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<![CDATA[KRISTINA R. GADDY - Open Stacks Blog]]>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:36:37 -0500Weebly<![CDATA[The Early Banjo in Appalachia]]>Tue, 11 Apr 2023 13:22:01 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/the-early-banjo-in-appalachia

"Little Babe Caldwell with a gourd banjo," The Jean Thomas, The Traipsin' Woman, Collection, University of Louisville.

A question I’ve gotten a number of times during book talks after outlining where the banjo appears in the Caribbean and North America is “When did the banjo appear in Appalachia?” or “I’ve seen the first reference to banjos in Appalachia in the 1790s, but does it appear earlier?” Photographs like the one Jean Thomas "The Traipsin' Woman" took of "Little Babe Caldwell" with a gourd banjo and the association of the banjo with Appalachia today lend the idea that the banjo must have existed for hundreds of years in Appalachia. And while the kid is holding a gourd banjo that looks homemade, all the instruments adults are holding in Jean Thomas's photographs are commercially made. The research I did both for Well of Souls and for presentations at The Banjo Gathering over the years made me question the idea of the banjo in Appalachia going back farther than other places in what became the United States.
I wanted to dig into the question "When does the banjo appear in Appalachia?" because I want to have a solid answer when folks ask, and because when I did look into it, I realized that some of the information that has been repeated for decades is wrong. So here we go. And, as always, a content warning: the history of the banjo is intertwined with the history of slavery, racism, and white supremacy in the US, and we can’t talk about the banjo without talking about these things. We’ll also be getting into Blackface Minstrelsy, so while I won’t share offensive lyrics or images here, know that it is part of this exploration.

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So when did the banjo come to Appalachia?

Ok, hold on, this question is actually a big knot, and we have to untangle it piece by piece. Let’s start with the last part: Appalachia. What is Appalachia?
There is the geographic region, which itself is much debated. In Jeff Biggers’ The United States of Appalachia, he offers this map, without counties designated, an amorphous shape sitting across mountain ranges. But he remarks, “Appalachia, as author Wallace Stegner once remarked about the American Southwest, has been more of a process than a place.”

The map of Appalachia in Jeff Bigger's "The United States of Appalachia."

And so what Appalachia is depends on who you ask, and the question “What is Appalachia?” almost always seems to be addressed when people are writing about it.
“Appalachia is, often simultaneously, a political construction, a vast geographical region, and a spot that occupies an unparalleled place in our cultural imagination,” writes Elizabeth Catte in What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia.
Stephen Stoll argues in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia that, “The southern mountains are half a billion years old, but Appalachia did not exist before the industrial invasion of those uplands during the nineteenth century. It appeared as a location within the capitalist world when its coal and labor ignited the American Industrial Revolution.” I can say this industrial invasion postdates the arrival of the banjo in Appalachia.
In the introduction to Y’all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia, Z. Zane McNeill writes, “Appalachia is more than a geographic region—it is an environmental space with a history of natural resource extraction; a cultural construction fashioned by conservatives and liberals to support revisionist arguments of what ‘America’ is, and which bodies represent ‘America;’ and a politically contested space that pushes disadvantaged voices to the margins.”
“But ‘Appalachia,’ as we use the word, tends to be mostly understood as a cultural region, centered lower than New York but farther north than Alabama. This symbolism is both the dream and the evasion. At once the fantasy and shame of the republic. A South, at least imagined, without Blackness,” writes Imani Perry in South to America. That imagining, that dream and evasion, is why we have to understand and recognize the Black Appalachian experience. And it is a point I’ll come back to later.

[Appalachia is] A South, at least imagined, without Blackness" -- Imani Perry

I know we won’t agree on a definition of Appalachia, so for sheer reasons of practicality, let’s use the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) map, which is pretty generous. (I know most people have been actually asking me about Southern Appalachia when they say Appalachia, because they don’t mean Ithaca, New York, for example. But then we have to untangle even more knots.) Appalachian urban areas include Birmingham, Knoxville, Charleston, and Pittsburgh, but not Nashville, Greensboro, Atlanta, Lexington, Lynchburg, Columbus, Akron, or Harrisburg.

The Evidence of the Banjo in Appalachia

James Weir, image courtesy WKU Libraries

Many folks have cited 1798 in Knoxville, Tennessee as the earliest appearance of the banjo in Appalachia, pointing to an account in James Weir’s diary.[1] However, until a few years ago, everyone was relying on what they thought was an accurate second-hand account of Weir’s journal. This source was Robert Coates’ The Outlaw Years: The History of the Land Pirates of the Natchez Trace, a work of fiction published in 1930 that claims to tell a history of the region. In it, Coates recounts an evening in Knoxville, Tennessee: “Rum shops lined the streets. ‘I stood agast,’ wrote James Weir, who visited the town in 1798. He saw men jostling, singing, swearing; women yelling from doorways; half-naked n——[my omission -KG] on their ‘banjies’ while the crowd whooped and danced around them.” Everyone assumed that it was an accurate transcription of Weir’s diary.
It is not.
Nowhere in Weir’s journal does he mention the banjo.
There is no account of the banjo from Knoxville in 1798.

Nowhere in Weir’s journal does he mention the banjo.
There is no account of the banjo from Knoxville in 1798.

In 2019, Lynn Niedermeir was able to go straight to the source: Weir’s journal. She is a librarian at Western Kentucky University, and a descendant of Weir donated the journal to their special collections. Niedermeir and her colleagues had heard that Weir’s journal mentioned banjos and African American music, and that would, in fact, be very valuable to people interested in music history and Black history. But Niedermeir could not find anything like what Coates wrote. In a blog post , Niedermeir quotes directly from the journal wherefrom Coates likely embellished: Knoxville was “Confus[e]d with a promiscuous throng of every denomination some Talked some sung but mostly all did profainly sware – I stood ag[h]ast, my soul shrunk back to hear the horrid oaths and dreadful Indignities offered to the supream Governer of the universe.”

The description from Weir's journal, with no mention of banjos. Image courtesy WKU Library.

She adds, “It’s a vivid portrait of a frontier community, but nowhere in Weir’s description is there a reference to either African Americans or banjos.” She goes on to note that in A History of Muhlenberg County (1913), the author accurately quoted the diary, but when Coates wrote his book, he embellished these accounts. No surprise, Niedermeir and I share a philosophy: “The story of the banjies-that-never-were is a lesson for all historical researchers: whenever possible, go straight to the source.”

Another account that comes up is from Greenville, South Carolina in the 1780s. Again, what people focus on is the vivid description: "After the evening's labors were finished, they [the white “young folks”] would join in a regular old-fashioned Virginia reel, and keep time with the flying feet to the delightful strains drawn from a gourd banjo."
We assume here that because it is the 1780s, we also assume that the banjo player must be Black since white banjo playing was not yet common (again, more on this in Well of Souls), but the text doesn’t mention anything more about the player. During this time, there were not many Black people in Greenville County. While in 1780, more than half of South Carolina’s population was Black, however according to the 1790 census, only a little over 9% of Greenville County’s population was enslaved.

I have a problem with when we get this source. It appears in an article on “The Upper Country of South Carolina” in Debow’s Review from December 1859. The author says that this is from an account of Mrs. Phoebe West Green, who would have been one of those “young folks” in the 1780s, having been born around 1770. She’s around 90 when she was asked to remember her youth in Greenville, and a lot has changed in those 70 years. In the 1780s, Greenville is not the town of Greenville--the county was first established in 1784 and the courthouse was not built until 1794, at which time the town was known as Pleasantburg. By 1816, it is Greenville, and by the 1850s, the natural resource extraction from Appalachia Steven Stoll mentions has begun: we have railroads and industry. And we also have Blackface Minstrelsy. By 1859, the gourd banjo was commonly known as an instrument of enslaved Black people in the South, so much so that it was used as a prop of Blackness on the Minstrel stage (Well of Souls has a lot more about this).

Detail of a 1794 map of South Carolina, where Greenville County has not yet been marked. Greenville county was taken from Cherokee land.

Potentially an attempt at a gourd banjo on the cover of Jim Crow Jubilee, 1847. Detail, from Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University.

Memory is also fickle. Minstrelsy impacted so much of American popular culture and musical culture that we can’t discount the idea that a gourd banjo—with its southern and rural connotations—appeared in Green’s mind because of an image she actually got from popular culture.
But maybe she did see a gourd banjo. Maybe that was the night that she first saw her future husband Isaac Green at a dance and she’d always remember the music she heard that night. Those are the kinds of memories that stick with us.

When I recounted all of this to my partner Pete Ross who builds gourd banjos and has also done a lot of research into early Minstrelsy, the fact that Green mentions a gourd banjo made it seem more plausible to him. He feels that if Green was stereotyping that a banjo was being played, by 1859 (decades into Minstrelsy), she might have been more likely to characterize it as a banjo (generally) or a wooden-rimmed banjo. “But, the gourd banjo was still known enough to be mentioned in the lyrics of early minstrel tune ‘Piccayune Butler’ and even at the end of the 19th century in places like S.S. Stewarts Journal,” he says.The gourd banjo was “part of general memory,” he adds, “but that still doesn't mean her memory is perfect and she's not describing something she saw at a different occasion and different date.”
I’m not sure that I agree, but it is possible that Green saw a gourd banjo in Greenville, South Carolina in the 1780s, but a second-hand (i.e. the source written by the author and not Mrs. Green herself), non-contemporaneous account is not a great source.

