The Banjo Wasn’t Theirs to Begin With

By Kenyatta  |  Founder, Cultural Appreciation

 

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I was walking through a gallery of African art, moving slowly the way I always do in spaces like that, reading the placards, letting the work speak. Then I turned a corner and stopped.

There on the wall was a painting of an African man in a wide-brim hat, leaning into a banjo, while a woman danced beside him with anklets shaking and a beaded collar bright against her chest. I stood there longer than I should have. Because in my head, the banjo had always lived in exactly one place: a front porch in Appalachia. Bluegrass. Country music. The instrument every movie reaches for the second it wants you to know you’ve arrived in the rural American South.

But this painting was telling a different story. A banjo. In Africa. And something about the way the artist had painted it, like it belonged in those hands, like it had always belonged in those hands, told me I had the whole history backwards. So, I went home and started digging. What I found changed how I hear the instrument to this day.

Painting by Mateyu, photographed at the Real African Art gallery. The instrument in his hands is the visual thesis of this entire piece: the banjo, at home, in African hands.

The banjo is not American. Its closest living ancestor is a West African folk lute called the akonting; a gourd-bodied, long-necked instrument played by the Jola people of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. It is part of a wide family of more than sixty plucked-string instruments found across West Africa, cousins to the ngoni, the xalam, and the larger, more famous kora.

For centuries, the most famous instruments in this family; the ngoni, the xalam, and the kora were carried by griots, the storytellers, oral historians, praise-singers, and musicians who held a community’s entire memory in their hands. A griot was a living library. When a griot played and sang, genealogies, victories, lessons, and warnings traveled from one generation to the next. The instrument wasn’t entertainment. It was the hard drive of a people without a printing press.

But here is the twist that makes the story even better: the akonting itself was not a griot instrument. Jola society has no griot caste. The akonting was the people’s instrument, played by farmers and fishermen in the evenings, by ordinary hands after ordinary work. That detail turned out to be the key to the whole mystery. The banjo’s closest relative wasn’t the property of a specialist class guarding formal memory. It was everyday music that belonged to everyone, which is exactly the kind of music that millions of ordinary people could carry across an ocean.

So, when we picture the banjo as a symbol of the American backcountry, we’re looking at the very last chapter of a much older book, and mistaking it for the first.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships in the trans-Atlantic slave trade; roughly 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage to reach the Americas. They arrived stripped of nearly everything — names, families, languages, freedom. But they did not arrive empty. They carried knowledge that no chain could confiscate, and some of that knowledge was musical.

In the Caribbean and the American South, enslaved Africans began rebuilding the instruments of home from whatever they could find. A gourd from a vine. A piece of hide stretched over the opening. Wood for the neck. Gut for the strings. From memory and scarcity, the West African lute was reborn on this side of the ocean.

The written record tracks it as the instrument resurfaces, name by name, place by place. As early as 1620, the English traveler Richard Jobson, sailing up the Gambia River, described Africans playing a gourd-bodied stringed instrument, one of the earliest European eyewitness accounts of an instrument in the banjo’s family. The earliest written record of one of these instruments in the Western Hemisphere comes from Martinique in 1678, where it was called the banza. By the mid-1700s the documentation multiplies: colonial newspaper notices for escaped enslaved people increasingly described skilled musicians, and a 1766 South Carolina reference to a “banjer” shows the instrument firmly established in the American colonies. In the early 1760s, the Scottish physician and poet James Grainger, living on St. Kitts in the British West Indies, wrote of enslaved people dancing to “the wild banshaw’s melancholy sound”, a line published in his 1764 poem The Sugar-Cane.

And in 1781, in a footnote to his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, who had spent his life surrounded by the music of the people he enslaved at Monticello, wrote a sentence I keep returning to.

Banjar. Banza. Banshaw. Bangoe. The instrument carried a dozen names because it was being remade in a dozen places by people who didn’t always share a language, but who all recognized the same instrument the moment they heard it. Jefferson got the origin exactly right: Africa, brought hither, no ambiguity. What he couldn’t see was where the story would go next, and how thoroughly that origin would be erased.

Here is where this stops being a story about an instrument and becomes a story about how cultural credit moves, and who gets written out of the ledger.

By the mid-1800s, the banjo had crossed over into white American popular music, and not gently. It became the centerpiece of an entire entertainment industry called minstrelsy, in which white performers darkened their faces with burnt cork, mimicked the music and movement of Black Americans, and made enormous sums performing caricatures of the very people whose instrument they had taken.

The figure most often credited with bringing the banjo to the popular stage is Joel Walker Sweeney, a white musician from Appomattox County, Virginia, born around 1810. Sweeney learned to play from enslaved Black musicians near his home, then carried that instrument onto the minstrel stage, he began performing with the banjo in Virginia in the early 1830s, and his earliest documented stage performance with the instrument came in April 1839 in New York. He is widely described as the first white performer to play the banjo publicly. The knowledge was Black. The stage, the spotlight, and the credit became white.

