“Well of Souls” discusses African-American musicians rediscovering the banjo and reclaiming their rightful place in typically “white” musical genres that adopted the instrument
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskKristina Gaddy’s beguiling new book aims to subvert that reputation by excavating the banjo’s history. Her thesis is simple and well-supported. The banjo was created in America by enslaved Africans, and for much of its history was integral to African-American culture, celebration, spirituality and resistance.
She weaves her story together from sources including paintings, diaries and letters, and tells it chronologically. In a less daring writer’s hands, this might have become a slog, but Ms Gaddy successfully blends archival skills with imagination. The opening, for instance, describes an engraving of a “strum strump”—a sort of ur-banjo made from a hollowed gourd covered in animal hide—found in Jamaica in the 17th century.
Her narrative moves across the Americas, following enslaved Africans, their descendants and their instruments. Strum strumps become banzas, banjas and banjers. For most of its history, many people looked down on the banjo. James Hollyday, a landowner in Maryland, sent a “bangeau” to his niece in London in 1758; she thought the artefact was “a great curiosity” on which she hoped to make “pretty music”. Hollyday himself associated it with the enslaved people who played it.
Ms Gaddy depicts the ways the enslaved used these instruments in dances and other forms of celebration that were tolerated reluctantly, if at all, by white authorities, who feared rebellion and secret communication through music. The banjo was “sacred”, she writes; “it fit into a cultural complex of music, dance and spirituality.” This part of her narrative is slightly over-egged.
The most heartening aspect of this book is the most contemporary. The last chapter discusses African-American musicians rediscovering the banjo and reclaiming their rightful place in Appalachian, country and old-time music—“white” genres that adopted the banjo, so contributing, over the centuries, to the erasure of its origins. The Carolina Chocolate Drops, an African-American old-time string band whose founder, Rhiannon Giddens, wrote the book’s foreword, won a Grammy.
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