The truth is, the banjo, like all the indigenous music of the South,

is another of those curious shadowy meeting places of black and white people.

Surely by now you’ve seen that bumper sticker that says, PADDLE FASTER—I HEAR BANJOS PLAYING.  It’s an allusion to the worst movie for the banjo’s image since the minstrel era—“Deliverance.”  Despite the wonderful “Dueling Banjos” song, which was written by the talented Arthur Smith, whom I used to watch on TV from Charlotte, NC as a boy (and who also wrote the “Guitar Boogie.”), it was an image I’d as soon forget.

The banjo is associated with rednecks, hillbillies, and racism in the American mind.  We think of it as an instrument of uneducated mountaineers in the rural South.  We remember white people in blackface mimicking the music of the plantations that makes us wince in pain now.   And that’s too bad.  The banjo is an instrument that contains a shared history in black and white.  It is an African instrument that white people—especially the poor–came to love.

Unfortunately, the searing history of the plantation, slavery, with all of its terrible damage to the people brought here against their wills, left us with a bizarre and tragic legacy of contradictions that perhaps reflect in our music.  The notion that an African instrument, the banjo, would embody racism is odd indeed.  The truth is, the banjo, like all the indigenous music of the South, is another of those curious shadowy meeting places of black and white people.  From the painful memories of the minstrels to the accusations against Elvis as “race music,”  the musical inventions of southern culture—jazz, gospel, rock, soul, R&B, blues, country, folk and bluegrass—all formed bridges across a divide that was stupidly attempted by law and cultural taboo.

A couple of video explorations that will open up that world for you differently.  One is “Give Me the Banjo” NARRATED

Steve Martin is a lifelong devotee to the banjo

BY Steve Martin on PBS.  You can watch it online here CLICK  It is a wonderfully told narrative of the instrument through its  complex history and cultural settings.  It will introduce you to a lot of players you’ve never heard of, black and white, blues, old-time, folk, bluegrass and other styles.

Like so many cultural artistic expressions, you will find yourself realizing that all your surface shorthand stereotypes are nearly worthless.  Finding the worlds under the music is like the difference between taking a tour of a country and living there.

Picture http://www.jamati.com/online/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/bela-africa.jpg

Finally, I recently found Bela Fleck’s wonderful documentary, “Throw Down Your Heart.”  A camera crew follows the master banjo player and his sound man as they traipse through Africa to reintroduce the instrument to its home and play along with native folk musicians across the continent.  Movie reviewer Lou Novacheck wrote of it in 2009:

The main story covers their trip, beginning with Uganda in East Africa, and ending up in Mali in West Central Africa, and includes hundreds of African musicians from the countries they spent time in, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, Gambia and Mali, from the famous to unknown. I’m sure neither Fleck nor Paladino saw the complexities and immensity of the project ahead of time, and I’m equally certain that there will be at least one additional similar

Bela Fleck with new friends

trip in the future. The origin of the banjo and its concomitant history are subjects that music scholars have been chewing on for years.

Early in the ninety minute film there is an astounding clip of a group of men playing what is a gigantic “xylophone” made of small logs calibrated to different notes.  Fleck, the great jam musician he is, finds a place to play along.  The music is haunting, joyful, and you see as many smiles as any film ever has, genuine and pure.

Truth is, most music through time was not primarily entertainment as we have created it in the last century but participative.  Music was a way that common people found relief from the dreariness of life and connected in their sorrows, joys and hopes my sharing the gift of music.  The image for the banjo to me is not the “minstrel” or the sinister condescension of “Deliverance” at all.  Those terrible truths existed and still do.  But the image of the banjo is the jam, where people sit together and make music.  There is an etiquette to old-time and bluegrass jams about taking turns, learning a canon of tunes, being invited in, and initiating the newcomer.

This year I finally broke down an bought a banjo (to go with my guitars, acoustic and electric, mandolin, harmonicas, keyboard, violin, dobro, bass, two ukuleles and penny whistle, among other things.  I just love sounds—any and every.  I have a Gold Tone BG-250, a gorgeous instrument that prices at the beginning of the high end banjos.  I bought it from my good friend and banjo wizard, Herb Trotman, at Fretted Instruments of Homewood Alabama.

And playing it is not a political event to me at all.  It is simply soothing, a connection to ancestors and the mystery of all life.  When I sit alone and play, I am not alone.  I connect to the ages and to all things.  While I’m not very good yet, here is an MP3 I came up with as a first composition, called, “Dynamite Hill” with banjo and keyboard on my recording.    LISTEN TO GARY PLAY “DYNAMITE HILL”

In a time when people sit, docile, in front of Blueray screens and passively watch other people live life, the jam seems pretty healthy by comparison.  So I offer, in closing, a wonderful group from North Carolina, “The Carolina Chocolate Drops,” play “Cornbread and Butter Beans,” who keep alive that this music belongs to all of us.  In the weary, tiresome deadness of current politics and economics, we desperately need the arts to help us find our souls again.  A good jam is a great start.