David G. Hyatt - Gourd Banjos

Some authors have postulated an introduction of the banjo into the mountains some 250 years after the first slaves were introduced in Virginia. The historical record, some of which is presented here, does not support this view. The number of references to the banjo, in widely separated locations, indicates it was fairly common on the frontier. The gourd banjo was probably on the early Colonial frontier in Virginia and North Carolina by 1750, and spread to other frontier areas from there. The banjo, banjo songs and dance certainly came into east Kentucky well prior to the Civil War.

There will probably be no way to determine exactly when early European Americans first began adopting the African gourd banjo. The first blacks were introduced into Virginia in 1619 when John Rolf bought "twenty Negars" from a Dutch man-o'-war. There are records in the early Colonial era, beginning in the 1600s, of white and black workers fraternizing in early America. The best analysis of American slavery I have found is Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone. Berlin says of early slavery:

"Through the first fifty years of English and African settlements on the Chesapeake, black and white workers lived together in ways that blurred the racial lines…By mid-century [1650] …Small communities of free blacks sprang up around the perimeter of the Chesapeake Bay, with the largest concentration on the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland … Many blacks and whites appeared to enjoy one another's company, perhaps because they shared so much. Behind closed doors … black and white joined together to drink, gamble, frolic, and fight. Indeed it was the violence that followed long bouts of 'drinkinge and carrousinge' that time and again revealed the extent of interracial conviviality … Inevitably conviviality led to other intimacies … Bastardy lists suggest that the largest source of mixed-race children in the seventeenth century Chesapeake was not the imposition of white planter men on black slave women but the relations of black slaves and white servants. Fragmentary evidence from various parts of Maryland and Virginia affirms that approximately one-quarter to one-third of the illegitimate children born to white women had fathers of African descent…"

Paul Heinegg, in Free African Americans in North Carolina and Virginia, documents the genealogies of most free black families of those states in the 1790 census. He has evidence that many descended from the union of a slave and a white servant woman in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some in the free African American community married Indians or slaves; however, others married members of the white community. These people had thousands of descendents by 1800; many had moved to the frontier as laws regarding free African Americans became more restrictive.

Thomas Jefferson only mentions the banjo briefly in a short footnote. The early descriptions of the banjo in America are mostly provided by travelers from elsewhere, such as Creswell, who was from England. Newspaper advertisements describing banjo-playing runaway slaves began in the mid-1700s. These advertisements do not describe the banjo; the advertisers assume readers are acquainted with the instrument. The newspaper readers would have been wide spread around the Chesapeake; therefore, the banjo must have been well known throughout this area by 1750. If the banjo was commonly known over a large area by 1750, as I assume, then it must have been introduced two or more generations prior to 1750. It is likely, therefore, that the amalgamation of music from Africa and Europe, and the adoption of the banjo by whites, began during the early colonial era, from 1620 to about 1670 when the distinction between indentured servants and slaves was not clearly defined in law. This was also a time when "black and white joined together to drink, gamble, frolic and fight."

The gourd banjo was known and described earlier in the West Indies and South America than in America; however, the banjo did not survive in those places as a folk instrument. Early slaves imported to the West Indies and South America were mostly male, and black families did not begin to be established there until much later than in America. Berlin asserts that free black communities were being established on the Chesapeake by 1650. Communities consist of families; therefore, free black families were being formed alongside those of white servants and wage earners. Families are, I believe, the necessary mechanism through which banjo playing, dance and other folkways are passed from one generation to the next.