I just returned from the conference, “Black Banjo: Then and Now,” held in Boone, North Carolina. This blog will plunder my memories of it for months, no doubt, but for now let me tell you a story …
I sometimes hand my banjo to somebody who’s never held one before and invite them to “make some noise.” They always do very strange things with their fingers. They might rest their thumb on the “drum” head, above the strings, and pick up with their index and middle fingers, like an electric bass player. Maybe they’ll rest all four fingers on the head below the strings and pluck down on the strings with their thumb. Maybe they’ll sit like a classical guitarist and use their thumb and all four fingers to pick the strings.
It’s interesting to watch what they do, and it’s immediately obvious that they have no knowledge of any of the banjo-playing traditions.
But — in one incident after another, stretching back many decades — Oldtime banjo players hand their banjos to West African players of a Senegambian instrument called the akonting, and they immediately play clawhammer like they’ve been playing the banjo all their lives. Alternately, a banjoist will pick up the akonting and play like a master griot, much to the amazement of his West African hosts.
The banjo is an African instrument and clawhammer is an African playing technique. The instrument and the technique simply survived slavery and are alive and very well today in America, albeit generally in the hands of white Oldtime musicians. Knowing this fact, and fully imagining it, has been a profound shock and inspiration to me.