mr. Dial said) to the less obviously useful, like animal sculptures made from tin and tree branches or plastic bread wrappers, or a slave ship built from metal and wood. As his sons recalled, during another interview in the shop office with nearly a dozen relatives and family friends in attendance, Mr. Dial would come home from work, watch the evening news, do some farming out back with his children and then set to work making things again.

Even with something ostensibly practical like a lure, “it was odd, the way he took his time and painted them and stuff like that,” his son Richard said. “Whatever he worked on had to be different from somebody else.” Mr. Dial was so prolific, he added, that his wife often made the boys tidy up by burying his old work in the yard. (Mr. Dial has said in the past that he sometimes hid his work himself because he feared the attention it might attract during the Jim Crow years.)

Life changed dramatically for Mr. Dial in the late ‘80s, when he was discovered by William Arnett, a wealthy white Atlanta collector who was obsessively scouring the South for unheralded African-American work. (Among his discoveries are the Gee’s Bend quilters, whose work toured to 12 museums in a widely lauded show.)

Mr. Arnett was smitten from the start. “Dial possessed a combination of pride, dignity and determination, along with a wry sense of humor,” he wrote in an e-mail. “His earliest artworks demonstrated an unlimited creative imagination. All he lacked was encouragement and opportunity.”

For Mr. Dial the meeting was transformative. “He didn’t have to bury stuff anymore,” his son said, “because Mr. Arnett would give him money for things, and Daddy was kind of fascinated. There was a point where he said, ‘Ya’ll been laughing at me, but look at what the man just paid me for doing this.’ ”

Or, as Mr. Dial put it, “That’s the time I did start thinking about art.”

Mr. Arnett gave him a monthly stipend in exchange for right of first refusal, which allowed Mr. Dial to make art full time. Mr. Arnett visited frequently, and introduced Mr. Dial to curators and other collectors, including Jane Fonda, who remains a major supporter. He also set the wheels in motion for Mr. Dial’s first museum exhibition, “Image of the Tiger.” Organized by the critic Thomas McEvilley, it opened at two New York institutions, the Museum of American Folk Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in November 1993. The show seemed poised “to break down the border between outside and inside,” Mr. McEvilley said. Critically it was successful: “He has a genuine talent that he brandishes fearlessly,” Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times. But soon after the opening “60 Minutes” ran a segment that suggested Mr. Arnett was exploiting the folk artists whose work he had championed, particularly Mr. Dial. Suddenly “my show died on the vine,” Mr. McEvilley said. And so did several other major exhibitions of Mr. Dial’s art in the works.

Since then, although Mr. Dial has exhibited in galleries and been included in many group outsider art shows, as well as the 2000 Whitney Biennial, he has had only one other major museum solo exhibition, “Thornton Dial in the 21st Century,” at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2005. (Mr. Dial, who remains close to Mr. Arnett, memorialized the debacle with the 2003 self-portrait assemblage “Strange Fruit: Channel 42”: it involves an eyeless scarecrow-like creature wearing a bloody tie strung up from a television antenna.) Yet the event had one positive effect on Mr. Dial, Ms. Cubbs said: “It made him re-evaluate what the relationship would be between his art and its audience, and his work became more complex and powerful.”

How did he do that? Mr. Dial isn’t telling. “I remember all of my art,” he said, “but I can’t talk about all of it, because I did it 20 or 30 years ago. You ain’t going to think about all you done did in life either.”

But pressed to explain why he makes art in the first place, he finally found an answer: “I make it for people to love.” (source: New York Times)

The African Banjo and American Music

First introduced to the United States by African Americans in southern slave communities, the early banjo was construed with a gourd head and four gut or vine strings. Early, relatively primitive designs of the instrument are African in origin and modern (designs) vaguely resemble these early versions. The banjo was introduced to Anglo-American culture in the early nineteenth century.

It quickly underwent important changes in structure and construction. The gourd head used in the African and early forms of the instrument was replaced by a wooden rim design. By 1850, some forty years after the date believed to signify the initial crossover into Anglo-American culture, the gourd sound chamber design had almost entirely disappeared. 1 In the mid-nineteenth century, the addition of a fifth “drone” string proved to be the most significant adaptation. It is not clear whether this development occurred in African American or Anglo-American playing circles.

Fretless 19th century banjo

Regardless of who made this modification, the impact on the playing style of the instrument cannot be understated. The fifth string fundamentally altered the way the banjo was played and the sound that it produced. It was this alteration that brought the banjo from an African instrument to what John and Alan Lomax described as “America’s only original folk instrument.” (source: North Carolina Craft Revival)

THE FIFTH STRING

Joel Walker Sweeney of The Sweeney Minstrels, born 1810, was often credited with the invention of the short fifth string. Scholars know that this is not the case. A painting entitled The Old Plantation painted between 1777 and 1800 shows a black gourd banjo player with a banjo having the fifth string peg half-way up the neck. If Sweeney did add a fifth string to the banjo it was probably the lowest string, or fourth string by today's reckoning. This would parallel the development of the banjo elsewhere for example in England, where the tendency was to add more of the long strings with seven and ten strings being common. Sweeney was responsible for the spread of the banjo and probably contracted with a drum maker in Baltimore, William Boucher, to start producing banjos for public sales.

These banjos are basically drums with necks attached. A number have survived and a couple of them are in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Other makers like Jacobs of New York or Morrell who moved his shop to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, helped to supply the growing demand for the instrument in the mid 1840s as the minstrel shows traveled Westward to entertain the gold diggers. (source: Bluegrass Banjo)

Perhaps no other instrument has been more deeply associated with the mountains of the southeast than the banjo. Through Hollywood portrayals, media stereotyping, and the recent rise in popularity of Bluegrass music, the banjo has become became inextricably linked to the people of the southern Appalachians.

