Dena J. Epstein's classic work traces the course of early Black folk music in all its forms. This book is the product of her strategic deployment of library science principles to historical research to the study of Black music during enslavement. She begins to analyze the use of percussion, banjo, and other instruments among enslaved people. Accompanied by musical examples, Epstein's analyses are fueled by eyewitness accounts and illustrations of musical practices. The second edition of this text, published in 2003, offers an additional preface in which Epstein reflects on the twenty-five years of changes in scholarship that followed her book's original publication. This book is available in the Performing Arts Reading Room.

This text explores the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion over the course of two centuries. Through archival research of diaries, letters, and art, Gaddy traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century until the Civil War. This history focuses on people of African descent, who created stringed instruments consisting of gourds or calabash resonators and wooden necks. Gaddy shows how enslaved people carried the spirit of this unique instrument as they were transported to Suriname, to the Caribbean, and the colonies that would become United States. Here, African Americans would have come together for religious rituals in which the banjo played an essential part. In the mid-nineteenth century, blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands. As a result of this appropriation the banjo was popularized and removed from its cultural context. This book has not yet been put into circulation at the LOC.

Following decades of study John Wesley Work III presents a collection of folk songs by African Americans. In this classic text, He also discusses the evolution and history of African-American folk music by emulating Black storytelling structures in this classic text. This book is available in the American Folklife Center Reading Room.

This music history of Black America embraces a broad spectrum of musical styles, activities, and traditions. Southern's book is one of the first major publications on African-American music that uses lithographs, photos, paintings, and other visual media to explore the private and social world of Black people. Her text provides a description of each image's subject matter, but the bulk of the work analyzes and interprets images of Black life by putting them into conversation with larger methodological shifts in the study history and the social sciences. This book is available in the American Folklife Center Reading Room.

The banjo has become associated with Anglo- and Celtic- Americans in the Appalachian mountains. However, it is understood that the banjo is an instrument rooted in African and African-American material culture. In this study, Cecelia Conway explores the remnants of a once vibrant tradition of African-American banjo players. Like many African-American traditions, African-American banjo music has been sparsely documented. Conway explores similarities between African-American banjo playing to West African music performances. She explains how Africans in America had, by the mid-eighteenth century, transformed the lyrical music of the gourd banjo as they dealt with the experience of slavery in America. This book is available in the Performing Arts Reading Room.

The story of the banjo's journey from Africa to the Western Hemisphere blends music, history, and unique interactions of culture. In this edited volume, Robert B. Winans and others present new scholarship that covers the instrument's West African origins. In addition to exploring connections to West Africa, this book explores the various lives of the banjo as it traveled through the Caribbean and into the United States. The contributors provide detailed ethnographic and archival research on gourd lutes, ekontings from Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea, and banzas in Haiti. The text also investigates tuning practices and regional playing styles of early banjo playing. Other essays place the banjo within the context of slavery to shed light on the banjo's introduction into the Afro- and Anglo- American folk music settings. This book is available in the Performing Arts Reading Room.

This book attempts to trace the cultural history of the banjo and its predecessors through West Africa, the Caribbean, the Antebellum Period, and Civil War to the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2008. Dubois pulls from archival sources and other historical works through the lens of the folk revival to outline the unique historical and social influences that impacted the development of the banjo in the United States. This book is available in the Performing Arts Reading Room.

Old-time musician and flatfoot dancer Philip Jamison tells the story behind the square dances, step dances, reels, and other forms of dance practiced in southern Appalachia. He argues that these distinctive folk dances are not 'authentic' jigs and reels brought by early British settlers, but hybrid styles of music developed over time by adopting and incorporating elements from other popular forms. He attempts to trace the forms from their European-American, African-American, and Indigenous roots to the modern day. He aims to explore the influence of African-American culture worked alongside European culture to create a unique blend of the two. This book is available in the Main Reading Room.

Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country music canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A. P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other Afro-Americans enriched the music played by Anglo-Americans has obscured the achievements of African-American country musicians and the engagement of African American listeners. The contributors to this book examine how country music became thought of as "white," how constructions of racial identity has been maintained, and how African-American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities.

After a century of whitewashing, country music in the mid-21st century has begun reckoning with its relationship to Black people. In this book, Francesca Royster discusses Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre. Her book elucidates the roots of the current moment found in records like Tina Turner's "Tina Turns the Country On!". She also reckons with Black "bros" Charley Pride and Darius Rucker. Then, she chases ghosts into the future with Valerie June and Our Native Daughters. By centering Black folks, Royster begins to understand what her daughter hears in the banjo music of Our Native Daughters and in the beats of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road." This text begins a conversation where Black artists and fans are collectively changing what country music looks, sounds like, and who gets to love it. This book is available in the Performing Arts Reading Room.