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 genre-the banjo song. The author then shows how Africans had, by the mid-eighteenth century, transformed the lyrical music of the gourd banjo as they dealt with the experience of slavery in America. Drawing in part on interviews with elderly African-American banjo players from the Piedmont-among the last American representatives of an African banjo-playing tradition that spans several centuries-Conway reaches beyond the written records to reveal the similarity of pre-blues black banjo lyric patterns, improvisational playing styles, and the accompanying singing and dance movements to traditional West African music performances. Like many aspects of the African-American tradition, the influence of black banjo music has been largely unrecorded and nearly forgotten-until now. In this groundbreaking study, Cecelia Conway demonstrates that European Americans borrowed the banjo from African Americans and adapted it to their own musical culture.
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