There is a third early-ish account (1833) from Appalachia that has also been cited in many places. I’m going to have a brief aside here on it, even though it postdates the earliest account (which is coming!) because it speaks to the trickiness of musical sourcing during this period.
In Dan Emmitt and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy, Hans Nathan cites an account from East Tennessee in Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee (1833) that again, has been cited without much thought. First, about the source: it is an unauthorized biography of David “Davy” Crockett that he disliked so much that he went and wrote his own autobiography A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (published a year later, without any references to banjos…). According to the American Antiquarian Society, no one has been able to determine who the unauthorized biographer is, so it could have been someone sitting in New York, making up what they thought frontier life in Tennessee looked and sounded like.

So in Sketches and Eccentricities, this made up story about Davy Crockett, an Black man named Uncle Ben:
“thrummed his banjo, beat time with his feet, and sung, in haste, the following lines, occasionally calling for particular steps:
‘I started off from Tennessee,
My old horse wouldn’t pull for me.
(Ben cries out-- “Now, back step an’ heel an’ toe.”)
   ‘He began to fret an’ slip,
   An I begin to cus an’ whip;
   Walk jawbone from Tennessee;
   Walk jawbone from Tennessee.
(“Now, weed corn, kiver taters, an’ double shuffle”)
   I fed my horse in de poplar trof.
   It made him cotch de hoopin’ cof;
   My old horse died in Tennessee,
   And will’d his jawbone here to me,
   Walk jawbone,’ &c.'"

A jawbone on the wall above a fireplace on the sheet music cover of Joel Walker Sweeney's "De Ole Jawbone." Image courtesy Johns Hopkins University, Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection.

Then, he goes on to play “Jim Crow,” which was by 1833 known as a Blackface Minstrel song. Hans Nathan writes the character of Jim Crow was “created and made famous by the actor Thomas D. Rice” in “the late [eighteen] twenties and early thirties.” According to an 1867 account of Rice’s rise in the Atlantic Monthly and recounted in Monarchs of Minstrelsy, Rice began performing as Jim Crow in Cincinnati, which is not in Appalachia, but on the border of the region and the nation’s frontier at the time. Rice had heard a Black stage-coach driver singing the famous lyrics “Turn about an’ wheel about an’ do jis so, An’ ebery time I turn about I jump Jim Crow.” Nathan thinks that the character Rice created had “something of the swagger of the real frontiersman and riverboatman. Their models indeed were Mike Fink and David Crockett…” and Black men Rice met in Cincinnati and later, Pittsburgh (which is in Appalachia). Maybe part of the reason that Crockett didn’t like the unauthorized biography was because he was depicted as one of the “colorful and lusty toughs,” as Nathan describes frontiersmen like Crockett and Jim Crow. “So the dance closed,” the unauthorized biography writes, “and not one of all that crowd danced more, got in a love scrape sooner, drank more whiskey, saw more fun, or sat up later than David Crockett…” The use of the comic banjo figure and the reference to Jim Crow in the 1833 Sketches and Eccentricities would make it seem like the whole passage was influenced by Minstrelsy.

This 1837 images features a band in Jamaica with a jawbone player. "Band of the Jaw-Bone John-Canoe" in Sketches of character : in illustration of the habits, occupation, and costume of the Negro population, in the island of Jamaica / drawn after nature, and in lithography, by I.M. Belisario, courtesy Yale Center for British Art.

But the first published version of a Blackface Minstrel song about jawbones doesn’t come until J.W. Sweeney’s “De Ole Jawbone” in 1840, seven years after this account [2]. The lyrics in the 1833 book don’t match Sweeney’s, another undated song called “De Ole Jaw Bone,” or Cool White’s 1844 “Walk Jaw Bone.” The lyrics to “Jim Crow” in the book also don’t match T.D. Rice’s song, except for the three words “jump Jim Crow.” Sketches and Eccentricities post-dates Rice’s success with the song, and the author could have easily copied his lyrics (they wouldn’t have been worried about copyright), they didn’t. Here is, seemingly, a Black banjo player singing another song with a familiar phrase, but not Rice’s song (and he only ever heard the two-line chorus).
So could Sketches and Eccentricities actually have come from a writer in the region who was familiar with this music? Could these two transcriptions, even though they seem tainted by Minstrelsy, actually be from Black vernacular sources? I don’t think I can say definitively. Early Minstrelsy isn’t well documented enough, and Black music certainly wasn’t documented well enough. If yes is the answer to either of the questions, then it would suggest that perhaps some of what Blackface Minstrels said about getting music from Black musicians was true, and not just something they said to bolster their authenticity. It might also suggest that Minstrels including T.D. Rice and Dan Emmett took songs from Appalachia and the Appalachian border regions, regions we now associate strongly with old time stringband music, to the Minstrel stage, rather than those songs originating on the stage and spreading them outward from there.

What is the earliest account of the banjo in Appalachia?

The text says "lute," which given the the description of "breathed," I think was meant to say "flute."

The earliest contemporary, first-hand source I’ve been able to find of the banjo in Appalachia comes from Thomas Ashe’s Travels in America Performed in 1806. In Wheeling, (West) Virginia, Ashe writes, “"I entered the ball-room which was filled with persons at cards, drinking, smoaking, dancing, &c. The 'music' consisted of two banjies, played by negroes nearly in a state of nudity, and a [f]lute through which a Chickesaw breathed with much occasional exertion and violent gesticulations. The dancing accorded with the harmony of these instruments."

One of the most interesting things to me in this account is that it is very clearly a social occasion: they are in a ballroom, and others are playing cards. Before the 1790s, we almost exclusively see the banjo as part of a religious/ ritual dance from New York to Suriname (I fully explore this in Well of Souls).[3] That’s not what we see here. This might be a function of the religious practices waning, which started with the Second Great Awakening. It also seems to be an integrated crowd, with the Black banjo players and Native American flute player, and a white crowd. Again, prior to the 1790s, we almost always have banjos being played by people of African descent for the religious/ ritual dance where only people of African descent participate. We have white observers of these dances (which is how we get the accounts). Then we have Black musicians playing fiddles and flutes for white audiences in ballrooms. Here, we have both.

Early Banjo Accounts in Near Appalachia

Another thing I want to point out is the proximity of banjos to the Appalachian region before the Wheeling account and the connectedness of Appalachia to other parts of the country.
In 1781, Thomas Jefferson writes from Charlottesville (a town that borders the Appalachian region) that "the instrument proper to them [enslaved people] is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa.”[4] In 1790, Abdiel McAlister put out an ad in a York, Pennsylvania paper to solicit the recapture of Nathan Butler who “plays well on the banjoe.” McAlister leased 3000 acres of land outside York known as Spring Forge, and it starts to get mountainous around there, but it's not quite Appalachia under any definition. (McAlister died in 1792 and may or may not have been the owner of Butler; McAlister did not own any enslaved people in 1789, and may have been leasing Butler.) Six years later, Anthony Peele put out an advertisement for the recapture of a man named Will who “plays on the banjo.” Peele lived “on the Yadkin river, near the Bald Mountain, in Rowan County” North Carolina. In 1796, Rowan County included today’s Davie and Davidson counties, and again, is right on the border to the Appalachian region as defined by ARC.

The North-Carolina Minerva and Fayetteville Advertiser 20 Aug 1796, Sat · Page 3

While Appalachia was less densely populated than some places to the east, it wasn’t completely isolated. In Travels to the westward of the Allegany Mountains, in the states of the Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, in the year 1802, the authors point out that the merchants in Knoxville “obtain their supplies by land, from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond, in Virginia, and in return, send, by the same channel, the production of this country, which they buy from the farmers, or take in exchange for their goods.” There’s also trade with New Orleans by river. The author of The journal of a tour into the territory northwest of the Alleghany Mountains ; made in the spring of the year 1803 notes that “boats are constantly used for the purpose of trade down the [Ohio] river, or the transportation of various articles of produce, &c. to the place of deposit at New Orleans.” And, enslaved people arrived in this region from somewhere else, so it is not impossible to imagine someone being sold from Baltimore to western North Carolina who continued his banjo playing.

Why are there no 18th century accounts of the banjo in Appalachia?

Distribution of enslaved people in North America in 1790 and 1860. In 1790, it is concentrated around the Chesapeake and South Carolina and Georgia coasts and in 1860, you see the Appalachian region did not have a high density of enslaved people.

This region was colonized by Europeans after places like the East Coast, where we get the earliest North American accounts of the banjo. “Until the 1760s, African American slavery and European American settlement in the interior of the North American continent was confined to New Orleans and its immediate hinterlands, along with a few scattered French, British, and Spanish outposts,” writes John Craig Hammon in “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770-1820.”[5] He says that by 1790, there “were nearly 12,000” enslaved people in Kentucky and 3,400 enslaved people in “the emerging plantation core around present-day Nashville”—in both cases referencing these territories as a whole rather than just the Appalachian regions of the states, which were less likely to have large plantations with large numbers of enslaved laborers. James B. Murphy writes that in 1800 “there were only 93 slaves in the Appalachian area” of Kentucky, and by 1820 there were 2,334 enslaved people in the whole state.[6] That is less than the number of enslaved people one western Maryland county the same year.[7] Research also suggests that enslaved people were more concentrated in Appalachia. For example, "In Harlan County, Kentucky, for instance, slave ownership before the Civil War was concentrated among five families that owned 48 percent of slaves in the county," Thomas Wagner and Phillip Obermiller write in the introduction to African American Miners and Migrants: The Eastern Kentucky Social Club.
But let me be clear: Appalachia is not an imagined South without Blackness. The presence of people of African descent in Appalachia could date back to the earliest settlements, however their communities looked very different from those in the Chesapeake region, the Carolina and Georgia coasts, and even urban areas like New York and Albany—places where we have multiple pre-1800 accounts of the banjo.

