African Origins of the Banjo: Part One of the West Virginia Instrument Anthology

Cover Photo: “Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893, oil on canvas, 49×35 1/2 inches. Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia” (Mazow 2005:150)

Anthology Introduction

This blog post will be the first in a continuing series that dives into the origins and impacts of specific instruments used in West Virginia’s music today. Beginning our journey with the banjo, the continuing anthology will focus on important instruments in old time, bluegrass, blues, gospel, and other genres through the words of experts, Augusta Archive recordings, and historical images. The banjo is one of the most iconic pieces of American culture and folk music. It is easily recognized around the world by its image, sound, and association with genres such as old time and bluegrass. In this first part of the history and impacts of the banjo, I will look into the instrument’s African origins and its development throughout colonial history and slavery leading up to the mid-nineteenth century, where the banjo began to enter white popular culture.

Early Records of Instruments Resembling the Banjo

The banjo as an instrument can be traced back to instruments brought or made by enslaved people from West Africa to colonies across the Americas. The instrument we think of today looked very different from the many stringed instruments that could have merged to form the modern banjo over centuries. Historian Kristina Gaddy writes in her book, Well of Souls, “Only three early gourd-bodied, African american-made banjos exist today…Known images of the banjo before 1820 number less than fifteen” (Gaddy 2022:xiv). The oldest surviving appearance of an instrument resembling the banjo was drawn by Sir Hans Sloane, a British naturalist and physician in Jamaica, who later went on to found the British Museum. Here he drew two stringed, gourd-bodied instruments, which he called “Strum Strumps” around 1687-1689 (Gaddy 2022: 15).

1707 engraving of Hans Sloane’s “Strum Strumps” (Gaddy 2022:15).

The early origins of the banjo can be traced back to several different names and African tribes that all had similar looking instruments. “The banjo, as we know it today, bears some resemblance to the Sengalese xalam, the West African molo, and the nkoni of the Manding peoples. All are plucked instruments with a gourd body and shortened fourth string. Unlike those instruments, however, the banjo–which first took such names as banza, banja, and bandore–has a flattened fingerboard, reflecting the simultaneous introduction of European instruments, such as the guitar and mandolin, into North America” (Mazow 2005:2). The banjo is an instrument developed out of Creolization, spiritual resistance, and centuries of blending and mutation. It stands as a symbol of the African cultures that were forced to bend and break under the thumb of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean. 

Confusion On The Term Banjo

Tracing the word banjo, when it is referring to the instrument has always been a difficult and often contentious task. Art historian Leo Mazow points out in his 2005 book, Picturing the Banjo, that “The name of the instrument derived from an African term; in the Caribbean, it was known as banza (Martinique), banjil (Barbados), banshaw (St. Kitts), and bonja (Jamaica). The name appears as bangio in South Carolina and banjou in Philadelphia as early as 1749. It probably evolved from the Kimbundu mbanza, a plucked string instrument constructed of a gourd, tanned skins, and hemp or gut strings.” (Mazow 2005:146). This, however, is not the only theory of where the word comes from. Historian Kristina Gaddy posits that the etymological origin of the word banya, which turned into banjo/banjer, wasn’t a word for the gourd instrument, but for an entire spiritual dance and ritual that happened to often involve the banjo’s predecessor (gourd-bodied instruments) and other instruments, the Banyaprei (or Banya play).

Banya and Banyaprei

Gaddy quotes W.E.B. Du Bois on the origin of “banjo”: “He also points out that there was a dance in Suriname known as the banya and… suggests ‘that on some level the term [bania] simply meant ‘musical instrument’ or perhaps ‘an instrument to which we dance”’ (Gaddy 2022:115). Suriname is a country and former Dutch colony in the North of South America.

.

The Old Plantation – Watercolor by John Rose in South Carolina circa 1785-1790 (Encyclopedia Virginia 2020).

She reveals her theory after finding many examples of art that mimics the dance shown in John Rose’s watercolor, The Old Plantation. The most notable example being Gerrit Schouten’s dioramas of enslaved people dancing in Suriname from around 1830 with the same cloths between their hands as the women seen in the photo above, and instruments being played. “After seeing Gerrit Schouten’s dioramas and understanding that this was the banya dance–a dance that was similar to the dance in the most iconic piece of art showing an early banjo–and that banya (dance) and bania (instrument) were homophones, I thought they had to have connections to each other, despite the distance between Suriname and South Carolina” (Gaddy 2022: 115).

One of Gerrit Schouten’s Suriname Dioramas from 1830 (Rijks Museum 2024). 

