Banjo.

A plucked string instrument with a long guitar-like neck and a circular soundtable, usually called the ‘head’, of tautly stretched parchment or skin (now usually plastic), against which the bridge is pressed by the strings. The banjo and its variants have had long and widespread popularity as folk, parlour and professional entertainers' instruments. The name of the instrument probably derives from the Portuguese or Spanish bandore.

JAY SCOTT ODELL, ROBERT B. WINANS

Banjo

1. Structure.

The modern five-string banjo is normally fitted with raised frets and strung with five steel wire strings, the lowest in pitch being overspun with fine copper alloy wire. It is tuned g'–c–g–b–d' (C tuning) or g'–d–g–b–d' (G tuning), but many other tuning patterns, e.g. g'–c–g–c'–d', g'–d–g–c'–d' and g'–d–g–a–d', are used to facilitate the playing of particular songs. There are usually 24 or more screw-tightening brackets (for adjusting the head tension) attached to the outer side of a tambourine-like rim of laminated wood about 28 cm in diameter. In banjos of high quality the upper edge over which the head is stretched is often of complicated design, as in an early (1920s) ‘Mastertone’ system of O.H. Gibson (fig.1a), which used a tubular metal ‘tone tube’ resting on spring-supported ball-bearings, or the ‘Electric’ design of a.c. Fairbanks. A pan-shaped wooden ‘resonator’ is often attached to the lower side of the otherwise open-backed body and serves to reflect outward the sound emitted by the underside of the head. The ‘thumb string’ (sometimes known in older literature as ‘chanterelle’), the short fifth string (fig.1), is placed adjacent to the lowest-pitched string and secured by a peg inserted into the side of the neck at the fifth fret position.

Until the early 20th century banjos were normally strung with gut strings, and these or nylon strings are still used by ‘classical’ banjoists. Raised frets were advocated by James Buckley in Buckley's New Banjo Method (New York, 1860) but did not become common until the 1880s. George C. Dobson's ‘Victor’ Banjo Manual (Boston, 1887) describes frets inlaid flush with the fingerboard as position markers but states that ‘the latest and most modern manner … is with raised frets’. Mid-19th-century commercial banjos were larger than modern ones and were tuned to the lower-pitched A tuning of e'–a–e–g–b. Smaller banjos and higher pitches later became increasingly popular, until by the 1880s most banjos were of modern proportions and commonly tuned to the modern C tuning (which maintains the same interval relationship). By 1890 in the USA the banjo was treated as a transposing instrument pitched in C with music still written in A, a situation that continued until 1909 when the American Guild of Banjoists, Mandolinists, and Guitarists voted to abandon the old A notation and write the music in C or ‘English notation’. In England both the written and tuning pitch were fixed at the modern level by the 1880s.

A number of hybrid and specialized banjos were developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including cello and piccolo banjos (tuned an octave below and above the standard banjo); banjeurines; concert and ‘ladies’ banjos (tuned a whole tone above and below the standard banjo); guitar, mandolin and Ukulele banjos (strung and tuned like their parent instruments); and plectrum banjos (identical to the standard banjo but lacking the fifth string). The tenor banjo (tuned c–g–d'–a') is identical with the standard banjo but has a shorter neck and no fifth string. Like the plectrum banjo it was developed for use in jazz and dance orchestras and is played with a plectrum. It has been widely adopted by players of traditional music in Ireland and England.

In England and Australia banjos with six or more strings were common during the late 19th century, the additional strings serving to extend the compass downwards. Another English type, the ‘zither banjo’ (distinct from C.L. Steffen's ‘banjo zither’, invented in Stettin in 1879), had first, second and fifth strings made of wire (the others were gut or wire-covered silk), frets, and geared tuning machines instead of the more usual friction pegs. It had a closed back which reflected the sound outwards through spaces between the head and rim, functioning much like a modern resonator, as do two banjos now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, by the American makers Henry Dobson and George Teed of New York (US Patent 34,913, 8 April 1862).

Banjo

2. History.

The development of the modern banjo began in the second quarter of the 19th century as an increasingly commercial adaptation of an instrument used by West African slaves in the New World as early as the 17th century. The earliest known illustration of the instrument is in Sir Hans Sloane's A Voyage to the Islands of Madeira, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christopher and Jamaica (London, 1707), written in 1688, which depicts two Jamaican negro ‘strum-strumps’ with long necks and skin-covered gourd bodies (fig.2). In the French colonies, where the instrument was usually known as the banza, it was often associated with the calinda, a dance unsuccessfully suppressed by acts of the Martinique government as early as 1654 and as late as 1772.