However, to assume that anywhere there were Black people there were also banjos or that all Black people played the banjo is also assuming a lot and borderline stereotyping. Let me take us to another place, briefly. As I point out in Well of Souls, the first account we have of the banjo in New Orleans comes when Benjamin Henry Latrobe visits the city in 1819 (fifteen years after our first Appalachian account). Here is a place where we know that upwards of two-thirds of the population was of African descent (either enslaved or free) when Latrobe visited. Here is a place where people of African descent were first taken and sold in 1719.[8] Here is a place where we have Black people singing, dancing, and worshiping, but no accounts of banjos. As I point out in Well of Souls, this might just be because an earlier account (particularly during the period when New Orleans was a Spanish colony) hasn’t been discovered. But it may also well be because there were no banjos there until after the Haitian Revolution and further disbursement of Caribbean culture in North America.

The chorus of Cool White's "Walk Jaw Bone" is similar to the chorus of the Carter Brother's and Son "Walk Joe Bone." In Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, William Mahar suggests that lyrics like "Walkjawbone, Jenny get along, in come Sally with the booties on" could have been dance calls. Images above from the Lester Levy Sheet Music collection, Johns Hopkins University.

Something similar could hold true in Appalachia. In Well of Souls, I explore how the banjo was central to African diasporic religions and rituals including banyaprei, Vodou, Junkanoo, and Pinkster. To perform a danced and sung religion like these, you need a group of people. Perhaps enslaved people were too dispersed in Appalachia to practice these religions (assuming they had once practiced them or their families or communities had), and so without the religion, there was no banjo until it became more secular at the turn of the 19th century. It could also be that during the period of expansion into Appalachia at the beginning of the 19th century, the people of African descent who moved into the region did not practice these religions and so did not bring the music, dance, and instruments that were central to the religions into the mountains.
Researcher Wilma Dunaway has also suggested that slavery in Appalachia was more brutal than in the plantation south. Taking that idea and applying it to music and dance, perhaps slave owners in the region were not as permissive as plantation managers and owners in the South, and did not allow for dances or banjo playing. In Well of Souls, I write about how the large numbers of enslaved people on one property had easy contact with one another and people on nearby plantations, and that could lead to uprisings. Manager and owners allowed for dances like the calinda and banyaprei in part as a way to deter unrest.
Despite the banjo’s identification with Appalachia and especially southern Appalachia, the banjo arrived in the region later than the Chesapeake, New York, and the Carolinas. We also don’t have many pre-1840 accounts from the region, which may be due to the fact that there were not that many banjos to be seen; that there are fewer records (for example, the earliest western Virginia newspaper according to Chronicling America was published in 1789); and as always, that we haven’t found them yet. If you have a pre-1840, contemporaneous account of the banjo in Appalachia, I’d love to see it!

[1] In her book African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia, Cece Conway misquoted Coates as saying Weir was there in 1789.
[2] The Lester Levy Sheet Music collection at Johns Hopkins has a version of Sweeney’s from 1848, but Nathan reprints an 1840 cover in his book. Hans Nathan’s Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy is a great resource, but Nathan presents information in a way that people may find offensive today, and he reprints Blackface Minstrel lyrics and images, which are ugly and racist. John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote an article for Oxford American trying to figure out how the jawbone might have been used in Kentucky music, which is worth reading: https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-99-winter-2017/death-rattle
[3] There is one account I’ve found in Virginia where this is not the case, but it seems that the enslaved man playing the banjo is being forced to do so for a white audience rather than it being an occasion for Black people.
[4] TJ is wrong on this point, but the date and location are what is important.
[5] John Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770-1820,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 175-206. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41478766
[6] James B. Murphy, “Slavery and Freedom in Appalachia: Kentucky as a Demographic Case Study,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Spring 1982), pp. 151-169. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23379577
[7] https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/intromsa/pdf/slavery_pamphlet.pdf
[8] For more on the general history of New Orleans, I recommend Ned Sublette’s The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Lawerence Hill Books: Chicago, 2008) and City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 by Jason Berry (UNC Press: Chapel Hill, 2018).

This is part of Banya Obbligato, a series of blog posts relating to my book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History. While integrally related to Well of Souls, these posts are editorially and financially separate from the book (i.e., I’m researching, writing, and editing them myself and no one is paying me for it). So, if you want to financially support the blog or my writing and research you can do so here.

]]><![CDATA[Pinkster, the King of Kongo, and New York]]>Wed, 19 Oct 2022 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/pinkster-the-king-of-kongo-and-new-york “Wait, is his name Charles or is the name of the king King Charles?” someone asked me after reading a draft of Well of Souls. In Albany, New York, the most well-remembered King of the African American Pinkster celebration was Charles, but Albany wasn’t the only place that had Pinkster celebrations and Charles wasn’t the only king.
In Antiquities of Long Island from 1874, Gabriel Furman writes that although at first Pinkster, “the day of Pentecost,” was celebrated by Black and white New Yorkers, it “eventually became entirely left to the former,” and was never as popular on Long Island as it was in Albany. On the hill where “the Capitol now strands,” booths were set up and Black people came from near and far to celebrate. The dance as he remembers it was called the “Toto dance,” which was danced to “a hollow log, with a skin of parchment stretched over one end, the other being left open, on which they beat with a stick, making a rough, discordant sound,” a drum Furman calls the “banjo drum.” [1]

A later 19th century image of King Charles on horseback from Harper's New Monthly Magazine.

“The head man in all these dances and processions was an old Guinea negro, aged eighty-five years, whom they called King Charlie,” continues Furman. James Eights had heard that Charles had been “brought from Angola” as a child. If you’ve read Well of Souls, you know that King Charles’s red coat and title as King connect him to traditions from the Kongo/ Angola region of Africa. Charles was said to be owned by “one of the most ancient and respectable merchant princes of the olden time, then residing on the opposite bank of the Hudson.” [2] This man was probably Volkert P. Douw, a mayor of Albany and New York state senator. [3]
Interestingly, Douw also owned Dinah, one of the enslaved people accused of starting a fire in Albany and mentioned in the “Pinkster Ode” as being buried on Pinkster Hill, where the festivities took place. [4] Charles is reported to have died in 1824, but by then, the Pinkster celebrations had already been outlawed and declining in Albany.

Many of the accounts of Pinkster (including fictionalized accounts in novels like James Fenimore Cooper’s Satanstoe) show up not only long after the festivity was no longer a regular occurence, but after the end of slavery in New York.
In addition to describing Pinkster in Albany, Furman writes that Pinkster was celebrated on Long Island, too, and that even in 1874 “especially on the west end of this island, it is still much of a holiday.”
On the other side of the island in Brooklyn, “men, women and children, sometimes as many as two hundred” came to the market to celebrate Pinkster. “They danced for eels around the market; they sang; "tooted" on fish horn; played practical jokes on one another,” wrote Henry Reed Stiles in 1869. People also got drunk and arrested for disorderly conduct, apparently, but Stiles reports that they were let off with a fine since Pinkster only happened once a year. [5]

Dancing for Eels 1820 Catharine Market. Read more at the Creolization of American Culture website by clicking the image.

Across the river in Manhattan, Pinkster in the late 1790s was a “universal observance” and “boys and negroes might be seen all day standing in the market place, laughing, joking, and cracking eggs. In the afternoon, the grown up apprentices and servant girls, used to dance on the green in Bayard's farm in the Bowery,” according to an 1846 reminiscence. [6] In 1838, The New-York Mirror reported that two of the Pinkster celebrants were Billy the fiddler, who stood “four feet nothing in his stocking feet, and [was] deeply versed in the mysteries of catgutt” and Pot-pie Palmer “a light-hearted, shirtless vagabond, who, during the prevalence of the yellow-fever, trundled the dead to their graves, singing ‘Yankee-doodle,’ and ‘Hail, Columbia!’” [7] During the excavation of the African Burial Ground in New York, one man was found wearing a red military coat, which has led people to speculate that he was a Pinkster King.

Detail from Samuel Jennings's "Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences" where a Black man wears a red coat. / Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Kownu in the banyaprei wears a red jacket with epaulets in this diorama by Gerrit Schouten / Rijksmuseum.

And while we suspect that other Pinkster celebrations had their own kings, King Charles is the only king found in historical sources. (I default to the idea that there are very few contemporaneous sources that discuss Pinkster, which was often because white people with the means to document Black customs didn’t care enough to do so. And the later sources, which impart a sense of nostalgia for pre-slavery times, all seem to draw on each other.) However, in an 1894 article about Pinkster by historian Alice Morse Earle, she notes that around the same time as Pinkster (May or early June), Black residents throughout New England held an “Election Day” where a “Black Governor” was elected. In Windsor, Connecticut, the master of ceremonies in 1820 was a man named “General Ti,” enslaved to “Calt. Ellsworth.” [8]
Like Calenda/ Kalinda dances elsewhere, similar traditions of celebrations and electing a king or master of ceremonies may have had different names but essentially served the same purpose: to carry religious and spiritual traditions forward in new ways, adapted to and integrated with the culture of white European Americans in power.

Read more about Pinkster and African American history in New York:

Dewulf, Jeroen. The Pinkster King and the King of the Kongo: The Forgotten History of America's Dutch-Owned Slaves. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017.
Stuckey, Sterling. Going Through the Storm: the Influence of African American Art in History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Williams-Myers, A.J. Long Hammering: Essays on the Forging of an African American Presence in the Hudson River Valley to the Early Twentieth Century. Africa World Press: Trenton, 1994.

Notes
[1] Gabriel Furman, Antiquities of Long Island, 235-239.
[2] Furman, Antiquities, 323-327.
[3] Dewulf, The Pinkster King, 60.
[4] Dewulf, "Rediscovering Pinkster," 17.
[5] Henry Stiles Reed. A History of the City of Brooklyn, Volume 2. 1869 39-40.
[6] John F Watson. Annals and occurrences of New York city and state , in the olden time : being a collection of memoirs, anecdotes, and incidents concerning the city, county, and inhabitants, from the days of the founders. Philadelphia : H.F. Anners, 1846, 178.
[7] The New - York Mirror: a Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts 1823...Apr 14, 1838; 15, 42; American Periodicals Series Online pg. 330
[8] Alice Morse Earle. “Pinkster Day. “ Outlook (1893-1924); Apr 28, 1894; 49, 17; American Periodicals Series Online pg. 743-744.