The banyaprei is a Suriname dance thought to be carried over from Africa where people have fixed roles, such as the Kownu (or king), who usually wears red. The steps and roles of the dance appear in a certain order and the play may last several days (Gaddy 2022). The dance John Rose witnessed in the late 18th century in South Carolina could have similar origins with the dance captured in Schouten’s 1830 dioramas. Following Du Bois’s quote that the banya is a name for any instrument that is used in a dance, the confusion of the single banjo-esque instrument with the whole dance could be the origin of the word banjer and banjo. Gaddy adds later on that Hendrick Charles Focke, a lawyer, a writer, and a free man of color living in Paramaribo, Suriname in the mid-nineteenth century, thought that the word banya was not just a name for a dance or an instrument. “In his writing on Surinamese music, Focke doesn’t only call the banya (he spells it banja) a dance or an instrument. For him, the banya was the ‘typical, characteristic folk music of our black inhabitants,’ the music created by those who lived in Suriname for generations” (Gaddy 2022:163). In this confusion, I would like to add one more possibility for the role the banjo played in black culture: a spiritual object, or as Gaddy puts it, a well of souls.

The Banjo’s Role in Creolized Spirituality

The banjo in the theory of historian Kristina Gaddy is not simply an instrument for idle playing or even the background music in spiritual practices, but a spiritually important object itself. I will not attempt to butcher Gaddy’s explanation, so I’ve put it here in full:

In Haitian Vodou rituals, “ceremonies and dances had moved into ritual spaces called oum’phors, and spirits would enter this realm through a pillar called a poteau-mitan, which extended from the floor to the ceiling and allowed spirits to enter from their dwellings in the water below or the skies above.” … “The banza, played at funerals where the dead and spirits were honored, wasn’t just a musical instrument. It was a well of souls: a ritual object constructed as a cosmogram. The neck bisecting the gourd from top to bottom is like the poteau-mitan, the line that draws the spirits; the body of the instrument is a circle, the realm to which the spirits are invited. The cosmogram also appears on the body of the gourd, the well itself. Four of the holes carved into the side of the banza… are made up of two intersecting lines. Functionally, they are sound holes; the sound that resonates within the body of the instrument emerges through them. But the maker chose to cut them in a shape that honors Legba and represents the intersection of realms.” (Gaddy 2022: 150)… “There is a fifth hole on the body, a triangle with one tip pointing toward the top of the instrument, suggesting an upward arrow which symbolizes a return to heaven. The peghead also looks like an arrow, although the tip of the instrument may have been broken off above where the hole was drilled. The banza also has a decorative pattern on the fingerboard made of five pointed ovals…Look at it one way and the five ovals form both a cross and a triangle, the cycle of life and the ascension to the spirit world. Look again, and eyes stare back. In many African cultures, eyes symbolically protect through their vision. Look at it again, and three leaves hang. Fall-drawings similar to the veve images drawn on the floor of the oum’phor or on drums in Vodou.” (Gaddy 2022: 151)

Haitian Banjo Fingerboard (Gaddy 2022).

Full Haitian Banjo (cannot see some details Gaddy mentions) (Gaddy 2022).

Black spirituality was consistently punished and feared by white slave owners and legislators, who often banned dances like the banya for fear that the gatherings would allow enslaved people to congregate and incite rebellion. Could the banjo have acted as a hidden symbol or cosmogram for black spiritual practices? It is clear that the instrument and the music played did hold some spiritual value, especially, as Gaddy points out later on, when black people converted to Christianity. Brother Jansa, a member of the Moravian Brotherhood tasked with converting the people of Suriname to Christianity in the nineteenth century, considered instruments used in creating slave music as items involved in sinful idol worship. He encouraged the confiscation or destruction of instruments when one converted (Gaddy 2022:169). In America too, “the banjo and the fiddle and Christianity didn’t seem to mix…Writing about her experience as a white girl on a plantation in Mississippi, Susan Dabney Smedes remembered that when the enslaved people joined the Baptist Church, they stopped playing instruments. The ‘most music loving fellow’ told the preacher that he’d broken his fiddle and banjo and thrown them away” (Gaddy 2022: 214).This shows clearly that as late as the 19th century, banjos were considered valuable spiritual objects to black people across the Americas and in order to assimilate into another religion, the musical object must be rejected.

The Lute Tradition 

Despite being hidden, changed, and muted by white oppression, “scholars agree that the banjo, through more than a century of folk diffusion, provided a means by which transplanted Africans could maintain native cultural expression” (Mazow 2005:2). Folklorist Cecelia Conway also theorizes that the spiritual and historical knowledge of African people could have been transmitted through music for generations before the banjo came to the Americas. “The Sengambia region of the savannah is characterized by a great ‘variety of string instruments’ including fiddles, lutes, and harps. The plucked lute–especially the halam type–seems to prefigure the banjo.” (Conway 1995:27). Throughout Western Africa, there are many kinds of oral traditions, be it spiritual or historical, that are transmitted through song and the playing of instruments. While it is nearly impossible to trace the direct origins of the modern banjo, these lutes, lingering spiritual rituals, and dances in the Americas stand as clues to unveiling the hidden importance of the banjo as a symbol of African cultures surviving throughout centuries of slavery. However, this would soon be diluted by increased interest in the banjo from white people. 

