Why a Black Banjo Gathering?

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“Thank you for making me aware of this important movement in African American music”—Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Chair of the Department African and African American Studies, Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University

The first Black Banjo Then and Now Gathering will bring together Banjo players, folklorists, scholars of the banjo, lovers of traditional and contemporary African American music and culture from all over the United States and the world. Hosted by Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, April 7th - 10th, 2005, the Gathering will feature lectures, workshops, jams, performances, and down home frolics over four days. The Gathering celebrates the African American Heritage of the banjo, which has not only a historic past, but also a resurgent present, and a great future.

The Gathering is sponsored by Black Banjo Then and Now (BBT&N) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BlackBanjo/>, an online group founded in March of 2004. BBT&N’s strives to create awareness that banjo playing in all styles comes out of the African experience. It supports contemporary Black banjo players, celebrates the banjo’s place in Black music and culture, and highlights the banjo’s role in cultural exchange.

Scholars of the African predecessors and relatives of the Banjo, and masters of West African string instruments like Ulf Jagfors and Daniel Jatta will help us learn where the banjo comes from. Builders and players of the gourd banjo will speak of the first banjos African Americans made. Scholars of the banjo like Dr. Cece Conway of Appalachian State will join banjoists who learned the instrument from their own mountain traditions, like Kentucky-born George Gibson and banjoists who fell in love with the banjo from the cities like Mike Seeger, to show how Black Banjo heritage is central to their Appalachian and southern banjo playing as a whole.

Above all this gathering is a celebration of Black banjoists themselves. It will memorialize African American banjoists of our past, like Horace Weston, Elmer Snowden, Gus Cannon, Fred Guy, Dink Roberts, Josh Thomas, John Snipes, and Odell Thompson. But we will also celebrate with living elder tradition bearers, like Algia Mae Hinton and Etta Baker, North Carolina fiddler Joe Thompson, and East Texas-born bones virtuoso, Cliff Ervin.

Crucially, this gathering will speak to a new generation of African American banjoists, performers and educators that unites a broad array of musics and regional styles. African-American dancer, percussionist, folklorist and educator, Sule Greg Wilson; Don Vappie, New Orleans Jazz banjo revivalist; Dr. Joan Dickerson, classical banjoist; Black Banjoist, blues and folk singer, author, and activist Tony Thomas from Miami; Rhiannon Giddens, a young fiddler, vocalist, and banjoist from Greensboro, North Carolina; and Rex Ellis, who has combined historic recreation and scholarship with storytelling and banjo playing.

When African American musicians and cultural workers heard John Snipes' version of “The Cuckoo” (Smithsonian-Folkways Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina & Virginia), they realized that the five-string banjo spoke in a language expressive of the lives of Black America. This Gathering hopes to be a focal point in repatriating the banjo to the Black Community, to inform African Americans about the banjo as a tool to express our culture and life, and to educate everyone as to how this expression of Black culture enriches the world at large.

There will be lectures, memorializing, education, and some real celebrating. There will be plenty of jamming, mingling, picking and dancing. There will be an opening night party with music and jamming and an opportunity to see an exhibit of historic banjos; a genuine dance-filled Friday night frolic; and a Saturday night concert featuring every known style of Black banjo playing, for the first time in history.

Most of all, the Black Banjo Then and Now Gathering will be a milestone in the resurgence and revitalization of African American and world banjo playing.