]]><![CDATA[Essential Banjo History Reading List]]>Wed, 12 Oct 2022 16:00:00 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/essential-banjo-history-reading-list

The essential banjo history reading list.

Whether or not you’ve read Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History, there are some other great books on banjo history that informed my research you should check out (many of which go beyond the early period I write about). If you have more suggestions, leave them in the comments below!

Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War by Dena J. Epstein
Considered the godmother of banjo roots research, Dena Epstein (link to blog post) spent decades researching and writing Sinful Tunes and Spirituals. In the 1950s, people tried to tell her that the history of Black music before the Civil War didn’t exist. She knew that if there was a record of slavery (which there was), then there had to be a record of the music that enslaved people played as well. The book is broader than the banjo as well, but she was the first person to document that the banjo was an African American instrument.

Banjo Roots and Branches edited by Robert Winans
Banjo Roots and Branches represents the latest in banjo scholarship before the publication of Well of Souls. The essays come from banjo researchers, and the idea of compiling the essays came from presentations and discussions at The Banjo Gathering. In the making for almost a decade, the book is a great resource and represents excellent scholarship, except for the essay by George Gibson, which presents cherry-picked references and incorrect information in an attempt to support an unsubstantiated theory.

The Banjo: America’s African Instrument by Laurent Dubois
While Laurent Dubois also writes about the banjo’s early history (and especially focuses on the Caribbean origins and Haiti’s relationship to the instrument), his book traces the banjo from those roots, past Minstrelsy into jazz and folk music of the 20th century. This book is especially good if you ask, “Wait, what happens to the banjo after Minstrelsy?”

That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture by Karen Linn
Karen Linn’s book also explores the banjo after Minstrelsy and it’s rise as a popular white instrument. Divided into four sections, she explores the banjo in the late 19th century, the banjo in the early 20th century, southern Black banjo, and southern white banjo.

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy by Christopher J. Smith
Even though William Sidney Mount painted one of the most iconic images of a Black banjo player, I didn’t focus on him or this piece of art in Well of Souls. One reason is because it didn’t fit into the flow of the story I was trying to tell. Another is that Christopher Smith has done an excellent job of exploring Mount’s life and work, especially as it relates to music, in this book. But more than that, Smith writes about the ways in which white and Black culture interacted in the early to mid 19th century on frontier landscapes and waterways.

Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy by Hans Nathan (out of print from University of Oklahoma Press, but available via Archive.org
As the title shows, this book is in some ways out of date. Published in 1962, it uses language, images, and phrasing that people will probably find offensive today. But the problem is that no definitive book on Minstrelsy has been written since, and Nathan does explore the life of Dan Emmett and early Blackface Minstrels like no one else has. He also does a thorough ethnomusicological study of early Minstrel songs, which helps for the understanding of what the influence of Black music was on this popular music form.

The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy by Bob Carlin
For many decades, Joel Walker Sweeney was credited with adding “the fifth string” to the banjo, which is a myth. As I write in Well of Souls, Sweeney wasn’t the first white guy to play the banjo, and probably wasn’t even the first white Blackface Minstrel to play the banjo, but he became the most well-known. And, his name became synonymous with banjo playing. Bob Carlin has researched the myths and reality of Sweeney, and explores his life in relationship to early Blackface Minstrelsy, filling in many gaps from Hans Nathan’s book.

The Music of Black Americans by Eileen Southern
Although not about the banjo, Eileen Southern’s classic text puts the banjo into context with Black American musical traditions from 1619 to the 1970s. The book is broad—from folk music to pop music to classical music—and is a great refence.

]]><![CDATA[What is an Early Banjo?]]>Wed, 28 Sep 2022 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/what-is-an-early-banjoWhat is an Early Banjo? An Exploration of an Instrument’s Relationship to Organology and Ethnomusicology

Pete Ross and I presented this at the 2022 American Musical Instrument Society Conference at Studio Bell: The National Canadian Music Centre in Calgary, Canada.

It presentation outlines the organological characteristics (how an instrument is made) of early banjos—pre-industrial gourd- and calabash-bodied instruments. It also analyzes whether organology alone can determine if an instrument is a banjo or to what extent we must consider an instrument’s provenance, usage, and cultural context. Using seven images of early banjos and the three confirmed extant instruments, we outline the organological characteristics shared across early banjos, and how those characteristics differ from known African instruments. We also discuss the known cultural context of the banjo, which was created by people of African descent in the Americas and used as accompaniment for ritual dance. Finally, we introduce a newly rediscovered instrument from a collection at the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, a watercolor at the British Museum of an instrument once held at the Leverian Museum, and a watercolor from St. Domingue, and we explore whether by using organological characteristics alone we can conclusively say that these three newly discovered sources can be called early banjos.

You can view more of the presentations from AMIS here.

This is part of Banya Obbligato, a series of blog posts relating to my book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History. While integrally related to Well of Souls, these posts are editorially and financially separate from the book (i.e., I’m researching, writing, and editing them myself and no one is paying me for it). So, if you want to financially support the blog or my writing and research you can do so here.

]]><![CDATA[Music in Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History]]>Mon, 26 Sep 2022 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/music-in-well-of-souls-uncovering-the-banjos-hidden-history

The sheet music cover for A.P. Heinrich's The Log House, with a Black man holding a gourd banjo or fiddle peaking out from the house as Heinrich plays violin, 1826. Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection/ Johns Hopkins University Libraries.

Unfortunately, all of the music illustrations got cut from Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History. Here are some of the songs referenced, musical examples of early American music, and other musical transcriptions I've come across recently.

Three musical selections transcribed by Mr. Baptiste for Sir Hans Sloane, Jamaica, 1687.

James Ford Bell Library/ University of Minnesota Libraries.

Papa on gourd banjo:

Rhiannon Giddens's song "Build A House" (0:00 to 1:31 in this video) begins with the second part of the Koromanti tune (starting on the third line above), adapted for banjo, cello, and frame drum.

Click here to visit Musical Passage, a website where scholars Mary Caton Lingold and Laurent Dubois have made this music come to life.

The Maroon ranger song transcribed by John Gabriel Stedman in his original manuscript.

James Ford Bell Library/ University of Minnesota Libraries.

Ranger Song on fiddle:

Stedman's transcription isn't broken up into measures (I count 21 beats in the first part, which might be 4 4/4 measures with a pickup and 25 beats in the second part, which might be 5 4/4 measures with a pickup). This may be a reflection of syncopation that he had a hard time writing in Western musical notation, because although he was a musician, he wasn't a professional or African American like Mr. Baptiste. The triple pattern in the second part reminds me of the first part of Baptiste's Koromanti, but it is not similar enough to be called "the same" (in my opinion).

Drouin de Bercy’s transcription of the A ai bombia bombé song he heard in Haiti before 1814.

Archive.org

A ai bombia bombé on fiddle:

The song is in a major key and very lively, which makes it feel a bit militaristic. Jackey Quakenboss, one of the drummers at the Pinkster festival in New York, was said to have sung a song with similar lyrics.

One of the Banja songs transcribed by H.C. Focke

Google Books

Arabi na Pambo on fiddle:

Arabi na Pambo is the banja song I reference in Well of Souls, but H.C. Focke transcribed others as well. Many are in a minor key. Click here to see more of the music.

Calinda

Calinda adapted for gourd banjo:

This transcription of Calinda appears in Slave Songs of the United States, where the editors write, No. 134. The “ calinda” was a sort -of contra-dance, which has now passed entirely out of use. Bescherelle describes the two lines as “avancant et reculant en cadence, et faisant des contorsions fort singulieres et des gestes fort lascifs” (“advancing and retreating in cadence, and making very singular contortions and very lascivious gestures").

When I was working on Well of Souls, I came across the record of the de Paur Chorus (already in our possession, somehow), where Danse Calinda is the title track.

There's also the more adapted version by the Lost Bayou Ramblers that I love.

Gottschalk's Le Banjo

Although Gottschalk was white and he took some of his melodies from Blackface Minstrel tunes, I do want to include some musical examples here because reference them in the book. Far and away my favorite version of Le Banjo is by Robert Pritchard. The liner notes to the Smithsonian Folkways recording write, "'Robert Starling Pritchard (b. 1927) is the first African American pianist playing Western classical music ever commercially recorded and published, affording him a unique place in music history,' says Henri Georges Polgar." Throughout his life, he continued to promote and support African American music and art, and became involved in humanitarian causes around the world. He passed away in 2016 and you can read more about him in his obituary here. Pritchard also adapted some Haitian folksongs for piano on this album, which is also a great piece (listen here).

There are also a few musical examples that I don't reference in the book.

An African Work Song, Barbados, ca. 1770s-1780s

Work Song on fiddle:

William Dickenson; Gloucester Archives (Clarence Row, Gloucester, England), D3549/13/3/2758. Read more here.

Transcriptions of songs from St. Bartelemy / St. Bartholomew, 1787-1788

In 1787 Swedish doctor Christopher Carlander traveled to the Swedish colony of St. Barthelemy (St. Bartholomew), which before and after was a French colony. According to Frederick Thomasson in Svarta S:t Barthelemy: Människoöden i en Svensk Koloni 1785-1847 (Black St. Bartholomew: Human Destinies in a Swedish Colony from 1785 to 1847), "Carlander valued seeing the Black populations music and dance and took it seriously, demonstrated by the fact that he wrote down their music and described their dances" (my translation, 132). These images are from Thomasson's book, and I still would like to see the originals (at Rijksarkivet in Stockholm) and look more into music in St. Bartholomew. (Oh, and my final note for now on this: endless gratitude to my dad, who read about Thomasson's book, got me a copy, and found me a copy of the published version of Carlander's diary, knowing I'd be interested in this transcription and the descriptions).

