greenmentch, Jun 20, 2017
Rhiannon Giddens is a Grammy-award-winning musician and
co-founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops who discusses the history of the
African banjo and how it became a keynote instrument of American music through
the minstrelsy and beyond. Rhiannon is
part of the new film on mountain music, A Great American Tapestry, The Many
Strands of Mountain Music, with more information at www.saveculture.org
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Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents the complete (unofficial) transcript of a June 2017 YouTube video entitled "Rhiannon Giddens: "On the Lost History of the Black Banjo".
This post is presented for historical, cultural, and folkloric purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Rhiannon Giddens and thanks to all those who were associated with this YouTube video.
-snip-
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2025/04/uncovering-history-of-banjo-with.html for the closely related 2025 pancocojams post entitled "Uncovering the History of the Banjo with Rhiannon Giddens: From African Roots to American Music" (Video & Selected Comments)
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TRANSCRIPT: RHIANNON GIDDENS: ON THE LOST HISTORY OF THE BLACK BANJO"
This English (auto-generated) transcript includes my spelling corrections, including capitalizations and my additions of punctuation marks. I am not including any time stamps in this transcription. A few words of this transcript that are given in brackets are my guesses about what Rhiannon Giddens left out but meant by her comments at those points.
Additions and corrections of this unofficial transcription are welcome.
.011-6:27
"I think it's uh pretty well summed up what Cecil Sharp left out of the story by uh, visually, by a movie called “Song Catcher" which kind of like takes that story of of people finding this connection between these Victorian songs and in in England and the Appalachian mountains.
And so this woman is collect… is going to collect songs in the Appalachian
mountains and she's looking for this ballad singer.
And she stops and sees a Black man playing banjo on the stomp.
(You know um which in the film is played by Taj Mahal. Taj Mahal right.) And uh she stops and asks him where this ballad singer is. And then she keeps
going.
And that to me is the story. You know, it's like “Oh, hey, a Black person
playing banjo. Where where's the ballad
singers?”
All right, you know, let's forget you now. You know, I mean, that's kind of…
that's kind of it. I mean, the the story
of …It's like for me, it's multiple things, you know.
One is the assumption
that all of this music starts in Appalachia which is just not true.
Um, two is that um there were no Black people in Appalachia which is also not true.
So there's are two enormously huge assumptions to make and really skew the
story.
But like he wasn't the only one who did that. I mean, Lomax did it too.
I mean, a lot of people who are looking for a narrative ignore everything that's
outside of that narrative because… you know.
And it doesn't take away from the work that they did. It doesn't take away from
what they saved. But it does frustrate
you when you think about what they left out.
The journey of the banjo is so interesting and is so hidden in American culture.
You know, you don't have the banjo until you have, um, a lot of people from
different parts of, you know, primarily West Africa um coming
Over- not under their own volition, um, being brought over
to North America, particularly to the Caribbean which is where, you know, people who are going to be sold into slavery were seasoned., you
know, especially if they were going to end up going up to the North America up to
North, North America.
So so much of what becomes African-American music and dance is formed, you know,
in the Caribbean, in Congo Square in New Orleans.
All of these different cultures didn't speak the same language, weren't playing
the same instruments, but were playing in a sort of family of instruments of these
lute type instruments you know.
Either the memory [of the instrument was] brought over or the instruments
themselves [was] brought over. And then, you know. the syncretization of all of
that, you know, forms what becomes known as the banjo the banar the Baner,
whatever, banza banza ,um, in the Caribbean and then being brought
with people up to the Southern United States or actually just United States in
general, you know, because people forget that there was, there were enslaved people all over you know. From, you know, I think, was like the first
European settler stepped foot on, you know,
in North America and like 20 years later is the first African-American, you know.
What I mean, it's like very very intertwined all over the place, you know. And and that's that's really important to
remember because the, the, the image of, you know, slavery in the Deep South leaves
out the Tidewater region, the mid Atlantic [region] and all of those folks that
were forming these cultures -these enslaved cultures- that then were marched down
to the, to the pens in Louisiana and then over to Texas, and Alabama and Mississippi
you know. So it's, it's a very much a wide, a wide cultural thing, you know.
So you have African-Americans with this native instrument, you know, this truly
American instrument-the banjo. And it's a plantation instrument for the first hundred years of existence. And
not- no White person plays it. Like
people know that's a plantation instrument.
And you, you have this and you also have Black musicians being trained
to play for White dances, you know. So
you have these ,um, these dance masters, you know, coming in.
But, then, you know, Black musicians pretty quickly become very prized.
And so they're, they're going back to the quarters. And they're
playing the banjo and they're doing all this, you know, their, their music and
dance and then they're going to play for these European dances. And they're playing fiddle and ,you know,
there's all these primary source, sources about you know “that darkie could
play a Sprague”, you know. It's like
they're learning Scottish tunes, and English tunes, and all, you know, whoever,
you know, whoever owns the plantation, you know.
And then, of course, that's going to come back and it's going to mix. And you know, the first people to play fiddle
with a banjo would be African-Americans. I mean that's obvious, you know. It's like they've got the banjo so and
they've had the fiddle for hundreds years.
They have these, you know, runaway slave posters saying, you know. “plays the
fiddle”, “plays the fiddle”, “plays the fiddle”. It's like “highly prized” So you have all that coming into being.
And then you have, um, the this form, this sort of String Band form. Of course,
there's interactions between, you know, Whites and Blacks particularly poor Whites and Blacks because they're the ones, you know, interacting. Like, you know, the the aristocracy is not
interested in this, you know.
So you've got all this stuff and it starts to, you start getting the first White
people playing the banjo -these, these traveling entertainers. Like those are the ones we know about. I
mean, who's to say that there wasn't some, you know, some White people like who
didn't, who weren't entertainers, like, you know, who were, you know what I
mean. Who's to say that. But that's what,
we know, you know, is, is, is these, these blackface entertainers start playing
the banjo. They make some changes to it, um. But, you know, in form it's pretty, it's like the stuff they do is, it
doesn't change the basic form of the banjo. There's no adding the fifth string and it was already there and, you know, all of these sorts of things.
And then so blackface entertainers started taking the banjo,
um. And people go nuts. They're like “What
is this thing?! This is amazing!, you know. And, and it becomes this cultural explosion. Like they, they travel to Europe. and
Australia. and South South Africa. And
it's the whole world's first, uh, encounter with indigenous American music,
even done through White people playing in blackface."
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