Akonting

Assembled from 21 blocks · 1 evidence · 22 related

1. Story
2. A three-string gourd lute of the Jola people of the Casamance and the Gambia river region, and the West African instrument that most closely resembles the early American gourd banjo — in construction and, unusually, in playing technique. It has a gourd body with a skin head, a long unfretted stick neck passing through the gourd, and three strings of which the shortest is a thumb-plucked drone. It is played with a downward stroke of the index-finger nail across the strings followed by the thumb catching the short string, a technique the Jola call o'teck. That stroke is essentially the movement known in North America as stroke style, clawhammer or frailing, which is the oldest documented way of playing the banjo and is not a European technique. The correspondence was pressed on the scholarly world largely by the Gambian researcher Daniel Jatta, himself a Jola akonting player, and it changed the terms of the banjo-origins debate: earlier arguments compared bodies and necks, whereas the akonting case compares what the right hand does. Unlike the ngoni, the akonting is a folk instrument played by anyone rather than a professional one, which is itself relevant to who was on the ships.
3. Knowledge
4. Akonting
5. West Africa
6. Connections
7. West Africa
8. Banjo
9. Kora
10. Ngoni
11. Akonting
12. The West African drum ensemble
13. The Middle Passage
14. The trans-Saharan routes
15. The trans-Saharan routes
16. The Kru seafarers
17. Highlife
18. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
19. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
20. Evidence
21. 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.