The Banjo Becomes a Symbol of Black Culture

While all of these labels and definitions of banya may point to where the tradition began, as enslaved people began to move from South American Suriname and other colonies into America, it became clear that banya and the other labels for it no longer referred to a folk music, a dance, or a spiritual ritual. In the eyes of the white slave owners, artists, and other observers, it became the word for a gourd-bodied, stringed instrument played by enslaved people. Gerry Milnes writes, in a 2017 article in Goldenseal magazine, “Early references in this country call the instrument a ‘banza’ or ‘banjil,’ which evolved into the colloquial ‘banjer,’ noted in the Maryland Gazette in 1754. In 1781, speaking about African slaves, Thomas Jefferson said, ‘The instrument proper to them is the Banjar which they brought hither from Africa.’ Many older West Virginians, like Frank George of Roane County, still refer to the instrument as a ‘banjer.’” (Milnes 2017: 41). No matter where the confusion or labeling was officially solidified, the banjer, banya, etc. became a symbol of slave culture and was immediately recognizable in art, minstrel shows, and other forms of imagery by the early nineteenth century. Throughout the 1800s, banjos of varying styles continued to be played and made by slaves, but the instrument “started to become a symbol of black culture” for the white people who witnessed the banjo on plantations and other settings (Gaddy 2022:182). The composer “Dibdin referenced the banjer in his songs, which were published in England and reprinted in the United States in the late 1790s. ‘The Bonja Song,’ published sometime in the late 1810s or early 1820s, used one of the many names for the banjo with the lyrics, ‘Me want no joys, no ills, no fear, but on my Bonja play.’” (Gaddy 2022:182). This type of music, with crudely mimicked African-American vernacular, such as poor grammar and misspelled words, is an early example of the role the banjo and the music associated with it would play in the minstrel shows and music compositions in the mid-nineteenth century and onward.  

Photos of “peghead banjo created by black musician in Southern West Virginia, constructed from Carnation condensed milk cans glued to a wooden box” (Augusta Archive 1991, 2024)

Conclusion and Continuation

The banjo’s African origins are historically undeniable, however in the twentieth and twenty-first century it was common to see banjos in the hands of white players. The banjo often became a symbol of shame for many African Americans attempting to recover and advance from slavery’s conditions. And yet, a mythologized whiteness was beginning to develop among banjo players and fans, hiding the vast history just discussed in this blog of the banjo’s origins, cultural complexities, and racism that led it into the late nineteenth century. Stay tuned for the next blog post where the second part of the anthology will dig into the banjo’s journey in the nineteenth to twenty-first century, its role in the development of iconic American genres, and its place in popular culture. I will attempt to answer Gaddy’s question: “Why was it that an instrument constantly described as ‘Black’ and ‘African’ came to be thought of as a white instrument?” (2022:177).

If you would like to know more about Kristina Gaddy’s book, Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History, the Augusta Heritage Center hosted the author for a guest lecture in 2022! The link to the recorded lecture is here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=1804183749981919

Make sure to visit Kristina Gaddy’s website, where there are more pictures and other wonderful sections on the banjo and other topics discussed in her book: https://www.kristinagaddy.com

Works Cited

• Augusta Archive 2024. Peghead banjo handcrafted by a Black musician from southern WV, Augusta Heritage Center, Photographed by Gerry Milnes Aug 1991, Available on-line (augustaartsandculture.org/document/peghead-banjo-handcrafted-by-a-black-musician-from-southern-wv-4/ and augustaartsandculture.org/document/peghead-banjo-handcrafted-by-a-black-musician-from-southern-wv/, Accessed Sept. 16, 2024).
• Encyclopedia Virginia 2020. Media: The Old Plantation, Encyclopedia Virginia: Virginia Humanities, Available on-line (encyclopediavirginia.org/4333hpr-b5deaccd6d628b6/, Accessed Sept. 16, 2024).
• Gaddy, K. 2022. Images in Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History, Kristina R. Gaddy, Available on-line, (kristinagaddy.com/blog/images-in-well-of-souls-uncovering-the-banjos-hidden-history, Accessed Sept. 16, 2024).
• Gaddy, K. 2022. Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY.
• Mazow, L. 2005. Picturing the Banjo, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA.
• Milnes, G. 2017. ‘The Banjo in West Virginia’, Goldenseal Magazine, Spring 2017, pp. 40-47.
• Rijks Museum 2024. Diorama of a Du, a Dance Celebration on the Plantation, Gerrit Schouten, 1830, Rijks Museum, Available on-line (rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/NG-2005-24, Accessed Sept. 16, 2024).

Madeline Ricks is an AmeriCorps member with the Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area serving at Augusta. She is using her year of service to continue the mission of digitizing Augusta’s large archive, as well as adding to the collection through new recordings and blog posts about Augusta happenings and stories of West Virginia culture. While she was born in Georgia, raised in both Indiana and Montana, and has traveled around the world, she has a special place in her heart for West Virginia, as her mother’s side of the family still lives outside of Charleston. She received her BA in English Literature and a minor in Italian Studies from Gonzaga University and recently finished a Master of Research in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She hopes to leave a lasting, positive impact on the organization and community during her short time at Augusta.