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. ​