In the British colonies the instrument was usually known as banjer or banjar, pronunciations still common in the southern USA. The Rev. Jonathan Boucher, describing life in Maryland and Virginia before he returned to England in 1775, wrote in Boucher's Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words (London, 1832): ‘The favorite and almost only instrument in use among the slaves there was a bandore; or, as they pronounced the word, banjer. Its body was a large hollow gourd, with a long handle attached to it, strung with catgut, and played on with the fingers’. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia (Paris, 1784, and Richmond, Virginia, 1853) stated of the negroes: ‘The instrument proper to them is the Banjar, … its chords [strings] being precisely the four lower chords of the guitar’. The common English guitar of the period was tuned C–e–g–c'–e'–g'; hence the banjar would have been tuned either C–e–g–c', if by ‘lower’ Jefferson meant ‘lower in pitch’, or else g–c'–e'–g', if he meant ‘lower in position when held by the player’. The former interpretation gives a traditional tuning pattern still sometimes used for the banjo’s four full-length strings; the latter gives the pattern of the modern G tuning.

Although long-necked instruments with skin soundtables are common in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the banjo almost certainly derived from one or more of those in Northwest Africa. Coolen (1991) and Conway (1995) favour the Senegalese xalam as the closest match in terms of structure and performance style. The xalam shares the banjo's characteristic short thumb string, but it and other banjo-like African instruments, such as the nkoni of the Manding peoples and tidīnīt of Mauritania all have round necks. The banza probably acquired its flat fingerboard after enslaved musicians in the New World became familiar with European and English plucked string instruments, all of which have flat fingerboards. A similar instrument, the Ramkie, has existed in South Africa since the early 18th century. Percival Kirby, whose Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa (Johannesburg, 1926) includes several ramkie illustrations, makes a good case for its being an adaptation of the Portuguese rabequinha or cavaquinho, possibly introduced by slaves from the Malabar Coast of India, long under Portuguese domination. Even if not directly related to the ramkie, the banza may have developed in a similar manner since Portuguese slave traders were active in West Africa as early as the 15th century.

The first depiction in the Americas of the modern banjo's distinctive short ‘thumb string’ appears in J. Stedman's book, Narrative of a Five-Year's Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam from the Year 1772 to 1777 (1796, 2/1806/R). Pl.lxix illustrates a creole bania, and a very similar instrument, collected by Stedman about the same time, is now in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden. They both have one short and three long strings and a skin-headed gourd or calabash body. A watercolour entitled The Old Plantation (painted between 1777 and about 1800 in South Carolina; fig.3) shows a group of slaves dancing to the music of a gourd-bodied banjo which, like the Stedman instrument, has three full-length strings plus a short thumb string. An inaccurate drawing of this instrument, included in an article by A. Woodward, ‘Joel Sweeney and the First Banjo’, Los Angeles County Museum Quarterly, vii/3, 1949, p.7, omitted the thumb string and contributed to the incorrect popular legend that this feature of the modern banjo was invented by Joel Walker Sweeney (1810–60). Nevertheless, as the first well-known and widely travelled white banjoist, Sweeney played a major role in bringing the banjo to the attention of urban audiences in the USA and England and presumably in popularizing the type of banjo that he played. One owned and said to have been made by him is in the Los Angeles County Museum. Fretless and of light construction, it had screw-tightening brackets (now missing) for adjusting the head tension, four full length strings and a short fifth string. It is also similar to a modern banjo in having a body made of a thin bent-wood rim instead of a gourd, and is thus better suited to commercial mass-production.

Through the influence of Sweeney, Daniel Emmett and many other popular minstrel-show banjoists (for illustration see Emmett, Dan), many of whom had lived near and learned from black banjo players, the banjo was rapidly introduced to white urban culture. By the 1840s and 1850s banjos were being produced by the first commercial maker, William Boucher of Baltimore (see fig.1b above), whose banjos were almost identical with Sweeney's, and James Ashburn of Wolcottville, Connecticut. The latter applied an improved tuning-peg to a banjo in 1852 (US Patent 9268).

By the end of the Civil War the banjo had also taken root among traditional white musicians of the rural South, who, like Sweeney, had learned about it from direct contact with black musicians and, also, touring minstrel shows, medicine shows, and circuses. The banjo joined the fiddle to initiate a tradition of what is now called ‘old-time string band music,’ and was also played as a solo instrument and to accompany songs. The black tradition remained fairly strong in the rural South through the 1930s, but by the 1990s there were few black players (see Conway, 1995). Until the latter decades of the 20th century interplay between the black and white traditions was common.

