African Banjo Echoes In Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (Publications of the American Folklore Society)
African Banjo Echoes In Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (Publications of the American Folklore Society)

African Banjo Echoes In Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (Publications of the American Folklore Society)

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SKU: DADAX0870498932
UPC: 9780870498930
Brand: Univ Tennessee Press
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Throughout the Upland South, the banjo has become an emblem of white mountain folk, who are generally credited with creating the shortthumbstring banjo, developing its downstroking playing styles and repertory, and spreading its influence to the national consciousness. In this groundbreaking study, however, Cecelia Conway demonstrates that these European Americans borrowed the banjo from African Americans and adapted it to their own musical culture. Like many aspects of the AfricanAmerican tradition, the influence of black banjo music has been largely unrecorded and nearly forgottenuntil now.Drawing in part on interviews with elderly AfricanAmerican banjo players from the Piedmontamong the last American representatives of an African banjoplaying tradition that spans several centuriesConway reaches beyond the written records to reveal the similarity of preblues black banjo lyric patterns, improvisational playing styles, and the accompanying singing and dance movements to traditional West African music performances. The author then shows how Africans had, by the mideighteenth century, transformed the lyrical music of the gourd banjo as they dealt with the experience of slavery in America.By the midnineteenth century, white southern musicians were learning the banjo playing styles of their AfricanAmerican mentors and had soon created or popularized a fivestring, woodenrim banjo. Some of these white banjo players remained in the mountain hollows, but others dispersed banjo music to distant musicians and the American public through popular minstrel shows.By the turn of the century, traditional black and white musicians still shared banjo playing, and Conway shows that this exchange gave rise to a distinct and complex new genrethe banjo song. Soon, however, black banjo players put down their banjos, set their songs with increasingly assertive commentary to the guitar, and left the banjo and its story to white musicians. But the banjo still echoed at the crossroads between the West African griots, the traveling country guitar bluesmen, the banjo players of the oldtime southern string bands, and eventually the bluegrass bands.The Author: Cecelia Conway is associate professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is a folklorist who teaches twentiethcentury literature, including cultural perspectives, southern literature, and film.

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