Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia

Author(s): Cecelia Conway

Source: Black Music Research Journal , Spring - Autumn, 2003, Vol. 23, No. 1/2 (Spring
- Autumn, 2003), pp. 149-166
Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and
University of Illinois Press

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 BLACK BANJO SONGSTERS IN APPALACHIA
CECELIA CONWAY

By the twentieth century, the five-string banjo had become the symbol
of Appalachia and its "hillbillies." At the turn of the twentieth century,
individualized local styles of old-time Appalachian string music rang out
from nearly every holler and crossroads community. By the late 1920s,
with the widespread availability of 78 rpm records and the growth in
local radio programming, all America could hear the old mountain fiddle
tunes as well as the more recent lyric guitar songs popular in the Upland
South. These same record companies and radio stations showed little
interest in the old-world ballads or old-time banjo playing also common
in the region. In August 1927, after southern musicians had enjoyed
access to inexpensive mail-order guitars for almost a generation, the
Carter Family and the singing brakeman Jimmie Rodgers recorded for
Victor Records in Bristol, Virginia. Country music emerged, and the gui-
tar took center stage.
In the early 1940s, bluegrass began to replace old-time mountain
music; it retained the banjo but changed its shape and increased its vol-
ume with the addition of a tone ring and large resonator. Despite the
music industry's disinterest, the intense rhythms of bluegrass captured
America's ear, and in the 1940s, this hard-driving music reasserted the
banjo with brashness and a fast-paced pushing of the beat. Following the
phenomenal success of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, this Tennessee
city became the performance and recording center for country music. At
the dawning of the twenty-first century, the five-string banjo continues to
symbolize the people of the Appalachian region.

CECELIA CONWAY, Professor of English and Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State

University, has conducted extensive field research documenting Southern and Appalachian
folk culture and literature and was a producer and director for the award-winning film
Sprout Wings and Fly. Her book African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions
(University of Tennessee Press, 1995) is the definitive history of the banjo's evolution from
its African origins to the modern five-string banjo.

149

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 150 BMR Journal

West African Roo

But this story obscur

long-neglected histor
how enslaved Africans
thumb string, and its
Early written and pict
panied the singing of
a gut, horsehair, or he
strings.
Recent scholarship elaborates the African roots of the banjer. In West
Africa, jeli musicians and other memory keepers, praise singers, satirists,
and healers (called griots by the French) played the predecessor of the
banjer for centuries.1 Ethnomusicologist Eric Charry (2000, 122) observed
that "some kind of lute is probably the oldest melody instrument of the
griots" and dates from before the thirteenth century. For centuries, the
griots played solo or in pairs on the gourd koni as it traveled across the
arid Sahel and northern savanna regions, from Cameroon to the Atlantic.
Swedish scholar Ulf Jagfors (2001) classified African plucked lutes as
either "transverse" or "spiked" instruments.2 The transverse lutes have a
"raised" or "standing" bridge characteristic of American banjers, and the
spiked lutes have a "reverse" bridge (Courlander 1963, 213). These types
probably correspond to the earlier African and later Islamic types of
plucked lute. Both the seventh-century African gourd (Coolen 1984, 120)
and the later Islam-influenced calabash lute were protypes for the banjer
at the time of the slave trade (Charry 2000, 122). Before about 1842,
American banjers were constructed only of gourds.
The numerous and specific local names for these related instruments
and their players indicate four important facts. First, this is a musical tra-
dition dating from before the seventh century in Africa-and perhaps
even further back to the Egyptian lute and the Indian serod-and contin-
uing to the present. Second, it is geographically widespread from Africa
to the Americas: South America, the Caribbean, and North America-
especially in the southern United States. Third, many delicate local vari-
ations of instruments and repertoires emerged within this tradition. And

1. Those grouped together as griots included the jali/jalo/jeli of the Mandinka, jali of the
Xasonka, jeli of the Bamana, gewel of the Wolof, gaulo of the Fulbe, gesere/jaare of the
Soninke, and jesere of the Songhai. Apparently the colonizer's general term is an early
transliteration of one or more of these local terms for a professional musician (e.g.,
Mandingo jalo) (Charry 2000, 107).
2. Jagfors (2001) describes the transverse lute as characterized by a "four foot
neck/dowel stick transversing through the round gourd body." Transverse body plucked
lutes include the akonting of the Jola and the bochundi of the neighboring Manjagos.

