Overview of Banjo History

The origins of the banjo are discussed along with historical context. Roughly 300,000 slaves or 2.5% of the West African slave trade entered the United States, mostly between 1691-1810. Enslaved peoples were from displaced nationalities, ethnic groups, cultures, and languages, and they brought various instruments of their culture with them to the Americas. Over time, the gourd banjo evolved from various influences. White Americans learned to play the banjo, at different places and different times, through African and European cultural exchanges. The banjo appeared in blackface entertainment prior to the Revolutionary war and, therefore, prior to minstrelsy and the Civil War. Following the Civil War, advances in banjo playing techniques, publications, design and manufacturing occurred. “Hillbilly,” later “Country,” music emerged from the Southern Appalachians in the early 1900s, but the banjo was usually not a featured instrument. Earl Scruggs deserves the major credit for the emergence of the banjo in Bluegrass music and Scruggs-style playing is the most common type played today. Other innovations in the music of the banjo, including melodic style, have occurred to the present day.