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All Mixed Up: Discursive Shifts in White Approaches to Banjo Music in Twentieth-Century America

By: Brianna Matson

In contemporary North America, the banjo is often considered a symbol of the white lower class. A profoundly ingrained symbol of the déclassé, banjo twangs accompany images of inbred, moonshining inhabitants of rural communities. This image of the banjo arose due to white Southerners’ participation in the American Folk Revival, a popular musical protest movement that spanned between 1940 and 1975.[1] Yet long before the image of Uncle Cletus’ front porch banjo duels became the predominant depiction of banjo players, Uncle Tom “wailed on the cat gut” in the yards in front of old plantation houses.[2] In this period, the banjo symbolized racial inferiority and plantation living. Any minstrel show that hoped to draw a significant crowd featured an Uncle Tom figure with a banjo on his knee, and newspaper comedy sections pantomimed the Black community’s affinity for the banjo.[3] This portrayal reinforced the notion that Black joy was inseparable from servitude, casting the banjo as a symbol of contentment within plantation life and reducing Black musicianship to a caricature for white entertainment. Early twentieth-century depictions of the banjo in minstrel shows generated significant changes in white discourses surrounding the instrument. These performances normalized banjo music, allowing the instrument to be “improved”—that is, made acceptable by white musical standards—and adopted into white musical traditions.[4] Black folk music likely would not have been appropriated without these discursive shifts leading into the “American Folk Revival.”

North American folk music is an amalgamation of traditional European music, including Celtic ballads, Scottish child ballads, and, to a much smaller degree, English classical music. In the early twentieth century, the genre expanded to include Hispanic and traditional African influences. Like “folklore,” such as the Grimm Fairy Tales, folk music generally served as a tool for immigrant families to share oral histories in a memorable and easily transmissible form.[5] These oral histories were as much about preserving personal narratives as they were about teaching children proper social behaviors. Traditional songs such as “A Young Woman’s Warning,” a North American folk tune written by a Scottish Immigrant living in the Jamestown settlement in the seventeenth century, served to warn young women against cheating on their spouses for fear of Godly punishment.[6] Many Black Americans learned folk music through its use as a tool for assimilation.[7] Religious folk songs became especially popular on plantations because their repetitive nature helped enslaved people learn English while also serving enslavers’ efforts to convert them to Christianity. The genre has evolved as folk tunes carried to the United States by European settlers adapted to include new generations and new communities’ perspectives. However, by the 1890s, ethnomusicologists began heralding the “death” of North American folk music.[8] This supposed respite only applied to upper-class white folk music, as poor white people and Black Americans continued to perform and celebrate their folk traditions.

Historians have drawn from an extremely limited source base to compose a loose history of the banjo; the contemporary consensus is that the instrument was originally a gourd-based instrument constructed somewhere in West Africa. Enslaved Africans carried knowledge of the instrument across the Atlantic and adjusted the instrument’s traditional construction based on the materials they had easy access to on plantations. Most historians, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists agree that the banjo reached its contemporary form shortly before the beginning of the Civil War.[9] The instrument was deeply ingrained in Black American culture and became an iconic symbol of Black Americana during Reconstruction. Shortly following the turn of the century, white Americans co-opted the instrument, first in minstrel shows and then as a critical component of the American Folk Revival. This shift in cultural ownership is yet another aperture in the history of the banjo. Many historians concur that this shift resulted from minstrelsy; however, because historians and ethnomusicologists valued Black folk traditions less than white folk traditions at the turn of the century, this consensus has not been examined in depth.[10]

The banjo’s role in the Protest Folk Movement may factor in previous histories’ failures to account for the shift in attitudes toward the instrument. Black folk music has been widely ignored, even though white folk music was not performed for more than fifty years before the Revival. In this half-decade gap, Black artists continued to perform and adapt traditional British folksongs.[11] During the Protest folk period, these revised versions of folk tunes resurfaced in the place of their traditional British counterparts because traditional Black instruments utilized more straightforward chords and synchronized rhythms that made the music easier to learn and to share amongst communities.[12] This was especially useful in poorer white communities, where folksongs served as tools for labor rights. Thus, without Black contributions to folk culture, there would have been nothing left for white Americans to base their “Revival” on.

Despite Black folksingers’ significant role in establishing the revival, historians dedicated more space to demeaning Black folk music than they did to celebrating the adjustments Black folk music made to the genre until the late twentieth century. In early revival histories, