How To Choose a Banjo——A Brief History of the Banjo

[Emma]

The origins of the banjo as we know it are unclear. It has some resemblance to West African instruments such as the kora with its plucked strings and skin head stretched on a gourd body. But unlike the banjo, the kora has a stick neck and metal loops that function similarly to frets.

The earliest banjo-like instruments to turn up in the Americas also used a gourd for a body, animal skin for a resonator, and a simple stick neck. They had various numbers of strings that usually included one that produced a drone.

By the 17th century early prototypes of the modern banjo starting appearing in the Caribbean. These instruments with their fingerboards and tuning pegs showed the influence of other western stringed instruments.

These earliest versions of the modern banjo were played by slaves, and it wasn’t until the 1830s that a white Virginian minstrel musician, Joel Walker Sweeney, took up the instrument. His banjo had four full-length strings, a shorter fifth drone string, and had a drumhead-like body. The banjo soon developed an audience on both sides of the Atlantic as Sweeney took his minstrel act to England where his banjo became a staple of music-hall instrumentation.

The banjo enjoyed continued popularity beyond the minstrel era largely thanks to Charlie Poole and his trio, the North Carolina Ramblers. As the result of a baseball injury to his hand, Poole adopted a three-finger picking technique that’s become known as classic or finger-style banjo. With their bluesy fiddle and melodic and intricate guitar and banjo parts, the Ramblers and their popular 1920s records became a prototype for modern bluegrass. Influenced by Poole’s technique, fellow North Carolinian Earl Scruggs, the banjo player in Bill Monroe’s groundbreaking Blue Grass Boys, defined the sound of modern bluegrass banjo in the 1940s.

As various banjo playing techniques evolved, new forms of the instrument were developed as we’ll see.