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Conway * Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia 151

fourth, on the journey from the koni to the banjo, core structural ch
emerged in the form of the instrument with each major cultural exch
in Africa, with the arrival of Islam, the addition of the spiked cala
(e.g., molo) and wooden lute (e.g., halam) forms to the transverse go
(e.g., akonting) plucked lutes; in South America, the introduction of
flat fingerboard and tuning peg, which reflected the influence of t
Spanish colonizers' guitar; and by 1842, in the American South, whe
whites had begun to play the banjer (pole or flat neck), the emergen
the five-string banjo, which retained the short-thumb African dro
string but replaced the gourd with a wooden rim. This sturdy new b
with an additional string in fourth position became acceptable to bl
as well as to whites.
A decade after the publication of African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia
(Conway 1995), there remain at least three unanswered questions con-
cerning this fascinating journey of the banjo from the savanna grasslands
of West Africa to the American South. First, Africans arrived during the
seventeenth century, but the first known record of their playing the ban-
jer does not appear until 1740. Were there banjer players in the American
South before then? Second, what was African interethnic exchange like
on American plantations? How did musical traditions characterized by
large groups of drumming and singing for dancing (e.g., from the Congo)
interact in this country with the solo traditions of griots from places such
as Senegal and Mali or the Jola players of the akonting from
Senagambia?3 Third, Africans were playing the fiddle and banjo as solo
instruments for at least one hundred years before the minstrels took up
the banjo in the early 1840s. Why are there few if any records of their
putting these instruments together in an ensemble before the minstrels
did? In this article, I attempt to shed some light on these remaining
mysteries.

African-American Banjo Players

Follow the Rivers and Traces into the Mountains

The banjer arrived in Maryland and Virginia no later than the 1740s
(Cresswell 1924, 18-19; Epstein 1977). During the eighteenth century,
when the banjer first appeared in North America, Ulster Scot, Scottish,
and Irish immigrants began arriving in Pennsylvania in large numbers

3. Sterling Stuckey suggested that W.E.B. Du Bois's commentary on slave religion is of

relevance to this discussion. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois ([1903] 1961, 145) wrote of
the "adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation"and
that it took many generations before these syncretized African rites had more than a "veneer
of Christianity." Undoubtedly, the same can be said of slave music.

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 152 BMR Journal

and traveling west on

Many were musicians
with them.

Already familiar with the one-string fiddle, Africans were quick to

adopt the popular fiddle, and they often played it for whites. In 1774,
Nicholas Cresswell described a barbecue along the St. Mary's River near
the Georgia/Florida border: "A great number of young people met togeth-
er with a fiddle and banjo played by two [N]egroes, with plenty of toddy,
which both men and women seem to be very fond of" (Cresswell 1924, 30).
Reports of banjos and fiddles appearing in close proximity and in sim-
ilar venues existed prior to the rise of the minstrels, but Cresswell's is the
only known account that might imply that the two instruments were
actually played together before 1840. The uniqueness of this report raises
the possibility that Cresswell was not saying that the fiddle and banjo
were played together but that they were alternating performances, or that
the fiddle backed up the banjo after the fashion of the one-string African
lute. The co-existence of these two instruments, begun by 1740, would
take a century to blend and burst into full-blown minstrel and old-time
string band music.
The cultural exchange that eventually led to the banjo becoming a sym-
bol for Appalachia began on the coastal plain and moved along the
waterways into the Piedmont. During 1774, at the Carter Plantation on
the James River between Jamestown and Williamsburg, two young white
boys, Ben Carter and Harry Willis, became fascinated with several
African musicians. These schoolboys exasperated their tutor, Philip
Fithian: "This evening in the School-Room, which is below my Chamber,
several Negroes and Ben, & Harry are playing on a Banjo & dancing!"
(Fithian 1957, 62). By 1781, the banjer had moved beyond the coastal
plains into the Upland South, where Thomas Jefferson (1954, 288)
observed its use by African musicians: "The instrument proper to them is
the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa."4
African musicians introduced African culture to the settlers as they
traveled across the mountain traces. In 1798, on "the south branch of the
Wilderness Road" at Knoxville, James Weir witnessed a crowd of men
4. Typically, musicians played the fiddle solo (or with percussion accompaniment), as
they did with the banjo. Samuel Mess Johnson is perhaps the first African to carry the fid-
dle into Appalachia. "Black Mess" escaped from a Maryland plantation on a fast horse, trav-
eled through the mountains and arrived in the frontier crossroads of Wheeling, Virginia
(now West Virginia), worked there as a ferryman on the Ohio River for a year and then
helped deliver a flatboat to Zanesville (Sacks and Sacks 1993, 61-62). On "Zane's Trace, the
first path navigable by wagon into the Northwest Territory," the most famous of whites to
hear his music was Louis Philipp, who was traveling to escape the French Revolution. In
1798, at a log tavern, the future king of France "listened to the strains of the sweet music
from the violin" played by Black Mess (61).