Two general classes of playing styles, each with many variations, have developed. Apart from numerous accounts from the 17th century to the 19th of the banjo's use by black musicians to accompany singing and dancing, no detailed descriptions or notations are known before the 1850s, when the first minstrel banjo tutors were published. The ‘stroke’ style they teach produces a sound similar to that described in many of the earlier accounts. It is similar to the earliest style of rural southern white banjo players, today known as ‘clawhammer’ or ‘frailing’, in which patterns of downward strikes by the index or middle fingernail are combined with downward strokes of the thumb against the fifth string. More complex patterns may be produced by the thumb dropping further down to pick individual notes on the full length strings. The other major family of styles, ‘finger-picking’, combines upward plucking by the first, and sometimes second and third fingers, with downward plucks of the fifth string by the thumb. In both styles the fingers of the left hand pluck, hammer and slide on individual strings to contribute additional notes and rhythmic accents.

Finger-picking is first mentioned by Briggs (1855), as an alternate, guitar-like way to accompany songs, and is more fully described in an 1865 tutor by Frank B. Converse, who credited the Buckley family with being the first to play it. By the 1890s it had become the dominant style on the minstrel, vaudeville and concert stages and for amateur urban musicians, but the down-stroking styles remained popular in many rural areas until well into the 20th century. Finger-style playing became increasingly well-established about 1900 in the rural folk tradition, both black and white, apparently in imitation of classical guitar technique. At first, folk finger styles were primarily two-finger picking (i.e. using thumb and index finger), but a three-finger style (which added the middle finger) was popularized in the 1920s by the North Carolina banjo player Charlie Poole, and somewhat later by Dewitt ‘Snuffy’ Jenkins and others from the region. In the 1940s it was further developed by Earl Scruggs into ‘bluegrass picking’, the most widely heard style today.

After the 1850s the banjo was increasingly used in the USA and England as a genteel parlour instrument for the performance of popular music. During the last quarter of the century s.s. Stewart of Philadelphia, and other banjo popularizers, sought to upgrade the instrument's social standing by downplaying its black origins and disparaging the ‘old-fashioned’ stroke style in favour of the more ‘elevated’ finger-picking style. Their marketing campaigns were successful and from about 1890 to 1930 there was a vast expansion in the production of banjos and great elaboration in their design and decoration, by makers such as Stewart, the Dobsons (New York and Boston) and a.c. Fairbanks (Boston). Besides making regular banjos, these makers (primarily Stewart) created a set of banjo orchestra instruments, all with five strings but of different sizes and pitches. From about 1890 to 1920 there was a craze for banjo, mandolin, and guitar clubs and orchestras; by the turn of the century most good-sized cities and colleges had such organizations. In this period specialized journals and great quantities of marches, rags and transcriptions of popular and light classical music were published for banjo by Stewart, Little Walter of Boston, Clifford Essex of London, and others.

The banjo’s important relationship to popular music at that time is well illustrated in the case of Ragtime. Nathan (1962) finds in some minstrel-show banjo tunes the earliest examples of the kinds of syncopation that later appear in the genre. Banjo pieces such as George Lansing's The Darkie's Dream (1887) are among the precursors of ragtime; ragtime itself immediately entered the banjo repertory, and banjo compositions from the mid-1890s onwards were heavily influenced by ragtime. The recorded output of the greatest turn-of-the-century banjo recording artists, Vess L. Ossman and Fred Van Eps, includes many rags, and banjo recordings of ragtime (available long before ragtime piano recordings were issued) were influential in increasing its popularity. Other important concert banjo virtuosos of the time included Parke Hunter, Alfred A. Farland and Fred Bacon.

By the 1920s the popularity of the five-string banjo was rapidly declining among urban players. It was displaced by the four-string tenor and plectrum banjos, which were favoured as rhythm instruments in the jazz and dance orchestras of the day, largely because a pick-played banjo was louder and better suited to the music for the fast, rhythmic new dance steps. The first true tenor banjo was probably the ‘banjorine’ marketed by J.B. Schall of Chicago in 1907, which was advertised as ‘tuned like a mandolin and played with a pick.’ Such an instrument found ready acceptance among mandolinists and violinists, whose original instruments did not adapt well to the new music. Regular banjoists converted more easily to the plectrum banjo. Once introduced, these instruments did not long remain as mere accompanying rhythm instruments; solo styles developed, as did virtuoso soloists such as Eddie Peabody and Harry Reser. The ‘Jazz Age’ created a new society craze for the banjo, this time in its four-string versions. By the 1940s, however, the four-string banjo was being replaced by the guitar, especially the electric guitar, as the rhythm instrument of choice; and by then the five-string banjo had also been abandoned by many rural musicians, either in favour of the guitar, or because of the decline in home music-making.

