Banjo

Assembled from 35 blocks · 3 evidence · 38 related

1. Story
2. An American instrument of African descent: a skin head stretched over a gourd, and later a wooden rim, a stick or fretless neck, and a set of strings including a short high drone tuned by the thumb. It was made and played by enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean and North America from at least the seventeenth century. Hans Sloane, in Jamaica in 1687–88, described gourd-bodied, skin-headed instruments he called "strum strumps" and had them illustrated in his 1707 Voyage; the instruments he depicts already combine African body-and-neck construction with European fingerboards and friction pegs, which is what distinguishes a banjo from either ancestor. Thomas Jefferson, writing in the early 1780s in Notes on the State of Virginia, called the instrument "the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa", and dozens of colonial spellings survive — banza, bangie, bonjaw, banjer. The instrument therefore constitutes documentary evidence in its own right: nobody carried a gourd lute in the hold of a slave ship, so its presence in the Americas records the survival of a body of knowledge — how to build one, how to tune it, how to strike it — inside people who arrived with nothing else.
3. Knowledge
4. Ngoni
5. Akonting
6. Banjo
7. The Middle Passage
8. Connections
9. European lute
10. The Middle Passage
11. Akonting
12. Ngoni
13. Blackface minstrelsy and the taking of the banjo
14. Hans Sloane records gourd lutes in Jamaica
15. The South Carolina Negro Act prohibits drums
16. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
17. Blackface performers take up the banjo
18. Banjo
19. West Africa
20. The transatlantic slave trade
21. Havana
22. New Orleans
23. Rio de Janeiro
24. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
25. Hans Sloane records gourd lutes in Jamaica
26. West Africa
27. Banjo
28. Oud
29. Jaliya — the Mande hereditary musician tradition
30. West Africa
31. Banjo
32. Evidence
33. Sloane observed and had illustrated gourd-bodied, skin-headed stringed instruments played by enslaved Africans in Jamaica, which he called "strum strumps". V55 verification basis: reported from retrieved summaries of the banjo-origins literature; the 1707 volume was not opened, no page or plate number is given, and the wording "strum strumps" is quoted at second hand.
34. Jefferson identified the banjo as the instrument proper to enslaved Africans and stated that they brought it from Africa. V55 verification basis: the sentence is reproduced as it appears in retrieved secondary summaries; the text was not consulted, the Query in which it appears is not identified, and the retrieved sources differ on whether to date it to composition in 1781 or publication in 1785.
35. 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.