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Conway * Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia 153

and women that "whooped and danced around" blacks playing on "t
banjies" (Coates 1930, 26-27). By 1806, the banjo had reached Wh
on the Ohio River, twelve years ahead of the Old Pike, the National
There, in present-day West Virginia, two Africans played "bangies"
ball with a Chickasaw musician who played a "lute."5 The banjo reac
western Kentucky by the early 1820s, where, after hearing black
players, Anthony Philip Heinrich composed The Banjo for the
(anticipating the banjo's later influence on the development of rag
piano); its cover illustration showed a black man playing a gourd ba
(Linn 1991, 1-2).
Musical exchange between Africans and whites, especially the
and the Scots, intensified as settlement continued, inspiring white
learn to play the banjo. The names of only a few black banjo mentor
known, but their stories illuminate how African and white contact
exchange occurred in and through the mountains from the time of s
ment into the nineteenth century.

Black Mentors and White Minstrels

By the third decade of the nineteenth century, whites, many of whom

were Irish, had begun to take up banjo playing and to create minstrelsy.
Like the plantation and frontier whites who first imitated African dance
before trying to play the banjo, these entertainers began by dancing. In
1832, on the river near Cincinnati, a stableman executed "a queer dance"
that inspired Thomas Dartmouth Rice. Born in New York City and of
Irish descent, Rice imitated the slave's "Jim Crow" song and dance-usu-
ally to fiddle rather than orchestral accompaniment. He did it so well that
he became known as the Father of Minstrelsy from Appalachia to Dublin
and Cork (Conway 1995, 90-93).
Also known in Cincinnati, the African-American banjo player
Picayune Butler became famous from New Orleans to New York City and
was celebrated in the song "Picayune Butler's Come to Town." Butler
illustrates the pattern of the traveling griot, prefiguring the itinerant
bluesman traveling through Appalachia, and seems to be the first named
black banjo songster to influence minstrels. About 1830, he inspired the
white entertainer George Nichols, who sang "Jim Crow" as a blackface
clown (Toll 1974, 44-45).

5. "The music consisted of two bangies, played by negroes nearly in a state of nudity, and
a lute, through which a Chickesaw [sic] breathed with much occasional exertion and violent
gesticulations. The dancing accorded with the harmony of these instruments" (Ashe 1809,
88-89). Musician Phil Jamison has observed that the Chickasaw may be playing a flute
(Jamison 2004).

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154 BMR Journal

Joel Walker Sweeney

the Blue Ridge Mounta
Like Rice and Nichols
probably workers from
24-25). This second-g
music with other mus
cians credited Sweeney
peck measure" or a "ch
popularize the five-str
vitalize the Virginia M
band (Conway 1995, 1
The five-string banjo
Sweeney started playi
thumb string, and th
tuned low, extending t
the adoption of fiddle
in round boxes, whic
tributed to this develo
carried banjo songs int
banjo and later string
the mountains, as wel
Hans Nathan (1962, 1
emergence of minstre
stitute the most indig
er southern folk hym
tings of the late eight
and pentatonic feature
cially when they vary
the four most original
ly Irish and Scottish i
pipes," "My Long Tai
Crow" is "partly relate
independence"-especial
cal (166, 168). These or
African musical excha
That whites in the mo
than from minstrels s
African-American men
from the fact that pre
tain special tunings an
not described in mid-n
uals. White mountaine

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Conway * Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia 155

repertoire when local musicians-turned-minstrels came home to visi

when minstrel entertainers traveled along the rivers giving shows.
The professional career of Dan Emmett (1815-1903), one of the m
renowned minstrels, is a good example of how African musical cul
was transmitted to, and transformed by, white musicians. Emmett
eled with the Cincinnati Circus Company into the mountains in 1840
convinced the company to hire the white banjo player Ferguson, f
western Virginia, as a roustabout. The circus manager's descript
objectionable but does suggest the banjo player's talent: Ferguso
"nigger all over except in color" (Nathan 1962, 110). Ferguson
Sweeney, is one of the two earliest white mountaineers to have lea
from blacks and then taught future minstrels, like Emmett, to play ban
Emmett's respect for first-generation, white banjo players is suggest
the fact that he stepped aside to allow Sweeney to become the lead
the Virginia Minstrels and replace him as the banjoist on their Britis
tour.

