Healing Trauma and Reviving Culture with the Black Banjo Reclamation Project

Date:25/07/2022

Author:Dana Hubanks

There's an invisible kingdom running under our feet and we don't even notice. It's usually associated with mold, decomposition, decay, and even death, but actually, we should be grateful this species exists. Indigenous peoples have been using mushrooms for food and medicine for centuries. Now is our turn to start paying attention to the numerous advantages fungi have to offer to humankind.

Few instrumental sounds are more immediately recognizable than the bright, metallic twang of the banjo. Clear, resonant, and earnest, the sound of the modern banjo is strongly associated with American folk and country music. Musicians like Pete Seegar and Earl Scruggs popularized the banjo in a modern context throughout the early to mid- century, and today, banjos in mainstream culture are squarely associated with white men in overalls and work boots.

But the modern banjo is a colonized form of a traditional African instrument. While the exact roots of the banjo aren’t entirely clear or even singular, instruments like the West African kora and akonting are obvious precedents. Unlike the modern banjo, these traditional precursors were fretless and often carved from gourds, connecting them almost inextricably with their place-based context.

Ultimately, though, the banjo was brutally extracted from its traditional home and brought across the ocean by way of the horrific and unforgiveable Atlantic slave trade. Brought to places like the Caribbean and the American South, enslaved Africans engineered new instruments akin to the traditional ones they’d been forced to leave behind. Over time, the mingling of traditional African folk musicians and working-class white musicians led to the absorption of the African banjo into the developing American folk and roots genre.

By the mid-1800s, the banjo was popularized in the white Western world by Joel Walker Sweeney, a white American musician who often performed minstrel shows in blackface. By the end of the 19th century, a group of five brothers known as the Dobson brothers began adding frets and resonators to the originally fretless instrument, and by the time the mid-20 century rolled around, the banjo was squarely associated with the heavily whitewashed world of popular bluegrass and country music. Today, the banjo’s relationship to Black culture and history is largely underestimated if not entirely unknown to most people.

But despite this history of slavery, theft, and exploitation, the story of the banjo and its ancestral belonging to Black and African culture has been sustained through the efforts and practices of Black musicians and musicologists.

"Reclamation is so much more than the process of reclaiming the banjo as a physical instrument. Reclamation is about reclaiming knowledge, skills, and a sense of connection to community, ancestry, history, and the land."