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2 comments about With a Banjo on My Knee: A Musical Journey from Slavery to Freedom (Single Title: Social Studies).

1. As an African American learning how to play the 5 string banjo (3-finger Scruggs style), it is interesting to know that there are other black banjo players or enthusiasts out there. One black man watched me play the banjo on the street and said that he never saw a "sister" playing a banjo before.

   Black people today don't realize their contributions to American society and culture with the banjo.

   This book is a must for all banjo players black or white. Keep up the good work.




2. Rex's book is clearly not a scholarly text backed by research, but a good summary without much probing of some of the standard information about the banjo's history with three in-depth portraits of African American banjoists Horace Weston, Gus Cannon, and Elmer Snowden.
   
   It is a well written book for its audience which is not at all scholars, but advanced children! This is also pretty clear from the format of the book itself and its explanations, a good book for children. but not at all scholarly. It reminds me of some of the books that Langston Hughes wrote for children which, although simplified, carry much wisdom and explanation that more advanced texts like. This fits in with Rex's role as a person whose main contribution to history is as a story teller, not a scholar of the banjo.
   
   Rex repeats without any evidence a view that is repeated over and over in books about African Americans and the banjo, a view that is never really supported by any evidence or any reference: The banjo went out of style among African Americans due negative feelings generated by the minstrels.
   
   There is simply no evidence for this!
   
   Black people tended to stop playing the banjo for the same musical reasons that most white banjoists tended to stop playing the banjo in the general replacement of banjo playing by the guitar that took place in the first four decades of the 20th Century.
   
   The developments that lead to a revival of banjo playing among whites did not not find any resonance in the Black community for cultural reasons: Bluegrass, and the "Dixieland" and "traditional"Jazz revivals of the late 40s and the early 1950s, followed by the revivals of "folks music," Bluegrass, and "old time music" since the mid 1950s.
   
   
   By the close of the 19th century, the five string banjo was the most popular instrument in America, indeed, in the English speaking world, being played by everyone from the British Royal family to back country African Americans and whites. The center of banjo production and playing was not in the South, or the Appalachian mountains at the time as often surmised by the ignorant, but in Boston and New York.
   
   The advent of ragtime, the infusion of Latin music in the great Tango craze of the 1910s, and the beginnings of jazz, led musicians of all types to abandon the five string banjo during the second decade of the 20th Century. The five string was largely replaced by banjos without the fifth drone string which conflicted with the types of harmonies and rhythmic accompaniment required by the new music. The three most popular instruments in what we now called "Jazz banjo" were and are the plectrum banjo (tuned like a five string banjo but without the fifth string), the tenor--first called "tango" banjo--(tuned chiefly like a mandola, but sometimes like a mandolin or like the first four strings of a guitar) banjo, and the guitar banjo (a six stringed instrument tuned like a guitar). They became instruments of choice for rhythm players and lead players who might have onced played five-string banjos in Black, white, and other dance and jazz orchestras.
   
   Another part of this process was that starting in the late 1890s the banjo tended to be replaced by the first availability of relatively inexpensive factory made guitars. At the same time larger guitars that could be heard more than the small parlor guitars popular in the 19th Century became available and started to be used in bands.
   
   During the 1920s and early 1930s thousands of African Americans played four and six string banjos in almost every known dance band or Jazz orchestra and as indiviuals or in groups. This was in addition to continued, though steadily decreasing five string banjo playing particularly in areas like Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia that parelleled a decrease of five string playing among whites as well. Bands like Louis Armstrong's, Duke Ellington's, Bennie Moten's, hardly presented the image of degrading minstrels. Nor did significant Jazz organizations of the time led by by banjoists like Zack Whyte and Nobble Sissle.
   
   In the mid 1930s with the advent of swing, greater amplification, the banjos in such orchestra and groups largely were replaced by guitars in Black as well as white Jazz orchestras. Most four and six string banjoists switched to guitar. In fact most of the older generation of swing band guitarists like Fred Guy with Ellington and Freddie Green with Count Basie began as banjoists, not guitarists (Green never played banjo with Basie).
   