By the mid-nineteenth century, black banjo music-already vital in the

mountains-had influenced whites extensively. By 1800, banjo players
had traveled across the mountain traces, reached Knoxville, and set fron-
tier people to dancing. By 1810, the African banjer, with its short-drone
thumb string and two or three other strings, was well known to white
America. No later than the 1830s, whites (often Irish) had "caught" banjo
music and the downstroking style from blacks along the Blue Ridge
Mountains. No later than 1855, an African-American two-finger picking
style had been heard by whites and, by 1865, adopted. Although numer-
ous variations in the technique evolved, the rhythmic sound of down-

6. Howard and Judith Sacks (1993) have documented another African-American influ-
ence on the minstrel Emmett, that of the Snowden family. African Ellen Cooper traveled
from Nanjemoy, Maryland, with her former owner's sister (who had come to Maryland
from County Antrim, Ireland) to Mount Vernon, Ohio. In 1834, Ellen married "entertainer"
Tom Snowden, who hailed from the same Maryland area with its vital eighteenth-century
black banjo tradition (including that described by Creswell [1924, 18-19]). By 1850, soon
after the advent of minstrelsy, the Snowden sons-banjo player Lew and fiddler Ben-and
their fiddling sisters traveled together in a stage coach performing as a family ensemble
(Sacks and Sacks 1993, 9-13, 17-23). In the 1860 census, the entire household was listed as
the "Snowden Band" (59). They traveled over a seventy-five mile radius and "taught white
farmhands how to play the fiddle and sing the most popular songs of the day and held reg-
ular open-air concerts on their farm" (12-13). Most important, local blacks and whites
agreed that the African-American family influenced or gave the song "Dixie Land" to the
white minstrel Dan Emmett. Ironically, this Confederate anthem, which Emmett's grave
describes as having "inspired the courage and devotion of the southern people and now
thrills the hearts of a united nation" (1), was actually an African-American family lament,
not unlike a blues song, for the sandy bottoms of the Nanjemoy homeplace along the
Potomac. The gravestone of Ben and Lew Snowden reads, "They taught 'Dixie' to Dan
Emmett" (3).

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 156 BMR Journal

stroking, two-finger
recognizable and pe
exchange resulted in
wooden rim, and gr
minstrelsy, the banjo
ble. Blacks and whi
structed, and playe
throughout the years
of the nineteenth cen
struction of many b
Bollman 1999).
Minstrelsy dwindled
Upland South and esp
Extensive African-Ir
but distinct, new g
flourish. Although in
ture, through this lo
influence of both tr
ished-especially in th
the guitar and, later,

Twentieth-Century A

Although many Afr

century, far too few o
few members of historic black communities remembered the names of
any black banjo players. With the emergence of the blues, the easy avail-
ability of the guitar before the 1920s, and the growing influence of radio
and records by the 1930s, not many African Americans continued to play
the banjo.
Twentieth-century black banjo music confirms that the "Affrilachian"
(i.e., Appalachian African-American) banjo tradition was widespread
across the Upland South and that it (1) continued patterns found in the
early African, colonial, frontier, and minstrel music, (2) influenced moun-
tain string bands, and (3) was the foundation upon which the blues
developed. Even as black banjo playing began to decline after 1920, the
tradition continued to have considerable influence across the country in
the newly emerging musical genres popularized by both whites and
blacks. In his 1979 introduction for the projected compilation Black
Appalachia, Alan Lomax confirmed this longstanding influence of the
banjo tradition: "The earliest records of slavery in Virginia show the
importance of black fiddlers, dance callers, and banjo players in the

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Conway * Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia 157

