Blackface performers take up the banjo

Assembled from 22 blocks · 1 evidence · 14 related

1. Story
2. Joel Walker Sweeney, a Virginian who said he had learned from enslaved Black musicians, begins touring in blackface with the banjo as his central instrument; through the 1840s the Virginia Minstrels, the Christy Minstrels and their imitators carry the format across the United States, Britain, Ireland and Australasia. The instrument is industrialised, mass-marketed and detached from the people who created it, and the caricature it is embedded in is used to justify first slavery and then segregation.
3. Knowledge
4. Banjo
5. Blackface minstrelsy and the taking of the banjo
6. Blackface performers take up the banjo
7. Connections
8. Blackface minstrelsy and the taking of the banjo
9. Banjo
10. Banjo
11. Blackface performers take up the banjo
12. European lute
13. The Middle Passage
14. Akonting
15. Ngoni
16. Blackface minstrelsy and the taking of the banjo
17. Hans Sloane records gourd lutes in Jamaica
18. The South Carolina Negro Act prohibits drums
19. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
20. Blackface performers take up the banjo
21. Evidence
22. The banjo descends from West African gourd and skin-headed plucked lutes carried in the knowledge of enslaved people, was documented in the Caribbean and North America from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was taken up from the 1830s by blackface performers who mass-marketed it while detaching it from its Black American origins. V55 verification basis: the book is cited as the standing scholarly authority for the banjo-origins argument; it was NOT read in this session, and the specific claims here were retrieved from search summaries of the banjo-roots literature rather than from its pages.