That’s not appreciation. It isn’t even ordinary appropriation. It’s a layered kind of theft most languages don’t have a single word for: the theft of an instrument, stacked on the theft of the credit, stacked on the theft of dignity from the people being imitated for laughs.

By the early twentieth century, the second erasure was already underway, and this one was quieter. As the American recording industry took shape, it sorted music into racial categories for the marketplace, “race records” for Black artists, “hillbilly” and later “country” records for white ones. The banjo, by then a fixture of minstrelsy and emerging country music, got filed on the white side of that ledger and stayed there.

Within a couple of generations, the transformation was complete. The gourd lute that ordinary hands had carried along the Gambia River, that enslaved Africans had rebuilt from hide and memory, that Jefferson had plainly called African had become, in the popular imagination, the whitest instrument in America. Not through a single lie, but through a hundred years of repeating the wrong story until it hardened into common sense.

That is the part that stays with me. Erasure rarely needs a villain twirling a mustache. It just needs a comfortable story, told often enough, by enough people, who never thought to ask where the thing came from.

In 1974, a Gambian man named Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta was studying in Atlanta, Georgia. He had grown up playing the akonting in his village in the Senegambian region. Then one ordinary day, by some accounts on a local radio station, by Jatta’s own telling on a country music program broadcast from Tennessee, American banjo music reached him, and he stopped cold. The rhythm, the picking, the down-stroking motion of the hand: he knew it. It was the music of home, coming out of an American broadcast, called something else entirely.

That moment launched decades of research. Jatta, later working alongside the Swedish researcher and instrument collector Ulf Jägfors, brought the akonting to the attention of American banjo scholars, most visibly at the 2000 Annual Banjo Collectors Gathering. What they demonstrated was hard to argue with: the akonting’s playing technique, a down-picking stroke the Jola call o’teck, is strikingly close to the American clawhammer or frailing style long assumed to be a homegrown Appalachian invention. The hands had been telling the truth the whole time. We just hadn’t been listening.

The banjo is a major instrument in American music that did not come from Europe. That alone should make us curious. An instrument this central to the American sound, to bluegrass, to old-time, to country, walked here from West Africa in the memory of enslaved people, and almost nobody who loves it knows that.

I’m not telling this story to take the banjo away from anyone. The musicians keeping old-time and bluegrass alive today are carrying something real, and many of them are the first to point upstream to where it came from. The point isn’t to swap one group’s claim for another’s. The point is that culture almost never belongs to a single people the way the marketing wants us to believe, and that the truest form of appreciation begins with knowing the whole chain of hands a thing passed through to reach us.

The banjo carries fingerprints from a Gambian riverbank, a slave ship’s hold, a plantation yard, a minstrel stage, a recording studio, and a mountain porch. Every one of those hands is part of the instrument. Leave any of them out, and you’re not hearing the real song. You’re hearing the cover version of the history.

That’s the work this whole brand is built on. Not to take culture away from anyone, but to make sure the people who built it never get written out of their own story again. The painting on that gallery wall had it right all along. The banjo was theirs to begin with.

History earns trust by showing its seams. A few honest notes on the live debates inside this story: scholars generally agree the banjo descends from West African gourd lutes, but they don’t all agree on the single ancestor, the akonting has the strongest case for the playing technique, while the ngoni and related instruments share other features, and Richard Jobson’s 1620 description is broad enough that experts still debate exactly which instrument in the family he saw. Population figures for the trans-Atlantic slave trade are best estimates drawn from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, not exact counts. And the dating of the very earliest references is approximate by nature,  we work from the records that survived, knowing the instrument almost certainly existed here before anyone bothered to write it down. Jatta’s own accounts of first encountering the banjo in America differ in small details, radio in one telling, television in another, though all place the moment in the early 1970s. None of this weakens the core truth. If anything, it sharpens it.

→  Repatriation Is Cultural Appreciation  —  What we owe the cultures whose creations ended up in our hands.

→  Culture Over Color  —  Why skin tone never tells you who someone actually is.

→  There’s Culture Everywhere  —  How to start seeing the history hiding in your everyday life.

•  Laurent Dubois, The Banjo: America’s African Instrument (Harvard / Belknap Press, 2016).

•  Cecelia Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia (University of Tennessee Press, 1995).

•  Bob Carlin, The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy (McFarland, 2007).

•  Kristina Gaddy, Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History (W. W. Norton, 2022).

•  Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, footnote (written 1781, first published 1785). Reproduced by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello.org.

•  Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (SlaveVoyages.org), Rice University — 12.5 million embarked / 10.7 million survived figures.

•  Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta & the Akonting Center for Senegambian Folk Music; presentations at the Annual Banjo Collectors Gathering (2000).

•  Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade (1623), recording his 1620–21 Gambia River observations.

— — —

Seek Different. Find Amazing.

There is culture everywhere. Let’s appreciate it — together.

— Kenyatta

www.ourculturalappreciation.com

@ourculturalappreciation