EARLY STAGES

Banjos belong to a family of instruments that are very old. Drums with strings stretched over them can be traced throughout the Far East, the Middle East and Africa almost from the beginning. They can be played like the banjo, bowed or plucked like a harp depending on their development. These instruments were spread, in "modern" times, to Europe through the Arab conquest of Spain, and the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. The banjo, as we can begin to recognize it, was made by African slaves based on instruments that were indigenous to their parts of Africa. These early "banjos" were spread to the colonies of those countries engaged in the slave trade.

Scholars have found that many of these instruments have names that are related to the modern word "banjo", such as "banjar", "banjil", "banza", "bangoe", "bangie", "banshaw". Some historians mention the diaries of Richard Jobson as the first record of the instrument.. While exploring the Gambra River in Africa in 1620 he recorded an instrument "...made of a great gourd and a neck, thereunto was fastened strings." The first mention of the name for these instruments in the Western Hemisphere is from Martinique in a document dated 1678.

It mentions slave gatherings where an instrument called the "banza" is used. Further mentions are fairly frequent and documented. One such is quoted in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians from a poem by an Englishman in the British West Indies in 1763: "Permit thy slaves to lead the choral dance/To the wild banshaw's melancholy sound/". The best known is probably that of Thomas Jefferson in 1781: "The instrument proper to them (i.e. the slaves) is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa." (source: Bluegrass Banjo)

Folk America ep01 Birth Of A Nation

About the Banjo by Tony Thomas

From Black Banjo Gathering this article "About the Banjo," written by Tony Thomas discusses the banjo and American folk music. Tony Tomas writes: The banjo is a product of Africa. Africans transported to the Caribbean and Latin America were reported playing banjos in the 17th and 18th centuries, before any banjo was reported in the Americas. Africans in the US were the predominant players of this instrument until the 1840s. Originally the banjos were made out of gourds and skins. The strings numbered between three and nine, with four- and five-string banjos being popular. A distinguishing feature was one or more short drone strings sounded with the thumb.

Banjo playing became an object of popular white culture in the US and later in Britain as a result of the Blackface Minstrel shows that became a popular form of entertainment in the 1830s and 1840s. Minstrels from the South who had actually learned real African-American music like Joel Sweeney popularized the banjo by introducing the clawhammer or frailing style that Blacks had brought from Africa. Commercial banjo makers later claimed that Sweeney invented the banjo in order to cover up its African origin. Sweeney did work with luthiers and drum makers to help perfect drum head banjos, the most common type, and is thought to have popularized the five-string banjo as opposed to the four-string banjo. Banjo playing became widely popular among working class and poor people both urban and rural. While African Americans continued their tradition with the instrument, whites also became fans, makers and manufacturers of the banjo.

Banjos began to be built by fine instrument makers, factory scaled manufacturers, as well as working people and farmers who worked with home-made materials. Gradually, the sturdier drum head style of banjo began to replace the gourd banjos.

Banjo playing expanded in the late 19th Century when classic banjo playing finger-picking styles made the banjo a popular instrument among the upper classes and social elites of the US and Britain. While efforts were made to distance the banjo from its African origins and its continued popularity as the instrument of the poor and the Black, nevertheless the outstanding player of period was Horace Weston, an African-American who excelled at the classic, minstrel, and traditional African-American banjo styles.

In the last 30 years of the 19th Century, manufacturers added frets to banjos to make them easier to play for beginners; these became a standard part for most manufactured banjos while people continued to make their own fretless and gourd banjos. In the same years banjo-based instruments aimed at taking the place of various orchestra instruments such as the banjo cello, banjo-bass, mandolin banjo, and banjo mandolin flourished as banjo orchestras became popular particularly among college students.

The twentieth century saw the emergence of steel strings on the banjos. This meant banjos could be played with a plectrum or pick. This led to the plectrum banjo and the more popular tenor banjo, which were both four-string banjos with the fifth drone string removed. These instruments proved popular for pop, dance, tango, and Jazz bands until they started to be replaced by the guitar in the late 1920s and 1930s.

While five-string banjo playing retained a support among African-Americans and whites in the Piedmont and Appalachian South, five string banjo playing declined until the explosion of Bluegrass in the post war years, powered by Earl Scruggs’ dynamic style of finger picking, Bluegrass led to the repopularization of the banjo among Southern whites. The “Folk Revival” that began in the late 1950s popularized the banjo among college youth. A crucial part of that folk revival was the struggle by some young folk players to learn and reproduce traditional Southern white and Black banjo styles played before Bluegrass. This led to a revival among some players of old-time clawhammer and finger picking styles.

The once ignored music of traditional African-American five-string banjoists from Piedmont areas of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia began to be heard again in the collection and performance of banjoists like Dink Roberts, John Snipes, and Odell Thompson. The publication of Dr. Cece Conway’s African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions linked these players to the African origins of the banjo as well as to the African origins of clawhammer and other traditional banjo styles among white old-time players. The issue by Dr. Conway and Scott Odell of Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina & Virginia, a CD of these Black banjoists’ music, brought the original Black voice of the five-string banjo back to the banjo world. These events helped encourage a layer of African-Americans to take up the banjo and continue and expand the traditions of their elders.

Today Black banjoists are exploring the original Black traditions of clawhammer and finger style five-string banjo, as well as reviving the traditions of Horace Weston in classic banjo, and continuing the great music of the great Black tenor, plectrum, and six-string banjoists of the 20th Century.

For more history of the banjo, please visit www.dhyatt.com/history.html, by George Gibson.