Pompey Ran Away - Negroe Jig

In: Selection of Scotch, English, Irish, and foreign airs, Volume 1. Adapted for the fife, violin or German-flute.

Pompey Ran Away on gourd banjo:

Congo Prince Jig

Congo Prince Jig on gourd banjo:

Although it comes from the book Brigg's banjo instructor (which was a product of the explosion in popularity of the banjo because of Blackface Minstrel troupes), the name of this as "Congo Prince Jig" evokes the King of Kongo and King Charles, the Pinkster King of Albany, who was said to have been from Kongo.

If you are aware of other early (1600s-1820s) transcriptions of Black or African American music, please let me know! I'd love to add it here.

This is part of Banya Obbligato, a series of blog posts relating to my book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History. While integrally related to Well of Souls, these posts are editorially and financially separate from the book (i.e., I’m researching, writing, and editing them myself and no one is paying me for it). So, if you want to financially support the blog or my writing and research you can do so here.

]]><![CDATA[Images in Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History]]>Fri, 16 Sep 2022 18:39:42 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/images-in-well-of-souls-uncovering-the-banjos-hidden-history

Du dance from P.J. Benoit's Voyage a Suriname / John Carter Brown Library

Every time I came across an interesting image during my research, I saved it in case I would need it again, in case I would be able to use it for the book. When it came to discussing which illustrations would make it, I had way too many. As much as I would have liked to basically make Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History an illustrated book, that wasn't what the book was and wasn't what we could do with it.
And again, I thought, well, the internet can provide. For one, many of the images that I mention in the book are digitized and available for folks to access. But interesting images that I came across in the public domain I could also put here on the blog, in color and higher resolution. (The ones that are available online but that I do not believe I have permission to share are linked below.)

Early Banjos in Well of Souls

Click below to enlarge and read captions.

These are photos that I have taken of the panja (Ethnological Museum in Berlin), Creole-bania (Tropenmuseum Amsterdam, where it was still on display), Haiti banza (Musee de la Musique, Paris), and the new banjo in Lyon (Musee des Confluences, no collection guide available online).

Gerrit Schouten's Dioramas

Diorama van een du, dansfeest op de plantage, Gerrit Schouten, 1830, Rijksmuseum

The diorama on display at the Rijksmuseum.

Diorama van de Waterkant van Paramaribo, Gerrit Schouten, 1820, Rijksmuseum

Waterkant van Paramaribo diorama we saw at the Rijksmuseum.

Detail of the banjo player in the Waterkant diorama.

Click here for more of Schouten's dioramas at the Rijksmuseum.
Click here for more of Schouten's dioramas held by the NMVW.

Images of Banjos in Well of Souls

Engraving of the Strum Strumps in Sir Hans Sloans Voyage to...Jamaica (1707). "1.1.2.2. Strum Strumps, lutes of the Indians & Blacks, made of different hollowed-out gourds covered with animal hides."

John Rose's South Carolina watercolor is viewable in color here.

Engraving of instruments in John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname (1796). For more on this image, see this blog post.

Study For Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, or The Genius of America Encouraging the Emancipation of the Blacks, ca. 1791–92, Samuel Jennings, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Study for Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences

The original Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences belongs to the Philadelphia Library Company and can be seen online here. Winterthur Museum also has a copy here.

Detail from Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de Saint-Domingue, 1791. The dance of a calinda at Nippes, St. Domingue with a banza (banjo) player at right. (James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries.)

Detail of Isle de St. Domingue, Vue de la Fossette, unknown painter, c. 1790. (Image from Etude Tajan catalog, 1999).

Benjamin Henry Latrobe's drawing of a banjo and other instruments in New Orleans are available here.

Illustration in Cynric R. Williams, A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica: From the Western to the Eastern End in the Year 1823.

Images of Dances in Well of Souls (and more)

Click below to enlarge and read captions.

Images of Musicians

Click below to enlarge and read captions.

Images of Processions

Click below to enlarge and read captions.

Images of Religious Ritual without Dance

Click below to enlarge and read captions.

Images of Places in Well of Souls

Click below to enlarge and read captions.

]]><![CDATA[Maps for Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History]]>Wed, 14 Sep 2022 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/maps-for-well-of-souls-uncovering-the-banjos-hidden-history

World map / Nova totius terrarum orbis tabula / Amstelodami : Ex officina F. de Wit, [1680?] / Library of Congress

A good map almost seems necessary for a book of historical nonfiction. Unfortunately for me, the other illustrations in Well of Souls were more important than any map I wanted to include. But, that’s why I have this blog. As easy as it might be to pull up Google Maps, some place names and even landscapes have changed over the last 400+ years. Here are some maps that I came across in my research that helped me understand the places and time periods I was writing about. (Also a quick note: they are not geographically organized, but organized by the chapters to which they correspond.)

These are all in the public domain, and while some are available at the Library of Congress's website (and I've linked to them), others are from books at the James Ford Bell Library/ University of Minnesota Libraries I was able to access while there.

Map of Africa / Wit, Frederik De. Totius Africæ accuratissima tabula. [Amsterdam?: S.N., ?, 1688] Map.

I - The Atlantic Ocean - This c. 1688 map of the African continent shows some of the place names that some like Hans Sloane may have heard of. You see names like Loango, Angola, Benin, and Guinea, which were place names that Europeans often used to distinguish African communities from which they took people.

Link to original.

Map of the Caribbean / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

II - Jamaica - On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean islands saw an expansion of sugar plantations, which drove the trade in human beings from Africa.

The Harbours of Kingston and Port Royal Jamaica / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

II - Jamaica - Hans Sloane went to Jamaica as the new Governor’s physician. Before the earthquake of 1692, Port Royal was the commercial hub not just for the island, but the whole British Caribbean. The earthquake caused most of the city to sink.

Martinique / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

III - Martinique - Father Jean-Baptiste Labat arrived in Martinique at Ft. Saint Pierre, on the east side of the island. Although small, Martinique is quite mountainous, and he had to make his way across the island to where he would be working.

A map of the city plan of New York / Library of Congress

IV - New York - This 1755 map of the City of New York, shows it confined to lower Manhattan with the Common and Negro Burial Ground labeled. The first time the burial ground appeared on a map was in 1735, but the first burials could have been as early as the 1650s.

Link to original.

Maryland and Delaware / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

V - Maryland - Maryland is split by the Chesapeake Bay, and the land surrounding it proved good for growing tobacco. But like sugar, the crop needs near constant labor and Maryland colonizers used enslaved people of African descent for that labor. Goods moved mostly along the water, and Oxford on the eastern shore had a bustling trade.

Map of Suriname (along the Atlantic coast) / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

VII / XV / XVI - Suriname - Suriname sits on South America’s northeastern coast, but Paramaribo is located a little bit inland on the Suriname River. Like in Maryland, the waterways were the primary method of transportation. This map lays out the property lines of plantations, where long skinny parcels give each owner access to the river.

Plan of the Town of Paramaribo / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

VII / XV / XVI - Suriname - This map of Paramaribo was one the original illustrations for John Stedman’s book.

South Carolina coast / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

VIII / XIX - South Carolina - We don’t know exactly where John Rose had property on the South Carolina Sea Islands or where he painted the now-famous watercolor of enslaved people playing music and dancing. This map shows St. Helena (spelled Elena) Island and Port Royal. South Carolina Coast.

Lucy McKim would travel to Port Royal during the Civil War and record songs she heard among the newly freed people there.

The island of Hispaniola (St. Domingue is on the left) / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

IX / XIV - St. Dominque / Haiti - St. Domingue and later Haiti make up half of the island of Hispaniola. Port-au-Prince lies on the western gulf, while Le Cap (first Cap Francois and then Cap Haitien) is on the northern coast.

Plan de la Ville de Cap Francois / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

IX / XIV - St. Domingue / Haiti - In this map of Cap Francois, you can see the “Negroes Market” and La Fossette laid out on the left side of the image (the southern part of town)

Hudson Valley / James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota Libraries

XI - Albany - Traveling up the Hudson River from Manhattan and New York City, you get to Albany. The vestiges of Dutch New York are still there in the place names around Albany.

Map of the Plan of New Orleans / Library of Congress

XIII / XVIII - New Orleans - An 1817 map of New Orleans showing the Place de Armes next to the Mississippi River and the French Quarter leading to the Place Publique, known today as Congo Square, and the Bayou St. John. Many of the accounts of African American music and dance in the city come from the levees, the space behind the city (what is today Congo Square), and the bayou leading to Lake Pontchartrain.

Map of New York City / Library of Congress

XVII - New York City - The city expanded tremendously between 1755 and 1840. What had been the Negro Burial Ground is now laid out as streets. The Minstrel musicians performed at theaters on the Bowery.

Link to original.

XIX - Washington, DC - Although much of the central part of DC had been laid out by 1860, much of the city was still being built, including the F street neighborhood where Eastman Johnson's father lievd.

Link to original.

This is part of Banya Obbligato, a series of blog posts relating to my book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History. While integrally related to Well of Souls, these posts are editorially and financially separate from the book (i.e., I’m researching, writing, and editing them myself and no one is paying me for it). So, if you enjoyed this as much as a cup of coffee, you can throw me a couple of bucks here.

