19th century
A01=Kristina R. Gaddy
A23=Rhiannon Giddens
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
american
Author_Kristina R. Gaddy
automatic-update
blackface
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AV
Category=AVGH
Category=AVLT
Category=AVM
Category=AVRL
Category=HBT
Category=HBTB
Category=NHTB
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
flute
folk music
gourd
haiti
instrument
jamaica
Language_English
martinique
minstrels
new orleans
new world
PA=Available
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
race
ritual
saint-domingue
slave
slavery
softlaunch
spiritual
spirituality
suriname
voodoo
winti
Product details
- ISBN 9781324074489
- Weight: 236g
- Dimensions: 140 x 211mm
- Publication Date: 09 Apr 2024
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo’s key role in Black spirituality, ritual and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives and art, she traces the banjo’s beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean and the colonies that became US states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland and New York
African Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass and country, its deepest history forgotten.
Kristina R. Gaddy is the author of Flowers in the Gutter: The True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis. She has received the Parsons Fund Award, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellowship, and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Rubys Artist Grant. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and Atlas Obscura, among other publications. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