   This happened for musical reasons, not because of any minstrels. Guitars seemed more suited to a more nuanced swing rhythm and had a greater harmonic range. Moreover, the advent of the large hollow bodied Jazz guitars, better amplification for recordings and stage shows, and finally electric guitars made the guitar superior to the banjos which were louded than the earlier parlor guitars and particularly suited for the early pre-electronic recording. As one of the banjoists turned guitar players of the generation told me 30 years ago, "Banjo and Tuba music got replaced by bass and guitar music in Jazz."
   
   Danny Barker, the great four and six string banjoist from New Orleans who switched to guitar in the 1930s when he was playing with Cab Calloway explained that when he decided to return to banjo playing in an New Orleans revival group right after World War II, Harlem pawn shops were filled with "thousands" of banjos and he had no problem finding a good instrument at a great price. Indeed into the early 1960s, not just in Harlem, but all over America, fine four and five string banjos now worth thousands could be found for easy money or nothing in attics, in garage sales, or even in junk yards! The banjo companies many of which folded in the early 1930s, and most of which had stopped or greatly curtailed making 5 string instrulemnts by the 1920s, produced few banjos of any kind by the 1940s.
   
   The banjo itself declined from total popularity at the turn of the century to relative obscurity by the early 1950s, not because of the minstrels, but for musical reasons common to Black and white musicians.
   
   To be sure among African Americans traditional five string playing continued among pockets of musicians in rural areas in the Appalachians and especially in the Piedmont regions of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia into the 1980s.
   
   The desertion of the banjo among African Americans had nothing to do with minstrels, who had actually more or less disappeared from the scene as a major form of entertainment by the late 1920s. It had to do with musical migration and development that was by and large shared by white musicians from the five string to the four and six string banjo to the guitar.
   
   It is true that vestiges of banjo playing remained in Southern white music. Even there,before Earl Scrugg's revived the five string banjo when he gained fame as part of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass band, the banjo was playing a smaller and smaller role in white "hillbilly" music. Generally, the banjoist tended to be a comic figure often playing the role of an old fashioned rube, a vestige of "old times" until Earl came along. When Earl first appeared on the Grand Ole Opry, Uncle Dave Macom, a great old master who had begun performing in the 19th Century, told Bill Monroe Scruggs would never make it as a banjo player because "he ain't a bit funny."
   
   Even so banjo playing in the entire country tended to continue to be indentified with jazz banjo playing in Dixieland groups until the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s which also tended to popularize bluegrass to wider audiences.
   
   African Americans did not widely participate in the Dixieland revival of the late 1940s and 1950s (although it did keep a number of Black four and six string banjoists particularly in Chicago and New Orleans working), the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s and their revival of 1940s and 1950s Bluegrass and resurrection of older white and black country musics involving the banjo.
   
   This has more to do with the fact that African American culture tends to be more progressive than white popular culture. Black people tend not to want to romantically glorify "the old days," particularly the days of Jim Crow Segregation. Black culture keeps trying to develop new expressions to escape the dominant cultures tendency to try to contain and emasculate black contributions.
   
   To be sure, many African Americans see the banjo as an old fashioned or out moded or "country" symbol, just as many Southern whites did in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s until the dominant urban sophisticated culture embraced Bluegrass and vice versa.
   
   However, there is simply no proof or even reference to minstrelry in any of the real history of Black banjoists and the banjo, just musical ones, shared by non Black banjoists as well.
   On the other hand, a new generation of African American banjoists like my friend Myra Hill and I are returning to the black and white traditions of the banjo.

1 comments about Easy Banjo Solos: Banjo Solo.

1. It is easy to be successful with the book! Melodies are easily identifiable thus building confidence instead frustration that comes with the fluff that masks the melody as found in many other Banjo books.

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