{"id":591,"date":"2019-05-18T14:22:52","date_gmt":"2019-05-18T14:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pl314-spring19\/?page_id=591"},"modified":"2019-05-18T14:22:52","modified_gmt":"2019-05-18T14:22:52","slug":"dylan-therriault","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pl314-spring19\/students\/dylan-therriault\/","title":{"rendered":"Dylan Therriault"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/h1>\n

\u00a0\u201cThe banjo in American culture has always been a loaded symbol, perhaps more ideologically loaded than any other musical instrument in the United States; it has never been neutral\u201d (Linn 442)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since its introduction to the commercial music culture of the twentieth century, the banjo is known as \u201cAmerica\u2019s Instrument\u201d. This is true, but not because its signature \u2018twang\u2019 is intrinsically symbolic to mainstream American culture, the flag, country music, or the white south. The history of America\u2019s instrument, and its consequential role in ideological constructions, is emblematic of what Stuart Hall calls \u201cthe dialectic of cultural struggle\u201d. From its origins in the slave trade, to its weaponized role in minstrelsy, and its eventual return amongst the commercialized symbolism of the \u201chillbilly\u201d south, the banjo is steeped in changing cultural and economic circumstances and purposes, incorporated into different \u201csocial fields\u201d that have progressively constructed and reconstructed the instrument\u2019s role and place this \u201ccultural struggle\u201d.<\/p>\n

Taken on a whole, the banjo\u2019s place in popular culture is rife with contradictions; however, when seen through this procedural understanding of this dialectic, these contradictions demonstrate the shifting ideological identity of the banjo. Its history reveals \u201cthe complex lines of resistance and acceptance, refusal and capitulation, which make the field of culture a sort of constant battlefield\u201d (Hall). The purpose of this article is then to trace the movements of the \u201cbattlefield\u201d of the banjo, to instruct on the history of the banjo through a Marxist frame. Working from Hall\u2019s model of \u201ccultural struggle\u201d, the history of the banjo reveals itself to be a dynamic construction and reconstruction of the instrument\u2019s status in popular culture as it passes through changing circumstances of class and race struggle and appropriation of the instrument by media. I borrow heavily from Hall, using his model of the dynamic tension of popular culture, as a battle between dominant and subordinate forces of class struggle. Additionally, I rely on Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s mechanisms of media as an appropriating, formulization, totalizing entity to characterize the induction of the banjo to commercial culture. This article will split the history of America\u2019s instrument into four period in order to reveal each subsequent ideological formation: First, the banjo as an instrument of minstrel shows. Second, the banjo as a prospective instrument of the bourgeoisie. Finally, the banjos appropriation by commercial culture as a symbol of the hillybilly is analyzed.<\/p>\n

While this article is more concerned with the broader cultural constructions of the instrument in and through class and race struggles, rather than the physically \u201cfixed historical object,\u201d these ideological changes have caused physical changes in the construction of the instrument. Understanding the physical instrument helps to identify the importance of these changes. This description is meant to convey the broad, contemporary construction and classification of the instrument, the result of this history of change.<\/p>\n

The banjo is a five stringed instrument that belongs to the \u201cplucked-lute\u201d family of instruments. The instrument features a wooden, hooped frame-drum body, with a metal tone ring to help with resonance. Banjos use strings to create tones, four of which stretch from the bottom of the instrument to the end of the neck. A characteristic fifth string stretches half-way up the neck, creating a higher pitched \u201cdrone\u201d sound that is utilized in different ways depending of the particular style of the musician. Modern banjos typically have frets along the neck to assist in achieving contemporary standards of pitch and conform to western scales. While other models of banjo\u2019s have been invented and spread in popularity, including four-string \u2018tenor\u2019 and \u2018plectrum\u2019 banjos, the five-string banjo remains the most culturally iconic model, and this history will focus dominantly on it. Similarly, the banjo has developed several techniques of play that differ substantially from one another over the course of its history, each of which comes to be identified with a particular era of music making on the instrument as well as the ideological significance behind the instrument at the time.<\/p>\n

