“What sound will accompany the end of days?” For Laurent Dubois, the question admits of one ringing answer: the sound of the banjo. A professor of Romance studies and history at Duke and “obsessed” amateur banjo player, Dubois relates here a history of the instrument that is both learned and entertaining. His enthusiasm shines through every page.
He locates the origin of the banjo in Central and Western Africa, home to an array of string instruments classified as lutes. These forerunners of the banjo were alike in possessing resonators made of gourds, or calabashes, over which was stretched a treated animal skin. Strings, typically of gut, were then positioned atop a bridge to extend from the resonator to the affixed neck. One of these forerunners, the banza, is pictured and described in a couple of 18th-century travelogues cited by Dubois. He also chronicles the rediscovery, fewer than 20 years ago, of a banza in the basement of the Museum of Music in Paris. His account has almost the quality of a mystery story and it exemplifies the sometimes-convoluted way curators come upon their finds and how old instruments are restored and returned to public display.
The banjo, as Dubois persuasively demonstrates, came in time to be identified as an African-American instrument. Banjo-like instruments made their way to the Americas during the years of the slave trade, which reached its peak at the end of the 18th century. (A poignant detail: The auction block where slaves were bought and sold was sometimes referred to as the banjo table.) When slaves ran away, their masters would publish descriptions detailing not only their physical appearance and stature, not only the clothes they might have been wearing, but also their possession of musical skills: their ability to sing well or to play an instrument, typically a banjo or a fiddle. These descriptions, as Dubois suggests, are tantamount to “capsule biographies of enslaved individuals.” His discussion is generously supplemented by quotations from former slaves who were interviewed in the 1930s as part of a project overseen by the Works Progress Administration.
One of the strongest aspects of The Banjo is the author’s commentary on paintings in which the banjo is depicted. Liberty Displaying the Arts & Sciences (Or the Genius of America) by Samuel Jennings was commissioned by the Library Company of Philadelphia, a favorite haunt of reform-minded Quakers, to further the cause of abolition. An allegorical painting, it portrays Liberty as a blonde of classical beauty dressed radiantly in white and reposed upon a stool. She is surrounded by books, scientific instruments, and other appurtenances of scholarship. Shown in the foreground and background are the beneficiaries of her vast learning: a group of African Americans. Two, in particular, command Dubois’s attention, one a man playing a banjo, the other an attentive child. Positioned as they are, apart from the other figures, near the horizon, they form the center of the painting:
Dubois is a good guide to this painting and to others because he is very intelligent—T.S. Eliot’s first requirement of a critic—and because he is a keen and sensitive observer. His interpretations carry a high degree of plausibility; they feel both right and true.
Another strength of his book is its treatment of blackface minstrelsy, in our day, to say the least, a complex and morally freighted topic. Calling minstrelsy “the most important theatrical form in nineteenth-century North America,” Dubois notes that it was especially popular in the North and that many minstrels were of Irish descent. (At the time, the Irish, in some circles, were not considered truly white.) So popular and lucrative was this form of entertainment that there were even troupes of black minstrels, some of whom specialized in a kind of reverse-minstrelsy in which they imitated the accents and attitudes of the Irish.
The tremendous popularity of minstrelsy partly explains the banjo craze of the second half of the 19th century. Until then, instruments were made by hand, one at a time, each “a unique piece based on traditions and prototypes but constructed for a particular musician.” Mass production put instruments into the hands of an eager and demanding public. Banjo competitions were held, banjo clubs formed. A journal, S.S. Stewart’s Guitar and Banjo Journal, was in publication for 15 years. There were banjo orchestras with instruments ranging from contrabass to soprano. Refinements of all sorts were made to brighten and amplify its tone, resulting in a flood of patent applications by inventors hoping to cash in. Dubois’s brisk account of these developments is one of the highlights of the book.
Compromising his solid research, however, is a prose style that at times savors too strongly of the seminar room. Among his favorite words are “sedimentation,” “imbrication,” and, especially, “space.” (“Cultural space,” “space of anxiety and possibility,” and “spaces of solidarity” are but three examples; many more, alas, could be cited.) His fondness for these and other phrases tries a reader’s patience.
Here and there, too, Dubois is prone to overstatement—as, for example, when he suggests, to “purchase and learn to play the banjo was a way of becoming, in a sense, one’s own minstrel.” Early in The Banjo, describing the “silencing of the contributions of Arabic science, philosophy, and culture” that supposedly occurred in Renaissance music histories, his tone verges on the conspiratorial. On a more technical note, it would have been nice had he included a fuller description of banjo acoustics. Specifically, though told of the purpose of the instrument’s body—called by some players the “pot”—we never really learn what contribution is made by the head. Perhaps Dubois, who assuredly knows this information, thought it too obvious to mention.
The Banjo concludes with a chapter devoted to a notable performer, Pete Seeger. It is easy to see why Seeger, a hero among leftists, is an attractive figure to Dubois, who in one place calls the banjo “the sound of progress, the sound of protest.” But the profile of Seeger on display here gives, at best, an incomplete picture of his political commitments and their consequences (see “The Red Warbler” by Ronald Radosh in the February 10, 2014, issue of The Weekly Standard).
These cavils aside, Dubois writes with enthusiasm about the instrument he loves, an instrument that has “an amazing capacity to bring people together, in laughter and song.” When he quotes some of the banjo-mad performers and promoters of the 19th century—a dazzled Frank Converse, for instance: “There was something in the sound of that banjo . . . that gave me a delight never before experienced”—one senses that they speak for him as well.
John Check teaches music theory at the University of Central Missouri.