South. . . . [T]his is the black music that preceded ragtime, jazz

blues" and created the "basis for modern country music" (quot
Wade 1999). Jimmie Strothers, a medicine show performer from m
Virginia and the first black banjo player recorded in 1936 by John L
continued this African-American legacy by playing old fiddle tune r
tory like "Cripple Creek." Alan Lomax observed of Strothers' pl
that "the black banjo player [is] co-creator of the zany rhymes and
calls of the Southern frontier." Strothers also represents the transit
the music from banjo song to proto-blues in his performance, on gu
of the suggestive rag "Poontang Little" (Wade 1999).
In the same two regions that were the centers of this living trad
early in the nineteenth century, twentieth-century black banjo pl
were found primarily along the lower Mississippi River Valley and a
the Upland South. The main distinction between these regional tradi
concerned ensemble playing. In part due to the outlawing of drum
in the east in 1740, the drum and banjo ensemble tradition was con
to parts of the Deep South and especially to the more culturally tole
Catholic areas such as the Place Congo in New Orleans.
In the hills of northeastern Mississippi, banjo player Lucius Smith
vides a link between these traditions. He played in a band with fid
Sid Hemphill (1876-1961), guitar player Alec Askew, and bass
player Will Head that was recorded in 1942.7 The band's repertoire,
enced by Anglo-Irish traditions, ranged across a wide variety of ge
including the blues. These recordings by Hemphill and Smith docum
an older style of African-American Appalachian string band music
they echo early sounds of the solo banjo and fiddle put together.
Gus Cannon, of Marshall County, Mississippi, learned from a dee
bear hunter on the Sunflower River in the Mississippi Delta his firs
tunes, downstroking "strumming fashion," on a fretless banjo (Con
1995, 125). A few months later, he learned, from other itinerant b
musicians, the finger-picking style for which he became famous o
medicine show and jug band tours (Olsson 1973). Far away in Chath
County, North Carolina, solo banjo player John Snipes and his men
Dave Alston (ca. 1835-1910) and Will Baldwin (1873-1943) lived near
Haw River (Lornell 1975, 1980). Their repertoires, too, were influenc
African precedents as well as by Irish song and Scottish fiddling.
Whereas Snipes preserved the solo banjo songster tradition of Af
griots in the Piedmont, the cousins banjo player Odell and fiddler
Thompson reflected ensemble traditions preserved in their ext
family. The Thompson fathers and uncles had been influenced by a
older light-skinned African-American fiddle player and maker
7. Released on the compact disc Black Appalachia.

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 158 BMR Journal

Wright, as well as w
and on the Walter Th
the parties and dance
on the floor and one
night. Fun" (Conway
The Piedmont and m
shared a tradition, an
players from the Pie
the mountains. Like
their conversational
made and, later, mai
for both blacks and w
Roberts (1894-1989)
mountaineers as well
old players when he
He carried the "Coo C
worked briefly aroun
banjo players Tommy
a renowned version o
ly available, many ba
as well.

In upstate South Carolina, Jake Staggers (b. 1899) also learned on a

homemade banjo-constructed of "a tin pan with a cat-skin" or some-
times groundhog- or catfish-skin head (Rosenbaum 1983, 74)-not unlike
the small lizard belly used by some akonting players.8 Staggers learned to
play banjo in Oconee County from his brother Hansell, who worked on
the railroad, and from two friends, one black and one white. After he
moved across the river to Toccoa, Georgia, Staggers played banjo during
Christmas as he paraded with several musicians to the light of "torches
of bottles and kerosene-soaked rags on long poles" in a John Canoe cele-
bration, also popular at that time on the North Carolina coast. But, like
the earlier black musicians who carried the banjo into Appalachia, he
would also travel way up on Panther Creek into the mountains of Rabun
County. He mostly played for hog killings, corn shuckings, and dances
for both blacks and whites. The white mountain sheriff liked his music so
well that he drove him up from Toccoa in the patrol car: "I use[d] to pick
banjo and call a set at the same time.... We used to have fun! White and
black, get on the flo' at one time and dance" (74-76). From one end of the
Upland South to the other, unknown and undocumented black banjo

8. When white banjo player Art Rosenbaum first met African-American Jake Staggers,
Staggers told him, "I've been dreaming about playing again" (Rosenbaum 1983, 74).