Five Strings of Domination<\/h1>\n

 <\/p>\n

The origins of the banjo in the Americas reveals its the scene for its first ideological identity.\u00a0 Most are surprised to find that the banjo is the descendant of musical instruments brought to the Americas through the slave trade, particularly through the diaspora of Western Africans as they were forcibly brought to the continent. Historic musicology has pointed towards a direct link in both construction and play style between \u201cspiked lute\u201d instruments prevalent in West Africa, in particular the Ekonting, and the spiked lute instruments that were recorded as used by slaves in the Caribbean. The earliest recordings of these date to the seventeenth century, but the presence of these proto-banjos becomes ubiquitous in the American south and Appalachian mountains by the end of the eighteenth century.<\/p>\n

Early banjos during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century preserved most of the characteristics of their antecedents. These instruments still featured gourd and calabash-based bodies and were played with a distinct \u201cstroke\u201d style that matches the technique of the ekonting (Adams). Unlike most western styles, which involve \u201cpicking\u201d individual strings with a finger or pick, the \u201cstroke\u201d style relies on striking strings in a downward motion with the back of the fingernail, and catching the fifth \u201cdrone\u201d string of the banjo with the thumb as the hand recovers from striking a string. The result is a locked in driving rhythm of strokes broken up by drones on off-beats. The sound is markedly different from most western styles of music, produced by a technique that does not have a recognizable equivalent. The style has persisted until contemporary times; nowadays its known as \u201cclawhammer\u201d or \u201cfrailing\u201d.<\/p>\n\n

Above, Contemporary player Mike Seeger plays Josh Thomas’ “Roustabout” on a gourd banjo, using techniques from the nineteenth century. Source: Smithsonian Folkways “Classic Banjo”.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Banjo antecedents were made of gourd and calabash. Gura, Philip F and Bollman, James F., America\u2019s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. 1999. Print.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While its slave origin eventually became ammunition with which to naturalize the instrument with the racist ideologies of the nineteenth century, the original spread of the banjo in the United States through economic class rather than racial caste. Significant research demonstrates that the instrument was a part of the \u201cfolkways\u201d of both black and white lower classes, who shared significant cultural contact throughout the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee. Migrations west, from states like Virginia and Maryland, brought with them slaves who played the banjo. Often, lower class individuals shared recreational and musical spaces.<\/p>\n

This historical position has two important results: First, \u201cbanjo music\u201d of this inception period is the product of an amalgamation of musical styles brought by both the Anglo-Celtic settlers and their West African slaves. Second, the banjo became recognized as a proletariat instrument, rejected by colonial elites. Sentiments such as \u201cDr Marion Mayo said \u201cclassy people\u201d did not dance jigs to the banjo\u201d fill early records of the instrument, taken down by educated individuals foraying into this \u201clower\u201d musical strata. One writer categorized the instrument as \u201cThe Bandore, n. A musical instrument\u2026 in use chiefly, if not entirely, among people of the lower classes\u201d (Gibson 243). As Hall puts it, this process parallels \u201cthe relations which constantly structure this field into dominant and subordinate formations.\u201d The banjo, on its outset, was cast into the subordinate formation of popular culture. Its induction ran along economic lines.<\/p>\n

This lower-class history of \u201ccreolization\u201d was quickly distorted by racist ideology after the instrument became a trope among minstrel shows (Gibson 244). The first full length minstrel show, staged by 1843, featured two banjo players who used their banjos as extensions of their character. Rightfully, these events have been wholesale denounced for their racism and the role they played in the Antebellum and Jim Crow era. However, it should be said again.\u00a0 Minstrel shows became wildly popular tools of dehumanization and violence against both slaves and freedmen throughout the United States (Linn 3). What is not widely known was the banjos place in this process, where the instrument served as a crucial part of the minstrel act, resembling the rough but innocent \u201chappy\u201d music of degraded slaves.<\/p>\n

Even though it was now being used as an icon of slave music, the banjo\u2019s construction underwent a period of formalization, becoming more indicative of present-day models. The gourd and calabash bodies were left behind for the hooped frame-drum construction that would be recognizable today. These models toted wide, unfretted necks which ended in scroll peg heads (Gura). Furthermore, the five-strings of the banjo became the typical standard for the instrument during this period.<\/p>\n

