Banjo

node · earth · The Caribbean and North America

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.