KRISTINA R. GADDY
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Come in, the stacks are open.

Essential Banjo History Reading List

10/12/2022

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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!

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What is an Early Banjo?

9/28/2022

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

9/26/2022

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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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When is a calabash not a calabash?

9/7/2022

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     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). 
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Engraving of Le Calebassier, a calabash tree / University of Minnesota, James Ford Bell Library
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Color engraving of Curcurbita longa (with calebasse mentioned in the caption) / New York Public Library / Public Domain
Why does this matter?

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The Backstreet Cultural Museum: A Neighborhood Cultural Library

8/24/2022

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[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.

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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. 
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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.
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"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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Introducing: Banya Obbligato, a Series of Extras and Companion to Well of Souls

7/20/2022

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Hi there. It’s been a while. Over the last two years, I’ve neglected this blog as I’ve been working on Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History, which will be published by W.W. Norton in October.

​But I’m back.


Nonfiction writing is often described as an iceberg—with just a portion of the writing and research showing on the surface, while an enormous mass lurks out of sight below in the water. As I was sending a full manuscript to my editor in December 2021, I decided to see what the Well of Souls iceberg looked like. The book is just over 77,000 words long. But to get there, I had 164,000 words of notes from 211 secondary sources and 114,000 words from 338 primary sources. ​

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    Come in, the stacks are open. 

    Away from prying eyes, damaging light, and pilfering hands, the most special collections are kept in closed stacks.  You need an appointment to view the objects, letters, and books that open a door to the past. 

    Here, pieces of material culture are examined in the light. The stacks are open. ​Read the stories behind objects and ephemera found in private collections, archives, and museums. 

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