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Source: Gura, Philip F and Bollman, James F., America\u2019s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. 1999. Print.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These instruments became icons of minstrelsy, used the enforce and educate racist ideology: \u201cBy the early 1800\u2019s, Americans had become familiar with the idea \u2013 though not necessarily with the reality \u2013 of the banjo as an instrument of black culture\u201d (Linn, 2). They were evidence of the \u201cobvious\u201d barbaric and unrefined nature of African American slaves and freedmen in the United States. In order to do this, however, the historic relationship of the banjo as a lower-class instrument, rather than an African-American instrument, needed to be dealt with. A \u201cdistortion\u201d of this sort is exactly the kind of process which Stuart Hall outlines as part of the perpetual process of popular culture: \u201ccultural struggle, of course, takes many forms: incorporation, distortion, resistance, negotiation, recuperation.\u201d Here, the banjo\u2019s importance passes through its first social field. Its role in culture becomes subject to the relations and demands of a new set of material and social conditions, as the antebellum south seeks to redefine and strengthen racial classes and division. Consequently, its history and position within class relations shifts, from a construction of economic class into a weapon of racist ideology.<\/p>\n

In effect, this movement of the banjo from common class square dances to the minstrel show stage serves to \u201cnaturalize\u201d the racist symbolism used to assert the barbarism of African American slaves and freedmen. According to Hall, naturalization allows ideological premises to begin to pass as self-evident assumptions (Hall, 18). Through such a process, a racist conception can become part of the shared social \u201cchains of meaning\u201d, where it is given constructed importance within an ideology. Through the ridicule of the minstrel show the banjo becomes a weapon of this kind of movement. In this case, it comes to stand for, as Hall describes them, the ideological base-image of the slave-figure and, to a degree, the clown. The blackfaced character, armed with the banjo, becomes \u201cthe familiar slave-figure: dependable, loving in a simple, childlike way\u201d while also exemplifying the \u201cclown\u201d, as Hall goes on to explain, that \u201ccaptures the \u2018innate\u2019 humour of the licensed entertainer\u2026 It is never quite clear whether we are laughing with or at this figure\u201d. In its burgeoning introduction to popular culture, the banjo starts its life as an explicit and gawdy symbol of racist ideology.<\/p>\n

There is a contradiction already present, indicative of the \u201cthe double stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it\u201d (Hall). The more the instrument came to represent the musical lives of African-Americans, the more the black string bands of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century started to disappear. By the end of the century, resisting and repulsed by the instrument\u2019s symbolism, less and less black people actually played the banjo, save in some rural spaces (Gura). That reality, of course, does not need to bear on the construction of the banjo in ideology, which is ever in the process of distortion and reinventions through the dialectic cultural struggle. Given this dynamism, it should not be a surprise that even this racist role for the banjo falls out of fashion.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Five Strings of the Bourgeoisie<\/h1>\n

 <\/p>\n

Crucial to Hall\u2019s understanding of the process of popular culture is a sense of periodic but constant change:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor, from period to period, the contents of each category change. Popular forms become enhanced in cultural value, go up the cultural escalator \u2013 and find themselves on the opposite side. Other things cease to have high cultural value, and are appropriated into the popular, becoming transformed in the process.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The relations of \u201cpopular\u201d and \u201cdominant\u201d cultural formations are not by any means fixed. Even the banjo\u2019s status as the instrument of the uncivilized would be overturned. By the end of the nineteenth century, the banjo faced another shift in ideology, as the instrument passed from weapon of racism to icon of the genteel.<\/p>\n

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An advertisement for the “Thoroughbred” banjo model of S.S. Stewarts. Source: Hamilton College Archives.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During the 1870\u2019s, either through the popularity of minstrel shows or the influence of the amalgamated origins of the instrument, the banjo found its way into the hands of the middle and upper-class whites. Although the banjo became directly associated with the minstrel context, it had become popular and recognizable in broader American culture (Gura). The banjo was beginning the extend its sphere into barrooms and parlors. Whatever the reason for this sudden spread, elite white musicians faced a problem: The instrument and the music it played had been naturalized as primitive. The banjo\u2019s identity lied in minstrelsy: a \u201cmandatory blacking of the white performer’s face accompanied the white use of black music\u201d (Linn, Elevation, 443).<\/p>\n

In order to overcome this predicament, a change in cultural values was necessary. White banjo sympathizers, hoping to achieve acceptance for their instrument and its music, campaigned for an \u201celevation\u201d of the banjo from its \u201cdegraded origins\u201d (Linn, 9). As such, the banjo faced its second social field, its conversion to the sphere of the dominant class and culture. We see again the distortion and reinvention of the symbol of the banjo through the \u201cculture struggle\u201d as its older formation in minstrelsy was erased to make way for bourgeois acceptance.\u00a0 These campaigns were largely successful \u2013 by the turn of the century \u201cwhite culture incorporated a recognized symbol of African-American music without the theatrical metamorphosis of burnt cork; the white musician no longer had to feign \u2018blackness\u2019 to play the banjo\u201d (Linn, 443).<\/p>\n