]]><![CDATA[When is a calabash not a calabash?]]>Wed, 07 Sep 2022 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/when-is-a-calabash-not-a-calabash When is a calabash not a calabash? It sounds like the beginning to a botanist joke, one that I’m not sure I could find the right pun for. It is also the title of a paper by anthropolgist Sally Price, where she explores the implications of conflating calabashes and gourds on African American and Indian American art and culture. And the answer to the question actually seems to be all the time. I’ve heard calabashes called treegourds and gourds called calabash gourds. Price has an excellent table of the differences between the two fruits, but most simply put, a gourd is Lagenaria siceraria and the fruit of a vine. A calabash is Crescentia cujete, and the fruit of a tree. They are not only totally different plants, they diverge at the taxonomic classification of angiosperm, or flower plant (meaning they have a different order and family).

Engraving of Le Calebassier, a calabash tree / University of Minnesota, James Ford Bell Library

Color engraving of Curcurbita longa (with calebasse mentioned in the caption) / New York Public Library / Public Domain

Why does this matter?

Why does this matter? Well, for one, science and botany are cool. And Price outlines the different, specific uses for the two fruits among Saramaka Maroons in Suriname. But when it comes to banjos, we have descriptions and instruments that are both made of calabashes and gourds, and that can actually tell us something about where the instruments might originate.

A calabash growing in Suriname.

A gourd growing at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania.

Humans domesticated the bottle gourd (Lagenaria) around 11,000 years ago, making it “one of the earliest plants to have been domesticated for use by humans,” according to Mary Wilkins Ellert. She notes that it was present in the Americas by 10,000 BCE—meaning that it far predates the arrival of any Europeans. It originated in Africa, where there are five species of wild Lagenaria. And the bottle gourd is very practical. It can grow anywhere in the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii), and when the fruit is dried, it forms a hard shell that can be made into a jug, bowl, or instrument.

A map of hardiness zones in North America, the Caribbean, and South America.

Across Suriname, we saw dried calabashes used as bowls and rattles. The bowls were cut across the center, while the rattles were whole and had a handle stuck through their center. Price notes that among the Maroons, only calabashes are used to make rattles. Although native to the Americas, the human record of using calabashes dates to 5,000–3,800 BCE in Peru. It was later introduced to Africa. But here is where a main difference lies between the two plants: while gourd vines have a wide growing range (although they do better in certain climates), calabashes (Crescentia) are a tropical tree, and only grow in hardiness zones above 11. This means that in the United States, they’d only grow in the Florida Keys (and Hawaii).

Gourds on Pete Ross's workbench as he tries to find one that matches to shape in the engraving of Sloane's Strum Strumps.

A calabash rattle from Suriname.

Although how the fruits look (both round and green when fresh; fleshy inside; hard and brown when dry) is part of the problem, another part is linguistic. The scientific names have a distinction, and in English and German, for example, we have two different words: gourd and calabash / kürbisflasche and kalebasse. But in French and Dutch, calebasse and kalebas are the words for both species. So, in accounts that have been translated from French, Dutch, or even German, gourd and calabash may have been confused. And so while (almost always) white, European and European-descended men are describing what a banjo is made of, can we take any real stock in whether they mean a calabash or a gourd?

Here are some descriptions I’ve pulled out:

Their musical instruments are a sort of drum, being a piece of hollow wood covered with sheepskin, and a kind of guitar, made of a calabass.
-- Jeffreys, The Natural and Civil History of the French Dominions in North and South America, Vol. II, 1760
He's read many other accounts (including Labat, not sure how much this is based on his observations or the readings of others).

"Then those poor slaves leave off work and repair to their houses, where they get their suppers, make a great fire, and with a kitt (made of a gourd or calabash with one twine string) play, sing, and dance according to their own country fashion...
-- John Taylor, Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript at the National Library of Jamaica

Their merry-wang is a favourite instrument, a rustic guitar, of four strings. It is made with a calabash; a slice of which taken off, a dried bladder, or skin, is spread across the largest section; and this is fastened to a handle, which they take great pains in ornamenting with a sort of rude carved work, and ribbands.
-- Edward Long, History of Jamaica, 1774

Keystone View Company, Publisher. Calabash tree, Jamaica. Jamaica, None. [Between 1860 and 1910] Photograph.

When everything was ready for the dance, one of them tuned a rough guitar, mounted on a calabash with catgut, and began to prelude as on a Moorish mandolin.
-- Theodore Pavie, Souvenirs atlantiques. Voyage aux États-Unis et au Canada, Louisiana, 1832
The original in French is “calebasse” which can mean both calabash and gourd.

The most curious instrument, however, was a stringed instrument, which no doubt was imported from Africa. On the top of the finger board was the rude figure of a man in a sitting posture, and two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a calabash.
-- Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Latrobe, published 1905, original account New Orleans, 1819

The guitar is made from a half of a calabash, to which there is a fairly long handle. They clothe it with a skin similar to that of the tambour, stretching on it four strings of silk, or birds' intestines which are first dried and then prepared with date oil; these four strings are supported by a comb. They play on this instrument, which in their language they call a Bagna, while pressing and hitting it, and consider it a sort of violin.
-- Phillipe Fermin, Nieuwe algemeene beschryving van de colonie van Suriname, 1770

1.1.2.2. Strum Strumps, lutes of the Indians & Blacks, made of different hollowed-out gourds covered with animal hides.
--Hans Sloane, Voyage to...Jamaica, published 1707, account 1687

The image that accompanies Sloane's description / University of Minnesota Library, James Ford Bell Library

And I well remember, that in Virginia and Maryland, the favourite and almost only instrument in use among the slaves was a bandore; or, as they pronounced the word, banjer. Its body was a large hollow gourd, with a long handle attached to it, strung with catgut and played on with the fingers.
-- Jonathan Boucher, Boucher's glossary of archaic and provincial words, 1832-33

No. 15 is the Creole-bania; this is like a mandolin or guitar, being made of a gourd covered with a sheepskin, to which is fixed a very long neck or handle...
--John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, published 1797, account 1770s

Strum Strump made of a round large gourd.
--Collection notes of The British Museum regarding an instrument from Virginia in Sir Hans Sloane's collection

Nearly all play a type of guitar made of half a "calabasse" covered with a skin scraped down to the thickness of a parchment, with a fairly long neck.
--Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique, published 1722

One writer makes a distinction, writing calabash in the text but specifying lagenaria with the scientific name:

Another musical instrument of the true negro is the Banjah. Over a hollow calabash (Cucurb lagenaria L. -gourd) is stretched a sheep-skin, the instrument lengthened with a neck, strung with 4 strings, and tuned like a chord.
-- Johann David Schöpf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783-1784.

And then we have the four surviving early gourd- and calabash-bodied themselves. And yes, I say that because two are made of calabashes and two are made of gourds. The Creole-bania from Suriname is made of a calabash (even though John Gabriel Stedman, who collected it, writes that it is made of a gourd), as is the panja, also from Suriname. The banza collected by Victor Schoelcher in Haiti is a gourd (and its oblong shape makes that obvious), and a new banjo that turned up at the Musee de Confluences in Lyon is made of a gourd, although it is much rounder.

The body of the Haiti banza, collected in Haiti by Victor Schoelcher. The body of this banjo is made of a gourd (Lagenaria). / Cite de la Musique, Paris.

The body of the panja, collected in Suriname by Brother Jansa. The body of this banjo is made of a calabash (Crescentia). / Ethnological Museum of Berlin

In Well of Souls, I argue that the banjo was a ritual object, and that also brings me back to gourds vs. calabashes. Sally Price points out that among the Maroons, calabashes seem to have more ritual uses and gourds have more practical uses, while the authors of a paper on a scientific analysis calabashes in Central America also note that, “Archaeological remains of C. cujete in Central America and the Antilles were found in ritualistic contexts, such as offerings in funerary rituals” and calabashes have many ritual uses in Central and South America, and the Caribbean. On the other hand, gourds are used to make string instruments in West Africa, like the 18-string kora harp and the two string gurumi. Did traditions combine so that banjo makers in Suriname found the calabash suited ritual better? Or was it a practical choice since a calabash forms a harder shell? Or did it not matter whether the body was a calabash or gourd, as long as the ritual structure* and religious context remained what was most important?

*I know this is coming out before Well of Souls is published, and if you are reading this and thinking, “What is she talking about? What the hell is the ritual structure of the banjo??” I promise it will be clearer after you finish the book. Sorry.

]]><![CDATA[Historic Cultural Connections of the Mardi Gras Indians]]>Wed, 31 Aug 2022 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/historic-cultural-connections-of-the-mardi-gras-indians

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An Indian marches during the Super Sunday before St. Joseph's Night in 2019.

You can’t talk about the cultural traditions of New Orleans without talking about the Mardi Gras Indians, who also call themselves Black Indians and Masking Indians. But because the first account of a banjo in New Orleans comes from 1819—just before the banjo was to transform into a wooden-rimmed stage instrument—and because the banjo doesn’t exist in the tradition of Masking Indians today, I couldn’t easily or naturally bring this tradition into Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History.

At the beginning of my research, I was interested by the Indians seemingly close connections to other traditions that I had researched where the banjo did appear, like Junkanno (John Canoe) and Carnival in the Caribbean. In my previous blog post, I wrote about the Backstreet Cultural Museum and Mr. Sylvester Francis’s work to preserve the costumes of the Mardi Gras Indians. When I talked with my friend Tom Piazza about wanting to see the Indians as part of my research, he said that while they come out at Mardi Gras, St. Joseph’s night and the Sunday before were really the time to see them. After I saw them and continued to see references to similar outfits and processions in the Caribbean, I couldn't help thinking that this was a shared tradition, even if the specific evidence for how it was shared hasn't been well documented.