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Conway * Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia 159

players such as Staggers shared the African banjo tradition with w

Appalachians.
In the northwest mountains of North Carolina, Dave Thompson a
his brother-in-law played banjo.9 Thompson's family moved f
Chatham to Guilford County, not far from the present home of Afr
American fiddler Joe Thompson in the Piedmont, and then in 1856
Ashe County. Perhaps unrelated to Joe and his banjo-playing c
Odell, Dave Thompson's ancestors were free blacks who carried two
ters of recommendation in hopes of traveling safely. They were h
west to the "free" states, but their ox wagon broke down on th
mountain in North Carolina. They settled on Stone Mountain-know
Thompson Mountain by some locals-in Watauga County. D
Thompson sometimes worked on the railroad in Tennessee and i
mines in Kentucky. He and his banjo-playing cousin and two brother
law would also sometimes travel to Virginia and West Virginia to pla
payday at the mines (Conway 1995, 142-145).
Dave Thompson influenced local white musicians when he play
seasonal get-togethers-especially at Christmas-with Doc Wa
Frank Proffitt, and Clarence Tom Ashley. Ashley's renowned banjo
sions of the "House Carpenter" ballad and "Coo Coo" are closer to D
Thompson's performances than to those of Ashley's white frien
one-time band member Hobart Smith.
Hobart Smith was from Saltville, Virginia, where the salt mines were a
scene of black and white contact before the coal mines. Smith was anoth-
er white mountaineer fascinated by black music. He played fiddle, piano,
and guitar, as well as banjo, and was influenced by an older African-
American fiddler named Jim Spenser. Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was
apparently in the area entertaining black railroad construction workers,
and a handful of records by African-American artists were also influen-
tial on Smith, as they had been on Dock Boggs of southwest Virginia and
eastern Kentucky (Russell 1970, 48-49).
Dock Boggs tells of following, as a little boy, the guitar player "Go
Lightening" along the railroad tracks to hear him play "John Henry." A
few years later, Boggs went to hear a string band in the neighboring black
coal town. The banjo player fascinated him most: "I said to myself-I did-
n't tell anybody else-I want to learn how to play banjo kinda like that
fellow does. I don't want to play like my sister and my brother. I'm gonna

9. Joe Wilson, director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, grew up in Ashe
County, North Carolina. He told the author that there were other black banjo players in the
area during the 1950s, including "Spec" Boren and Johnson County, Tennessee's Bug
Wagner (Wilson 2003). Dave Thompson was recorded by Sandy Paton in 1963; Thompson's
"House Carpenter" was released on the Folk-Legacy label in 2000.

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160 BMR Journal

learn just how to pic

got hold of a [banjo]"
Twentieth-century
or persistent than in
American banjo play
Reid-the son of a m
eventually guitar. He
(b. 1913), who is of
descent. Other memb
Moore, who played
Elizabeth "Babe" Reid
ing style-possibly lea
band, Fred Reid, als
player Cora, marri
Phillips, who describ
played both banjo an
the Piedmont, the wh
and sometimes up on
Hotel in Blowing Roc
Two West Virginia b
County and Clarence
their fathers and gr
Another West Virgin
traveled south, and s
tobacco. Dalton was in
banjo and fiddle playe
by the music of a
whiskey from his fa
1983; Dalton 1993). Th
eth-century white ba
they had learned.
On the Black Appala
as wide a sweep as th
lated hill country o
includes several cuts
The music recorded b
enough to show us ho
the twentieth centur
those who still played
of their musical lives
to the peak decades o
Lomax believed that "black mountaineers formed orchestras that out

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Conway * Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia 161