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Banjo manufacturers sought to “bleach” the instrument by adding exquisite detail and expensive construction. This Stewart Banjo features intricate inlays along the neck, as well as frets to assist in creating western pitches. Source: Gura, Philip F and Bollman, James F., America\u2019s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. 1999. Print.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This process was spearheaded by producers and manufacturers of the banjo, especially Philadelphia\u2019s S.S. Stewart. As an owner of a banjo producing capital, his \u201cGreat Instrument Factory\u201d, Stewart engaged in a considerable advertising and production campaign with the aim of reconstructing the banjo\u2019s position in American culture. In particular, he wanted to let the banjo rise \u201cabove the ham\u201d, a reference to the pig\u2019s fat used in blackface that stood as an idiom of low culture. He and his allies\u2019 efforts changed the construction of the instruments, their playstyles, and ultimately imbued the instrument with the values of refinement and luxury. These producer-driven changes to the banjo sought to relieve it of its subordinate status and let it rise into the dominant class of culture.<\/p>\n

First, the appearance of Stewart\u2019s banjos overhauled the instrument to emulate wealth and sophistication. The gourd bodies of early slave banjos were done away with entirely in favor of hoop construction styles meant to mimic western craftsmanship. These Stewart banjos were meant to \u201cconvey an elitist image\u201d, often featuring intricate \u201cmother-of-pearl inlays along their necks as well as \u201cornately carved heels at the base of the necks\u201d (Gura 173). Furthermore, the advertisement of such instruments conducted the same \u201crefinement\u201d. These banjo models were called the \u201cImperial\u201d and the \u201cThoroughbred\u201d, advertised as available only to serious banjo players (Stewart, 8).<\/p>\n

These banjos were equipped with new hardware, such that the instruments could be inducted into the expectations of high art music at the time. This eventually resulted in a fundamental redesign of the banjo in line with Western formula:<\/p>\n

\u201cOlder banjos had been larger in size, lower in pitch, darker timbred, with short sustained tones on stopped strings that gave the instrument a percussive, more African, quality. Late nineteenth-century banjo manufacturers followed the general trend of Western art music, gravitating toward higher pitch, brighter timbre, and longer sustained tones. Frets were slowly accepted in the 1870s and 1880s; strings continued to be made of gut (occasionally silk for the humid summer months). By the end of the century, the pitch of the instrument had risen a minor third, from A to C. The actual sound of a high-quality banjo of the 1890s was remarkably different from that of an 1840s banjo. These modifications of tone quality, though always presented as improvements in advertisements, were not essentially improvements, but changes\u201d (Linn).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The aural quality of the banjo had to be reinvented, too, not just its physical appearance. The \u201cstroke\u201d style of the banjo associated with black banjo players and minstrel shows created distinctly syncopated and rhythmic music unlike most compositions of western and European music. In fact, the stroke style of play was prohibitive to executing western styles of music, since it was unable to play slow melodies with variating rhythm (Linn 2). Elevating the banjo meant developing playing techniques that could replicate and mimic elite music. Along side the \u201cstroke\u201d style, the banjo\u2019s \u201cguitar\u201d style began to become favored. The \u201cguitar\u201d style relied on picking string with the use of the thumb, index and middle finger, mimicking the style of play used on most guitars during the period. Stewart\u2019s banjo manuals emphasized this style of play as the proper manner to play instrument, as it allowed the instrument to conform to western musical genres. In addition, Stewart\u2019s ideal banjo player learned by notation, written music, rather than the oral tradition that defined early banjo playing (Gura).<\/p>\n

