Gourd Banjos: From Africa to the Appalachians
- Monday, October 01, 2001 -
"...a black Virginian born Negro fellow named Sambo ... He makes fiddles, and can play upon the fiddle..."
Banjo playing in Tidewater Virginia is described in the Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian. Fithian was a tutor at Nomini Hall, owned by Robert Carter. The Carter family was one of the most prominent in Virginia. Carter employed, in addition to Fithian, both a dancing master and a music tutor. Fithian's diary entry for February 4, 1774, included the following about two of his pupils:
"This evening, in the School-Room, which is below my Chamber, several Negroes & Ben, & Harry are playing on a banjo and dancing!"
Fithian comments in a letter to a friend:
"And as to the Boys they are full of youthful impetuosity & vigor, & these compel them, when they are free from restraint, to commit actions which with proper management they had surely avoided."
The class bias in Tidewater Virginia would have prevented Ben and Harry from playing banjo for a white audience. Did they play a gourd banjo? We don't know because Fithian does not describe the banjo. It is probable that by 1774 the banjo was so commonly known that Fithian felt a description was unnecessary.
There may be an even earlier reference to whites playing a banjo-like instrument in Secular Music in Colonial Annapolis, The Tuesday Club (1745-56). The author, John Barry Talley, quotes a letter by one or the Tuesday Club members:
"Bacon wrote to Callister, 'Your strum-strum must wait til the garden will permit me a day or two's leisure to tinkle it at Oxford.'"
This could have been the 'strum-strum' that Sir Hans Sloane described in Jamaica.
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection at Colonial Williamsburg has a watercolor, The Old Plantation, which was found in South Carolina. This painting, which is assumed to be late eighteenth century, depicts a four-string gourd banjo with three long strings and one short. This painting has often been cited as evidence that the short banjo string was not a later invention. John Huron of Bristol, Tennessee, made a replica of this banjo for Colonial Williamsburg.
There is a later description of a banjo-like instrument that appears somewhat different from those observed in the Chesapeake area. Fredrika Bremer visited America in 1849-50. Eileen Southern, in Readings in Black American Music, quotes Bremer's Diary entry for Columbia, South Carolina, on June 10, 1850:
"... another young Negro ... came and sung with his banjo several of the Negro songs ...The banjo is an African instrument, made from the half of a fruit called the calabash, or gourd, which has a very hard rind. A thin skin or piece of bladder is stretched over the opening, and over this one or two strings are stretched, which are raised on a bridge. The banjo is the Negroes' guitar, and certainly it is the first born among stringed instruments."
Southern says of Bremer:
