Category: 18th 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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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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The Images of John Stedman's Suriname

8/3/2022

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No. 15, The Creole Bania as illustrated in Stedman's book. Although it has three long and one short strings, a rounded body, and a skin soundboard, it looks pretty different from the actual instrument Stedman collected.

The first land he saw was a few rugged islands off the coast, followed by mangroves that lined the ocean. John Gabriel Stedman had journeyed from Holland to Suriname as a soldier contracted to fight Maroons--people who had escaped slavery and lived in the tropical jungle. During his time in Suriname, Stedman kept diaries, notes, and daybooks, which he turned into a massive manuscript, which at the hands of a publisher and ghost writer transformed into Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.
In Minneapolis, during the snowiest February on record and some of the coldest weather I've ever experienced, I sat for days with the writings of Stedman. It brought me back in time to some seven months earlier when I traveled to Suriname, to the tropical climate of the Caribbean I had experienced in Paramaribo and the hot and rainy jungles in the small South American country. They took me back in time to the 18th century, too. His writings offer us an intimate and a detailed look at enslavement and the culture and lives of the enslaved in the Americas during eighteenth century. Most importantly for me, he documented the banjo in Suriname during his trip and brought what is now the oldest existing banjo, the Creole-bania, back to Europe.

The University of Minnesota's James Ford Bell Library bought the remnants of his writings, which are now tucked away in the rare books vaults deep under the cold Minnesota ground. A fellowship at the library allowed me to do the first big research dive for Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History, and I read every word of his writing that remains in order to build out the world around him, the world the early banjo exists in. And I write much more about Stedman and his trip to Suriname in Well of Souls (although an equal amount probably got cut; his time there was so interesting and he wrote so much about it). While I allude to drawings he made in Suriname and the illustrations that went into his book, I couldn’t include them.

The stack of books and papers I researched at the library.

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Godmother of Banjo Research: Dena Epstein

7/27/2022

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New York, 1952
The smell of books lingered in the air as card catalog drawers clinked closed and creaked open. Dena Epstein walked through the golden light bouncing off the stone walls. She might have felt at home in any library, even if she had never been there before. On this day in 1952, she found herself in the New York Public Library, a monument to curiosity and learning in the heart of Manhattan. Dena had studied music and library science, and had worked as a music librarian. At thirty-six years old, her career as a librarian was temporarily on hold as her husband worked a government job and she took care of their children.
Not working in a library didn’t seem to suit Dena, though. She wanted to engage her mind, she wanted to have interesting things to think about. Unanswered research questions nagged her. One of those questions made her come to the library from her home in New Jersey.

"Lorena" sheet music cover by Ehrgott, Forbriger & Co. Lith. Cincinnati (no date). Courtesy Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University, Public Domain.

More than ten years earlier as a graduate student, Dena had written an essay on music publishing in Chicago from 1858 to 1871. Even though the Music Library Association published the essay, she’d come across a song during her research that piqued her interest. Her essay covered songs published during the Civil War, songs that became popular in the Union and the Confederacy, even if they were written by northerners and published in Chicago. She wanted to know more about “Lorena,” one of the most popular songs in the Confederacy, a fact that she found curious, since it was published in Chicago. She could never find much about the song’s author Henry D. L. Webster, and thought she might have a mystery worth pursuing.

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The Golden Age of Our Country

7/4/2019

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Side portrait engraving of man from the late 1700s.

St. George Tucker, engraved by Saint-Mémin, Harvard Law School Library collection.

This February while at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, I came across St. George Tucker's A Dissertation on Slavery with a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, in the State of Virginia. I received the William Reese Company Fellowship to research the papers of Captain John Gabriel Stedman, and other collections related to Suriname and the Americas before 1810. In a search for documents on slavery in Virginia, which I thought had the possibility to reveal more about early music and dance in the colonies and early Republic, I found Tucker's Dissertation.

Although it didn't end up helping me with that research, Tucker's opinions about the abolition of slavery struck me. Here was a man, standing up in front of the Virginia legislature, calling out Thomas Jefferson specifically and calling the United States more or less a bunch of hypocrites.

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Views of the Creole Bania

2/28/2019

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I spent February at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on a William Reese Company Fellowship, looking at the papers of Captain John Gabriel Stedman and investigating the banjo's early history in Suriname and the Caribbean.

This is a banjo, one of the earliest images of a banjo. This engraving is only one of four pre-1800s images of the banjo, taken from Stedman's memoir Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname. The special collections at the Bell Library have Stedman's diaries from Suriname, notes and journals from after his time in Europe, the original 1790 manuscript, and many different versions of the published memoir. To the left is a hand-colored plate from the English first edition, while below are versions from the German, French, and Dutch editions.

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A Skimmington Shaming

3/2/2018

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Is your neighbor being annoying? Too loud? Coveting another neighbor's wife? What do you do about it?
In early America, the answer would have been skimmington.

Metropolitan Museum of Art / The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1966

Read my piece on skimmington in OZY.

If you want to read even more about skimmington and the European traditions it evolved from, check out Riot and Revelry in Early America, a collection of essays about protest and celebration in the United States from the colonial period to the Civil War.

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Let's Make Pepparkakor!

12/8/2017

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Me, rolling out gingerbread dough.

...also known as Swedish gingerbread cookies!
As I was rolling out dough for pepparkakor last weekend, I realized I didn't know anything about the distinctly thin and crispy cookies I've been cutting out and eating every year. So, I decided to look into what I could find about the history of Swedish gingerbread and share my favorite recipe, which comes from an almost-antique 1986 Allt Om Mat.
Enjoy and God Jul!

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The Proto-Feminists of Early America

11/11/2017

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Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, Vice President John Adams about the 1793 Valmy Celebrations, where women marched in the streets with men in support of the French Revolution.

Read my new piece on OZY!

Just in time for election day, OZY published my piece on how early feminists in the U.S. got inspiration from women participating in the French Revolution. This story was inspired by an essay in Riot and Revelry in Early America, a book that explores the celebrations, parades, and traditions that helped create American culture, even if they have been forgotten.

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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

The Images of John Stedman's Suriname

Godmother of Banjo Research: Dena Epstein

The Golden Age of Our Country

Views of the Creole Bania

A Skimmington Shaming

Is your neighbor being annoying? Too loud? Coveting another neighbor's wife? What do you do about it?
In early America, the answer would have been skimmington.

Read my piece on skimmington in OZY.

Let's Make Pepparkakor!

The Proto-Feminists of Early America

Read my new piece on OZY!

Come in, the stacks are open.

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Categories

Come in, the stacks are open.

Is your neighbor being annoying? Too loud? Coveting another neighbor's wife? What do you do about it? ​In early America, the answer would have been skimmington.

Come in, the stacks are open.

Archives

Categories

Is your neighbor being annoying? Too loud? Coveting another neighbor's wife? What do you do about it?
In early America, the answer would have been skimmington.