Through changes like this, the banjo\u2019s place in popular culture shifts upward. As the minstrel shows fell out of fashion, the banjo wisped into the dominant culture, assisted by physical changes in the instrument and alterations to its sound. These let the banjo slip into containment among the dominant class by conforming to its ideological \u201cchain of meaning\u201d: the banjo, just like the bourgeois, is refined, modern, and luxurious. The instrument no longer referenced the jolly, caricatured slave. Now, it found its place as a sign of the genteel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Five Strings of the South<\/h1>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is a testament to the dynamism of the \u201ccultural struggle\u201d that the banjo\u2019s position in the dominant formation did not last long. The five-string banjo \u201cfad\u201d of the end of the nineteenth century ended abruptly, in the face of recording media that favored music aimed at the common class. Since the banjo had been \u201celevated\u201d from this, it fell out of the foreground. While the banjo as a symbol of the bourgeoisie may not have lasted, its rise sidelined the history of the black banjo. By the turn of the century: \u201cthe plantation setting for the banjo had nearly disappeared in the popular media\u2026 and the association of blacks with the banjo continually lessened in the minds of Americans\u201d (Linn 118). This erasure was completed with the induction of the banjo\u2019s modern image: the instrument of rural, white America.<\/p>\n

After \u201cdiscovering\u201d the children\u2019s ballads of traditional, mountain singers, folklorists at the beginning of the twentieth century became obsessed with the Appalachians. For these researchers, the music of the mountains represented a \u201cauthentic\u201d culture. This term was strictly ideological: \u201cFor the folksong and folklore collectors working in Appalachia in the early twentieth century, authenticity was located in the past\u2026 They valued cultural stability over the technological change of modern America, handicraft to the machine-made, and they valued purity over the dynamics of ethnic and racial pluralism (Linn 137). These collectors were mostly put off by the traditional banjo playing that had remained robust here, which was living on as an echo of the \u201ccreolization\u201d that defined the banjos material existence within the lower classes. The older ideologies of the banjo stained the instrument\u2019s image: the banjo\u2019s time as a minstrel instrument, and then as a rich \u201cfad\u201d, precluded it from becoming part of the \u201cauthentic\u201d values with which these folklorists were painting the Appalachians. Not until the mid-century, when these notions had all but eroded from popular culture, did the banjo become \u201cauthentic\u201d in the hands the revivalists like Pete Seeger.<\/p>\n

Instead, the banjo\u2019s reemergence among popular culture was driven explicitly by commercial media, namely the sudden popularity of \u201chillbilly\u201d music and depiction of mountain culture. This genre, hillbilly, is a \u201ccultural and ideological\u201d construct, centering around the demoralization of poor, white Americans from the mountains through the assertion of their identity as \u201cstereotypical portrayals of shiftless, drunken, promiscuous, and bare-footed people, living in blissful squalor beyond the reaches of civilization\u201d (Sopriaz 2).<\/p>\n

A consequence of this formalization of mountain music is that black string bands and banjo players were wiped from the public eye: the hillbilly construct under which this mountain-like music was explicitly white, in order to keep this music separate from their \u201cracial\u201d offerings in the blues (Linn 139).<\/p>\n

The hillbilly banjo was and is still played with a distinct technique, generated by Earl Scruggs of the \u201cBlue Grass Boys\u201d. The stroke style firmly left behind, Earl Scruggs\u2019 style revolved around rippling roles of three-finger picking that produces the rapid twang that most are familiar with (Sopriaz 3). The addition of a resonator behind the body of the instrument sharpened the tamper and amplified the volume, giving the banjo a new slate to be inducted into \u201chillbillyhood\u201d.<\/p>\n

Above, Earl Scruggs plays his “Bluegrass Breakdown”, demonstrating the speed and twang of his three-fingered style, which came to identify this brand of “hillybilly” banjo. Source: Smithsonian Folkways “Classic Banjo”<\/em><\/p>\n

The subsumption of the banjo into commercial media represent its third social field, subjecting it to the formalization, tropes, clich\u00e9s and sameness of Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s \u201cculture industry\u201d.\u00a0 They write: \u201cThere is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him\u201d. Given that, under this mass media, the reality of the world becomes indistinguishable from the filmed one, the banjo\u2019s ideological place in popular culture during this period becomes more potent in \u201ccontainment\u201d. The banjo was used as an unmistakable symbol of this \u201cmythically rural, white, poorly educated and thickly accented region\u201d, contributing to this ideological process of ridiculing poor white Americans.\u00a0 As a result, the banjo became a symbol for a familiar trope, used here in the \u201cdemoralization\u201d of impoverished whites: The Clown. A trope like this, here, acts as predetermined classification, such that audiences are left with \u201cno scope for their imagination\u201d when they are presented with the meaning of the banjo (Adorno and Horkheimer).<\/p>\n