Blackface minstrelsy and the taking of the banjo

Assembled from 19 blocks · 1 evidence · 14 related

1. Story
2. The nineteenth-century American entertainment form in which white performers in blackface makeup presented what they advertised as the authentic music of enslaved people, and the mechanism by which an African-descended instrument became, for a century, a signifier of white rural America. Joel Walker Sweeney, a Virginian who by his own account learned to play from enslaved Black musicians locally, began touring in blackface from the mid-1830s and made the banjo the centrepiece of his act; through the 1840s the Virginia Minstrels, the Christy Minstrels and their many imitators carried the format across the United States, Britain, Ireland and Australasia. Two things happened at once and both matter. The instrument was industrialised and mass-marketed, spreading far beyond the communities that made it, and its origin was overwritten: the caricatures the form traded in were used to justify slavery and, later, segregation, and the banjo was detached from the people whose instrument it was. This is not an aside to the organological story. It is why, by the twentieth century, the banjo's African ancestry had to be re-established by scholarship rather than simply remembered.
3. Knowledge
4. Banjo
5. Blackface minstrelsy and the taking of the banjo
6. Connections
7. Banjo
8. Blackface performers take up the banjo
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. Evidence
19. 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.