Blackface minstrelsy and the taking of the banjo

node · earth · United States, Britain and the British settler colonies

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.