A History

The modern banjo has historical roots that can be traced back over 150 year to the late 19^th century classic banjo styles, the mid 19^th century minstrel banjo styles, and even further back to earlier African musical influences.

The idea of stretching a skin across a resonating chamber, then attaching a neck and strings originated with Western Africans, who were forcibly taken as slaves and brought to the “New World”.  These early banjos consisted of a gourd or a carved wood body with an animal skin stretched around it and simply a stick used as the neck. 

When Africans and Europeans arrived in North America, they had shared ideas and attitudes towards music, despite their massively unequal statuses.  This led to new kinds of music being formed from both groups, both separately and together.  The mid 19^th century minstrel banjo is likely one of the first creations born from the meeting of the two musical worlds.  Next to the fiddle, the banjo was the most popular instrument in African-American music in the U.S. throughout the 18^th and into the 19^th century.  In the early 1800’s, white musicians began to play the banjo, in imitation of the southern African-American’s.  By the time the mid-1800’s rolled around, professional performers had popularized the banjo across the U.S. and in England.  Because these musicians often performed with blackened faces, they became known as “blackface minstrels”.

There are a lot of negative aspects surrounding the “blackface minstrels”, due to the fact that they depicted slaves and southern life in inaccurate and degrading ways.  Nevertheless, minstrelsy was a part of America’s first nationally popular music, and it helped to popularize the banjo for both black and white populations.  Due to their popularity, the first factory-made banjos appeared in the 1840’s.  Soon after that, five-string banjo’s arrived, and were adopted as the norm, which they still are today.