When one hears its familiar metallic twang in a fast rhythmic succession, one thinks of thick southern drawls, pick-up trucks, and moonshine. In American culture, the banjo is often associated with the country and bluegrass styles of music. The banjo is often accompanied by other instruments of the same family (guitar, fiddle, mandolin, bass), a vocalist or two, and the clapping and stomping audience. The average American citizen knows what the contemporary banjo is, but does not know the true roots of this instrument. As Jay Bailey states in the Historical Origin and Stylistic Developments of the Five-String Banjo, “Many…have been content to presume that, because the banjo is so uniquely American, the instrument must also, and consequently the question of ultimate origin has not been generally and seriously questioned.” This iconic five-stringed instrument has its true roots reaching deep into the oldest continent on the globe: Africa.
The contemporary banjo is a quite complex instrument: its main components are a head (the large round section of the banjo), neck, fingerboard, bridge, tuning pegs, and of course the strings. Yet there are over twenty parts in total that work in unison to create this complicated apparatus (Simmons). Only over centuries of development was this final product achieved. The oldest ancestors of the banjo can be traced back to Africa where it existed under many different names. The essential make up of these instruments was a drum with an attached neck and strings stretched over it. It was usually a one to three stringed instrument made from a hollowed out gourd with animal skin or parchment stretched over it. Thomas Edward Bowdich, while travelling around Africa in the 1800s, described the makeup of these instruments: “the body is a calabash, the top is covered with deer skin, and two large holes are cut in it for the sound to escape; the strings, or rather one string, is composed of cow's hair, and broad like that of the bow with...