Many suits today “more explicitly reference Native American culture,” as Cynthia Becker writes, but the Spirit of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors “incorporate materials associated with African art, such as raffia, kente cloth, and cowrie shells, and include face masks and African-inspired shields” [1].
Throughout the written history of New Orleans after Africans were forcibly brought to the city, we see descriptions of the costumes that free and enslaved people of African descent wore as they danced in and around the city. These historical descriptions don’t always conjure the structured, beaded outfits that the Mardi Gras Indians wear today, but traditions change.

An image from Sketches of Character by I.M. Belisario, 1837, Courtesy the Yale Center for British Art.

Drummers marching with an Indian Tribe, 2019.

Christian Schultz visited New Orleans in 1808, and when he saw dances at the back of the city, where Congo Square is today, he wrote that the “principal dancer or leaders are dressed in a variety of wild and savage fashions, always ornamented with a number of the tails of the smaller wild beasts”[2]. More than 100 years earlier, when Hans Sloane was in Jamaica at a festival, he noted that the dancers “very often tie Cows Tails to their Rumps, and add such other odd things to the Bodies in several places, as gives them a very extraordinary appearance”[3].
In 1817, two years before Latrobe observed a banjo in New Orleans, German Johann Ulrich Buechler wrote that on Sunday afternoons, “behind the city” (meaning up from the river), Black residents gather to dance. The men “wear Oriental and Indian outfits, with a Turkish turban of different colors, red, blue, yellow, green, and brown, and also matching scarves around their waists to cover their nakedness” while the women dress in the newest fashions [4]. In other words, they are elegant. When I read this, I thought of an image from Suriname done by P.J. Benoit, where the fabrics flow freely as men and women dance.

Illustration of a Du (banya prei) dance in Suriname. Image from Archive.org

In a Vodou ceremony in Haiti a few years before 1817, Drouin de Bercy describes men with “leaves around their loins, feathers on their heads, and bows around their wrist,” who are part of the ritual to intiate new members [5].
Around the same time, Timothy Flint wrote about the “Congo-dance” performed around New Orleans. “Some hundreds of negroes, male and female, follow the king,” who wears a crown made of “oblong, gilt-paper boxes on his head, tapering upwards, like a pyramid. From the ends of these boxes hang two huge tassels, like those on epaulets.” This is more evocative of the structured headpieces worn by Indians, but also reminds me of descriptions and images of Junkanoo.
Flint continues that the people who follow in the parade behind the king wear “their own peculiar dress” with streams and bells that tinkle [7].

An Indian with a house-shaped decorative element on his headdress.

Jaw-Bone or House John-Canoe in Belisario's Sketches of Character, 1837. Image courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art.

Leon Beauvallet describes something similar during Dia de Los Reyes (Epiphany) in Havana, Cuba in the 1850s. The genuine king wore “a very proper red, close coat, velvet cest, and a magnificent gilt paper crown.” Next to him was his queen, while behind him were bands of men, some of who were dressed as Native Americans and others who had “large yellow spots” drawn all over their bodies, “magnificent peacock feathers” in their hair and flour on their faces [8].

Festival of the King, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, ca. 1770s

Flag Boy of the Wild Tchoupitoulas, 2019.

In 1831, Frenchman Pierre Forest wrote about a dance on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, where the Black people gather in smaller groups: “Each company has its flag, which, perched at the top of a pyramid-shaped pole, serves as a rallying point for all the parties” [9]. In Haiti almost ten years later, Victor Schoelcher noted that during Carnival, groups of Black men paraded while singing and dancing. The men had outfits made of a hundred pieces of striped or checkered cloth, and the “king wears a feather turban as his crown.” Each company also had its own name and flag [10]. Today, the New Orleans Indians have a Flag Boy, who carries the tribe’s symbol or name.

Two young Indians, 2019.

"Dressing for Carnival," Winslow Homer, 1877. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

During a public “Congo Dance” in 1843 when a reporter from the Times Picayune was able to attend, the leader of the orchestra strummed “a long-necked banjo, the head of which was ornamented with a bunch of sooty parti-colored ribbands,” and the male dancer wore “a pair of leather knee caps from which were suspended a quantity of meal nails, which made a jingling noise that timed with his music” [11].
It’s not until 1860 that James Creecy again associates the dances in Congo Square with the banjo, writing that “colored people and negroes, bond and free, assemble…with banjos, tom-toms, violins, jawbones, triangles, and various other insturments.” He, too, writes that the dancers wear “fringes, ribbons, little bells, and shells and balls, jingling and flirting about the performer’s legs and arms”[12].
Scholar Jeroen Dewulf sees a commonality between these costumes and Iberian Moresca dances where dancers “typically wore gilt paper helmets, long streamers tied to their soulders, and bells to their legs”[13]. But worn percussions instruments are common across Africa, and in African Art in Motion, Robert Farris Thompson explores the masks, headdresses, and elaborate costumes worn by dancers in many African cultures [14]. In Flash of the Spirit, Farris Thompson explains that feathers are common decorations in Kongo costume and “connote ceaseless growth as well as plenitude”[15].

Helmet Mask / before 1880 / Bamum kingdom. "Another occasion for the public display of masks and other prestige arts is a palace-sponsored festivity known as "Nja", the Fon's dance. This annual celebration coincides with the conclusion of the main harvest in late December or early January." Image and description courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Maroon procession in P.J. Benoit's Voyage a Suriname: "a delegation, led by the granman. To his left is the major fiscal and to his right, the under captain granman; following the three leaders are the captains of all the villages." Image courtesy Archive.org

The origins of the Mardi Gras Indians aren’t clear. There are clear connections to various African traditions (how could there not be?). But the term Indian and the elaborate feathers and beading evoke Native American dress, although many people point out that its not the dress of Native Americans who lived around Louisiana. Michael P. Smith argues that, “Despite the lack of specific genealogical records, the black Indian gangs of New Orleans descend both spiritually and culturally, and, according to oral history, by direct ancestry from these renegade, underclass groups in French and Spanish colonial New Orleans”[16]. That is to say, they descend from Maroons or enslaved people who escaped bondage and lived in the swamps outside of the city and may have been aided and formed new communities with Native Americans in the area. The costumes may have been an ode to the Native American communities that sheltered enslaved runaways. Cynthia Becker (and others) point out the potential influence of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows on the costumes.

Masking Indian, 2019.

What masking Indians wore could have also been a more “politically safe strategy” for representation of “African ceremonial memories,” as Richard Brent Turner writes [17]. Ned Sublette writes that “The closest resemblance to the motifs of the Indians' suits might be in Trinidad, where the Carnival tradition derives largely from a French Creole population,” although there is “no evidence for any direct influence” between the traditions [18]. Trinidad was a mix of African, European, and Amerindian cultures, just like New Orleans and much of the Caribbean.
The historical record doesn’t give us a perfect line for where the traditions of the masking Indians came from, but I loved that moment when I came across a description of a king, parade, or outfit for a dance that reminded me both of a historic description somewhere else in the Americas and a contemporary tradition. One of the points that I come back to in Well of Souls and research into early Black music and dance is that we have to think of the Americas as a more continual space. A place where people moved—by choice and force—and cultures mixed and blended, and where we can see cultural throughlines if we choose to look for them.

Sources:
[1] Cynthia Becker, "New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians: Mediating Racial Politics from the Backstreets to Main Street," African Arts Vol. 46, No. 2, Performing Africa in New Orleans (Summer 2013), pp. 36-49.
[2] Christian Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage through the states of New-York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee : and through the territories of Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi and New-Orleans; performed in the years 1807 and 1808; including a tour of nearly six thousand miles (New York: Isaac Riley, 1810), 197.
[3] Hans Sloane, Voyage to Jamaica..., xlviii-xlix.
[4] Johann Ulrich Buechler, Land und Seeriesen eines… 1820
[5] Drouin De Bercy, De Saint-Domingue: de ses guerres, de ses révolutions, de ses resources, et de moyens a prendre pour y rétabilir la paix et l'industrie (Paris, 1814).
[6 & 7] Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi, from Pittsburg and the Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Florida to the Spanish Frontier (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1826), 139-140.
[8] Leon Beauvallet, Rachel and the New World: A trip to the United States and Cuba (New York, 1856), 363-365.
[9] Pierre Forest, Voyage aux Etat Unis (Lyon: Perret, 1834).
[10] Victor Schoelcher, Colonies étrangeres et Haïti (Paris: Pagnerre, 1843), 299.
[11] "THE CONGO DANCE” 18 Oct 1843 Times Picayune.
[12] James Creecy, Scenes in the South and Other Miscellaneous Pieces (Washington: Thomas McGill, 1860), 19-22.
[13] Jeroen Dewulf, “From Moors to Indians: The Mardi Gras Indians and the Three Transformations of St. James,” Louisiana History vol 56, no. 1 (2015): 11
[14] Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion (University of California Press, 1979).
[15] Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), 121.
[16] Michael P. Smith, “Behind the Lines: The Black Mardi Gras Indians and the New Orleans Second Line,” Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, Selected Papers from the 1993 National Conference on Black Music Research (Spring, 1994), 45.
[17] Richard Brent Turner, p. 55
[18] Ned Sublette, The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawerence Hill Books, 2008), 298.

]]><![CDATA[The Backstreet Cultural Museum: A Neighborhood Cultural Library]]>Wed, 24 Aug 2022 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.kristinagaddy.com/blog/the-backstreet-cultural-museum-a-neighborhood-cultural-library[This was originally presented at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in 2019 in conjunction with what I wrote about Het Koto Museum in Suriname. Mr. Francis died in 2020 and the original museum building was damaged by Hurricane Ida, but they gained a new home in July 2022. However, I’ve kept the piece in present tense as I wrote it at the time.]

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Most days, Mr. Francis was at the museum to greet visitors. In 2019, I asked him for a photo in front of the museum and to sign my copy of Fire in the Hole.