did the best of white mountain string bands." He was repeating the
timents of the local white community of Campaign, Tennessee, who
that the band of Murphy Gribble (banjo), John Lusk (fiddle), and A
York (guitar) was "the best square dance band in that part of the st
(quoted in Wade 1999). Their reputation among local whites and
music, recorded in 1946 and 1949 by Stu Jamison and Margaret May
help us understand the exuberance and extravagance of Lomax's clai
In the 1920s, a substantial black population was connected to this ha
stop on the railroad in south central Tennessee due to its proximity t
Rocky River Coal and Lumber Company. This musically rich Afr
American community was only a few miles from the birthplace of
extraordinary banjo player Uncle Dave Macon, who knew these b
musicians. (Macon was such an accomplished banjo player and sin
that some African-American record listeners thought he was black.
the song "Christmas Eve," Lomax noted the "complex interlock of b
and fiddle" (quoted in Wade 1999)-a characteristic found as far away
Round Peak, North Carolina, in the white fiddle and banjo mus
Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham.
Although less common among African Americans than solo playin
doubling, the African-American fiddle and banjo ensemble tradition
especially strong throughout the mountains. Fiddler John Lusk (b.
was a farmer who spent most of his time around the edge of the m
tain near Turkey Scratch. He came from a musical family: "The girls
n't left out-all of them could play something. Some of them pl
banjo, some guitar, some fiddle" (quoted in Wolfe 1989). He play
fiddle owned by his grandfather, a slave who had been sent to
Orleans in the 1840s to learn to play the fiddle." (A "postwar accoun
Andrew Jackson dancing to a black slave fiddler refers to training in
Orleans, the center for black fiddle music.") Like Lusk and the fidd
heard by Cresswell, the grandfather seems to have grown "proficie
both in repertoires designed for white dances, as well as ... less form
'sukey jumps' or 'kitchen dances' held by blacks themselves" (W
1989).
In the 1930s, Lusk's son explained, they had "Murph run the banjo, and
Daddy run a fiddle. Murph and Daddy could change off when they need-
ed to, at long dances, and Murph would take fiddle and Daddy the
banjo." Gribble preferred their "broke legged rhythm"; they played "old-
time breakdown music" and "some of that ole black country music, you
know, a Sukey jump," including pieces like "C. C. Rider" (quoted in
Wolfe 1989). What fascinated the documenters was that "[t]he fiddle did
not always lead the melody, but passed it to the banjo.... Half the time
the melody was played on the banjo, the fiddle moaning low rhythmic

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 162 BMR Journal

chords, over and over

tinct styles of banjo a
playing of most conte
Thompson, northeas
southwest Virginia's C
Armstrong-uses a hu
strokes characteristic
Jamison continues:

Suddenly, at the second

octave, with a wild cry
would then play a loose
ry suggestion of the me
downbeats, dancing a di
cal of all for banjo-not
startling gaps and hesit
octave half of the tun
demands of melody, it
was far and away the m
heard-Bach himself wou
(49)

They played in "high key" and "flat key." The "antiquity" of the tun-
ings-(e-B-E-F#-b) and (e-D-G-B-b)-is suggested by the banjo's "old low
frequency" pitch "before the advent of diamond-drawn steel strings" (55).
Other Appalachian black fiddle and banjo duets included brothers Mac
and Boyd Kay from Stephens County, Georgia, and John and Will Gibson
(the grandfather and uncle of Affrilachian poet doris davenport) from
Rabun and Habersham counties, Georgia (see the articles by Hay and
davenport in this issue).
Virginia's eighteenth-century heartland solo banjo tradition remained
strong in its mountains into the twentieth century. Josh Thomas of
Hollins, Virginia, had once played music for those building the railroad
across the mountains. Thomas's music is some of the oldest, most com-
plex, and most legendary of the solo banjo tradition (Conway and Odell
n.d.). Several other solo players also lived near or along the Blue Ridge in
Virginia, including John Calloway (who performed "Coo Coo") and
Irwin Cook from Henry County. Cook and the Foddrell brothers (of
Patrick County, Virginia) sometimes played in ensembles, and the
Foddrells' father Posey, a preacher, had played the banjo when young
(Lornell 1978). John Lawson Tyree played in Franklin County, Virginia; he
always played for his family at Christmastime, a tradition, like that of
Staggers' John Canoe, that celebrated the "Christmas gift," a practice dat-
ing back to slavery times (Tyree 1999).

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Conway * Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia 163