The five-string banjo regained something of its former popularity after World War II, largely because of the influence of the American banjoists Pete Seeger (see Seeger family, (3)), who popularized traditional rural southern styles among urban players as one aspect of the folksong revival, and Earl Scruggs (see Flatt and Scruggs), who became famous as the developer of the ‘bluegrass’ style of banjo playing (see Bluegrass music). It has also regained some popularity as a jazz instrument through the virtuosity of such performers as Bela Fleck (fig.4).

In the southeast USA, many white and a few black traditional country musicians still play banjos, often homemade and fretless; their many tunings, playing techniques and repertory include survivals of 19th-century minstrel and black performing practice. The Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, has a good collection of field recordings of such music, as does the Southern Folk-Life Collection (Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC). In the USA the American Banjo Fraternity promotes classic banjo playing and holds biannual conventions. Among the few composers to score for the instrument are Weill (Mahagonny, 1927), Krenek (Kleine Sinfonie, op.58, 1928) and Davies (The Boy Friend, 1971).

Public instrument collections possessing banjos include the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Banjo

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T.F. Briggs: Briggs' Banjo Instructor, Containing the Elementary Principles of Music (Boston, 1855/R)

The Cadenza (1894–1924)

The Crescendo (1908–33)

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H. Nathan: Dan Emmet and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK, 1962, 2/1977)

D.J. Epstein: ‘Slave Music in the United States before 1860: a Survey of Sources’, Notes, xx (1962–3), 195–212, 377–90

B.C. Malone: Country Music U.S.A.: a Fifty-Year History (Austin, TX, 1968, 2/1985)

A. Rosenbaum: Old-Time Mountain Banjo: an Instruction Method (New York, 1968)

C.P. Heaton: ‘The Five-String Banjo in North Carolina’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, xxxv (1971), 62–82

T. Adler: ‘The Physical Development of the Banjo’, New York Folklore Quarterly, xxviii (1972), 187–208

D.J. Epstein: ‘African Music in British and French America’, MQ, lix (1973), 61–91

R.C. Toll: Blacking Up: the Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1974)

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D.J. Epstein: Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, IL, 1977)

R.B. Winans: ‘The Black Banjo-Playing Tradition in Virginia and West Virginia,’ Journal of the Virginia Folklore Society, i (1979), 7–30

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R.L. Webb: Ring the Banjar! The Banjo in America from Folklore to Factory (Cambridge, MA, 1984)

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R.B. Winans: ‘Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843–1852’, Musical Theatre in America, ed. G. Loney (Westport, CT, 1984), 71–97

N.V. Rosenberg: Bluegrass: a History (Urbana, 1985)

G. Kubik: ‘The Southern Periphery: Banjo Traditions in Zambia and Malawi’, World of Music, xxxi/1 (1989), 3–29

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M.T. Coolen: ‘Senegambian Influences on Afro-American Musical Culture’, Black Music Research Journal, xi (1991), 1–18

M. Hendler: Altweltiche Wurzeln eines neuweltlichen Musikinstruments: Verschuttete Spuren zur Vor- und Fruhgeschichte der Saiteninstrumente (Göttingen, 1991)

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G. Gruhn and W. Carter: Acoustic Guitars and Other Fretted Instruments: a Photographic History (San Francisco, 1993)

U. Heier and R.E. Lotz, eds: The Banjo on Record: a Bio-Discography (Westport, CT, 1993)

A. Tsumura, 1001 Banjos (New York, 1993)

P.F. Gura: ‘Manufacturing Guitars for the American Parlor: James Ashborn's Wolcottville, Connecticut, Factory, 1851–56’, Journal of the American Antiquarian Society (1994), 117–56

R.B. Winans and E. Kaufman: ‘Minstrel and Classic Banjo: American and English Connections’, American Music xii/1 (1994), 1–30

C. Conway: African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (Knoxville, TN, 1995)

P.F. Gura and J.F. Bollman: America’s Instrument: the Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999)