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The Banjo in American Pop Culture
Image from "America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth" Email to friend
Say banjo, and the image of Jed Clampett's jalopy wheels jumbles into view and you can't help but hear that fine, come-and-listen-to-my-story bluegrass picking of the banjo virtuoso Earl Scruggs. But the banjo wasn't born in the Blue Hills. Centuries earlier, African musicians lopped the top off a calabash gourd...covered it with a ground hog hide, attached a neck and some horsehair strings and played banza or banjar. But as soon as white musicians appropriated the instrument, adding a fifth string, tweaking its unmistakable sound and taking to the stage in blackface, many black musicians abandoned it. In spite of its likely Afro-Caribbean roots, the banjo became almost emblematically American: Versatile. Ever evolving. Iconic.
Philip Gura, co-author of "America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century" and Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and Jim Bollman, co-owner of the Music Emporium in Lexington, MA, and co- author of "America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century."
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