Category: 17th Century

Music in Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History

9/26/2022

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.

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Maps for Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History

9/14/2022

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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.

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Willem Van de Poll's Maroon Dancing in Suriname

8/17/2022

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Listen to this post:

On the way up the Suriname River, a bar in a Maroon village that served Parbo Bier. When we traveled to Suriname in 2018, guides and guidebooks alike made it clear that taking photographs of Maroons in their villages was unacceptable.

There was a point—well, I’ll be honest, there were many points—where I was getting out every book from the academic and local libraries in Baltimore about Suriname, Haiti, Jamaica, Caribbean dance, Vodou, Obeah, and so many other subjects vital and tangential to Well of Souls. At the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, I found a copy of Willem Van de Poll’s Surinam: The Country and Its People. I didn’t know anything about Van de Poll, but the 1951 publishing date intrigued me. In a 1941 paper by Harold Courlander, I found a reference to a gourd banjo in Haiti, and thought it entirely possible that a gourd banjo or a wooden-rim banjo might turn up in Van de Poll’s photos.
The book is a mix of Van de Poll’s photographs and reportage on Suriname’s history and what Van de Poll saw as he traveled in the country. I later learned that he traveled with the Dutch Royal family as their photographer, including on trips to Suriname. His photographs, while useful and at times gorgeous, are also literally taken through the lens of a Dutch colonialist who was working for the monarchy. Suriname was still Dutch Guiana, and from some of the photos, I was definitely getting mid-century National Geographic exoticism vibes.

But as I flipped through the book, I was keeping an eye out for photos and descriptions of music, dance, instruments, and religion.

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Pestdoktor

3/25/2020

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Print of the linocut pest doctor.

In an attempt to distract myself from devastating news about the federal mismanagement of the current covid-19 pandemic, I decided to make a linocut of a plague doctor. As if emerging from a nightmare as a cross between a crow and the grim reaper, the doctors wore long cloaks, a hood with a long beak, and eye protection. I searched for images to use for inspiration and a simple engraving print caught my eye. As I went to research more about the image, I realized it wasn’t just any plague doctor outfit, this was supposed to be an image of a real doctor, Ijsbrand van Diemerbroeck, who not only treated plague patients, but wrote a book of case studies in hopes of educating other doctors about symptoms and treatments.

Portrait of Van Diemerbroeck from Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Just as we saw the novel coronavirus expanding from Asia, across Europe, and finally to North America, Europeans in 1347 began hearing about an incurable disease spreading across the continent. When it finally arrived in 1348, it killed thousands of people and became known as the Great Pestilence. For three hundred years, plagues and pestilences came and went in Europe every twenty to thirty years, devastating the population each time. No one understood germ theory, no one knew what caused the disease, and no one knew how to treat it. Their only real hope was containing the disease, which included quarantine and isolation for patients and having dedicated plague doctors.

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Come in, the stacks are open.

Music in Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History

Maps for Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History

Willem Van de Poll's Maroon Dancing in Suriname

Pestdoktor

Come in, the stacks are open.

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