In an unassuming former funeral home on a quiet street in New Orleans, Louisiana’s Treme neighborhood, another community-driven museum preserves and documents material culture. Through collecting and showcasing the intricately crafted suits and outfits of the Mardi Gras Indians, Mardi Gras gangs, Baby Dolls, and Second Lines, Sylvester Francis is preserving and promoting the unique traditions of African Americans in New Orleans.
The former funeral parlor is almost overstuffed with colored feathers and beads, sewn onto armature in flat and three dimensional figures. Funerals and Second Line parades happen year-round, so many people drawn to the Backstreet Cultural Museum come for this room. Here, Francis has collected suits from tribes across the city for preservation and education. The Mardi Gras Indians or Black Indians of New Orleans only make their appearances during Carnival celebrations, St. Joseph’s Night, or Super Sundays. These traditions evolved from the African American music and dance in New Orleans, often associated with Congo Square.

On a Sunday afternoon in 1819, British-born architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe walked through New Orleans. Towards the edge of the city limits, he heard a loud thumping he mistook for horses hooves on a wooden floor. He made his way closer to the sound, seeing masses of people assembled on a public square. He, a white man, pushed in to get a better view, and realized that everyone participating was Black. In the sea of people and pounding of drums in Congo Square, Latrobe made note of an unusual instrument he had not seen before that he believed to have been imported from Africa. He wrote that body was made of a calabash, it had two strings and a carved figure of a man sitting on top of the fingerboard. He also saw men playing drums, and found them interesting enough to sketch in his journal. In circular groups, he noticed men and women dancing. This is perhaps the most-well known account of Congo Square dances, and another iconic image of the banjo from the Americas [1].

On the wall at the Voodoo Museum in New Orleans, the instruments that Benjamin Henry Latrobe saw are recognized as being part of religious and spiritual ceremony.

In 1786, a letter said enslaved men and women gathered at Place Congo to “dance the bamboula and perform the rites imported from Africa,” [2] while another visitor to New Orleans commented that the dance and music “rocked the city,” [3] music and dance another visitor described as “drumming, fifing, and dancing in large rings” [4].
The descriptions that come from George Washington Cable’s writings on Congo Square and Edward Kemble’s drawings in the late 19th century also describe and depict dances and music, but rely on second-hand information and stereotypes.

In 1823, Timothy Flint described something a little different during these rituals. He observed a man wearing a crown made of a “series of oblong, gilt-paper boxes on his head, tapering upwards, like a pyramid. From the ends of these boxes hang two huge tassels, like those on epaulets. He wags his head and makes grimaces” [5]. This image of a man is very similar to descriptions of John Canoe/ Junkanoo festivals in the Caribbean, including those in Jamaica and Trinidad.

A more African-inspired Indian mask with cowrie shells sewn on.

A masking Indian poses on St. Joseph's Night 2019.

An image from Sketches of Character by I.M. Belisario, 1837, Courtesy the Yale Center for British Art. Belisario drew "figures from the masquerades that the formerly enslaved performed in Jamaica during the annual Christmas and New Year's holidays."

This types of ritual dress continued into the late 19th century. Charles Raphael remembered that in the 1880s during Marie Laveau’s Voodoo services, the dancers resembled those of the men “who dress in Indian Chief costumes on Mardi Gras and dance on the Claiborne Avenue neutral ground” [6].

Sylvester Francis's brother showed us the outfits on display during a visit to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in 2019.

How the present-day Mardi Gras Indians fit into the history of music and ritual dance in New Orleans is less clear than the continuing tradition of the Koto Misi in Suriname. The groups that gathered in Congo Square on Sundays were known as tribes, and the tribes of Mardi Gras Indians still gather to practice and sew on Sundays. And while the suits have clear visual resemblance to Junkanoo festivals in the Caribbean, and even feature similar roles in the procession, Ned Sublette writes that, “there is no evidence for any direct influence of those traditions of New Orleans” [7].
The oral tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians references influences from the traditional dress of Native Americans. The suits are a representation of solidarity between oppressed groups and respect towards Native Americans, who sheltered those who had escaped enslavement. While some scholars like Jeroen Dewulf note there is “no credible data to substantiate parallels between the ‘Indian’ outfit of the Mardi Gras Indians and how real Native American tribes in the area used to dress,” this part of the oral tradition cannot be ignored [8]. However, it’s also clear that the suits have developed over time and include distinct elements evolved from the Mardi Gras Indian tradition.

The Queen from Belisario's Sketches of Character. Courtesy Yale Center for British Art.

With a masking Indian on the Super Sunday parade before St. Joseph's Night, 2019.

A crowd forms to take photos of a masking Indian in New Orleans.

Sylvester Francis says he was “born to be a cameraman.” In 1970, while working at the Rhodes Funeral Home, he started documenting funerals with a Super 8 camera. Then, he started taking photos and filming on Carnival or Mardi Gras day. He says, “My job was to take pictures, not knowing that you would call it ‘documenting.’ Truthfully, just doing it for us, but people started looking for me” [9]. And he would give them a copy of a photo if they asked for it.

In 1990, Francis helped Victor Harris of the Spirit of Fi Yi Yi tribe sew a mask for Carnival. He says, “On top of the mask was the piece they let me sew,” and he wanted it as evidence of his work. Harris let him have it and then Francis hung it in his garage. He says, “I started begging Vic [Harris] for more pieces. And this is how I started my museum. Nobody taught me how to make a museum. I learned myself from documenting the neighborhoods for so long” [10]. Soon, his garage became home to photos and suits, and it was important that these traditions had a place in the community. Some of suits have a deeply spiritual meaning, and can be tied to spirits or ancestors [11]. Jack Roberston of the Mandingo Warriors says, “When I’m sewing, I’ve got my dead ancestor’s eyes. It is coming to me as I am doing it.”

An interior shot of the old Backstreet Cultural Museum location.

In 1999, Joan Rhodes provided the Blandin Funeral Home in Treme as a home for Francis’s collection. Today, the museum holds the largest and most comprehensive collection documenting the tangible culture of “New Orleans’s African American community-based masking and processional traditions.” But the museum is also more than a museum. Bruce Sunpie Barnes, Big Chief of the Northside Skull and Bones Gang says, “It became an information center. It was more than just a museum, it was like a neighborhood cultural library where people came by to gain knowledge” [12].

You can learn more about the Backstreet Cultural Museum on their website https://www.backstreetmuseum.org/ and see the Second Line that celebrated the museum’s new home this summer below:

Sources:
[1] Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The journal of Latrobe; being the notes and sketches of an architect, naturalist and traveler in the United States from 1796 to 1820. New York: Appleton and Company, 1905.
[2] Jason Berry, City of a Million Dreams: New Orleans at 300 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 41.
[3] Freddi Williams Evans, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011), 1.
[4] Forestcue Cuming, Sketches of a tour to the western country : through the states of Ohio and Kentucky, a voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and a trip through the Mississippi territory, and part of West Florida, commenced at Philadelphia in the winter of 1807, and concluded in 1809 (Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear & Eichbaum, 1810).
[5] Quoted in Jeroen Dewulf, “From Moors to Indians: The Mardi Gras Indians and the Three Transformations of St. James,” Louisiana History vol 56, no. 1 (2015): 5-41.
[6] Quoted in Jeroen Dewulf, From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2017), 171.
[7] Ned Sublette, The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawerence Hill Books, 2008), 298.
[8] Jeroen Dewulf, From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square, xi.
[9] Fire in the Hole: The Spirit Work of Fi Yi Yi & Mandingo Warriors (New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2018), 20-21.
[10] Fire in the Hole, 20-21.
[11] Rory O'Neill Schmitt and Rosary Hartel O'Neill, New Orleans Voodoo: A Cultural History (The History Press, 2019), 97-98.
[12] Fire in the Hole, 50.

This is part of Banya Obbligato, a series of blog posts relating to my book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History. While integrally related to Well of Souls, these posts are editorially and financially separate from the book (i.e., I’m researching, writing, and editing them myself and no one is paying me for it). So, if you enjoyed this as much as a cup of coffee, you can throw me a couple of bucks here.

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​So when did the banjo come to Appalachia?

​The Evidence of the Banjo in Appalachia

What is the earliest account of the banjo in Appalachia?

Early Banjo Accounts in Near Appalachia

​Why are there no 18th century accounts of the banjo in Appalachia?

Three musical selections transcribed by Mr. Baptiste for Sir Hans Sloane, Jamaica, 1687.

Papa on gourd banjo:

The Maroon ranger song transcribed by John Gabriel Stedman in his original manuscript.

Ranger Song on fiddle:

Drouin de Bercy’s transcription of the A ai bombia bombé song he heard in Haiti before 1814.

A ai bombia bombé on fiddle:

One of the Banja songs transcribed by H.C. Focke

Arabi na Pambo on fiddle:

Calinda

Calinda adapted for gourd banjo:

Gottschalk's Le Banjo​

An African Work Song, Barbados, ca. 1770s-1780s

Work Song on fiddle:

Transcriptions of songs from St. Bartelemy / St. Bartholomew, 1787-1788

Pompey Ran Away - Negroe Jig

Pompey Ran Away on gourd banjo:

Congo Prince Jig

Congo Prince Jig on gourd banjo:

Early Banjos in Well of Souls

Gerrit Schouten's Dioramas

Images of Banjos in ​Well of Souls

Images of Dances in ​Well of Souls ​(and more)

Images of Musicians

Images of Processions

Images of Religious Ritual without Dance

Images of Places in Well of Souls

So when did the banjo come to Appalachia?

The Evidence of the Banjo in Appalachia

Why are there no 18th century accounts of the banjo in Appalachia?

Gottschalk's Le Banjo

Images of Banjos in Well of Souls

Images of Dances in Well of Souls (and more)