Rufus Kasey (1918-2002), born in Bedford County, Virginia, not fa

from the childhood farm of Booker T. Washington, grew up near th
Peaks of Otter with a banjo-playing father and banjo-playing uncles
neighbors. When Kasey was a young man, he and his father played f
local dances, sometimes with a fiddler, on and near their farm (Wina
1979). His father taught Kasey how to make banjos by hollowing out
sourwood gum tree stumps. Kasey learned new material from an unc
who worked in the mines when the uncle returned home to visit, brin
ing new songs with him. Kasey, who ran a junkyard and lumbering bu
ness late in life, continued to play solo banjo for his children, grandch
dren, and neighbors (Conway and Odell 1998).
John Jackson (1924-2002), raised on a tenant farm with thirteen bro
ers and sisters in Rappahannock County, Virginia, stands out because
was internationally recognized. A gravedigger and musician in Fairfa
County, Virginia, John Jackson became well known for his guitar play
and unorthodox banjo-playing style from concert appearances, recor
and compact disc recordings. He started on his father's $4.98 guitar at
age of four and explained that he made the banjo his primary instrum
after his brother broke their guitar over the head of a rowdy dancer.
family listened to early blues records by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bl
Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, and country singer Jimmie Rodgers (Perdue 19
John Jackson n.d.).
The Reverend Gary Davis, a famed guitarist from Appalachian Sout
Carolina, also continued to play banjo in many styles-includ
clawhammer, ragtime, and blues. Many of the last generation of blac
banjo players, such as Dink Roberts and Odell Thompson, both from
North Carolina Piedmont, also became guitar players, influencing
development of country blues (Lornell 1975, 1980, 1990; Dink 1975; Fid
Joe 2004).
Leonard "Buck" Bowles, a fiddler and banjo player who was recorded
by Kip Lornell (1978) in the 1970s, is the only black mountain banjo play-
er known to the author who is still active as of this writing. He and his
wife, Pluck, live on a small farm on the mountain outskirts of
Martinsville, Virginia, adjacent to the place where Pluck grew up. Buck
Bowles plays while Pluck dances, and he has frequently played in ensem-
bles, calling the sets for the dancers (Virginia Banjo Players n.d.).
The old-time banjo was still ringing among blacks and whites at the
turn of the twentieth century, when African-American banjo syncopation
inspired black pianists such as Scott Joplin, who was influenced to create
ragtime by his mother's banjo playing. Other Upland South black banjo
players were a significant influence on the development of ragtime gui-
tar playing. The fine ragtime guitar player Willy Trice was influenced by

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 164 BMR Journal

the banjo playing of

Thomas Burt (1901-
Carolina, show us ho
who took up the guit
took up his primar
Saturday night dance
of a banjo and play.
(Hinson 1978). The sh
in the Piedmont; t
Appalachia.
Minstrel stereotyping, harsh memories of slavery, urbanization, indus-
trialization, and especially, the increasingly restrictive Jim Crow laws led
singers to refashion their lyric songs with an assertive social commentary
that laid the foundation for the emergence of the blues. Black banjo play-
ers became obscure as they had begun to put down their banjos by the
1920s and to set their songs to the then-inexpensive and readily available
mail-order guitar, leaving the banjo to whites.
The influence of the black banjo tradition was again felt when blue-
grass adopted banjos with the African short-thumb fifth string reattached
to the tone ring combined with the large resonator that had been invent-
ed for the tenor banjo. These heavy metal banjos rang out across the
mountains and across the country with the three-finger picking of Earl
Scruggs-style playing.
Black banjo playing remained nowhere more lively or persistent than
in Appalachia. The music and memories of the few black musicians who
continued to play banjo in Appalachia into the twenty-first century help
us understand this tradition, which stretches from the Blue Ridge back to
the African grasslands. In the early twentieth century, the banjo still sig-
nified at the crossroads between the West African lute griots and jolas of
the grasslands, the traveling country guitar ragtime players and blues-
men, and the banjo players of the old-time southern string bands and,
later, bluegrass. Some of the elders continue to play the banjo, and their
music and memories help us understand the African roots of the banjo
and the mysteries of its history.

10. Willy Trice related how this renowned banjo player went to the crossroads in Orange
County to meet the devil one Sunday morning in hopes of learning how to play any tune
imaginable: "[A]fter a while, the wind got to blowing a little bit and something came up
there and got to dancing, .... kicking up leaves everywhere and balls of fire coming out of
his mouth and his eyes bright red." But Uncle Luther left without a banjo lesson: "I don't
know what he told the devil. He ran on home" (Bastin 1973, 190). Before guitar players from
Tommy Johnson in Mississippi to others in Appalachia went to the crossroads to learn fan-
tastic guitar playing from the devil, banjo players such as Uncle Luther Trice prefigured or
set the pattern of a journey to the crossroads.

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Conway * Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia 165

Aspects of this article appeared in conference talks at the Appalachian Stu

Association, American Folklore Society, the Banjo Gathering, and the International B
Conference. I appreciate the support of the Virginia Foundation for the Human
Appalachian State University, and the North Carolina Arts Council in this work.

DISCOGRAPHY

Black Appalachia. Rounder CD 1823 (1999). Compact disc.

Thompson, Dave. House carpenter. Ballads and folk traditions: From the Folk-Legacy Archive
Folk-Legacy Records CD-125 (2000).

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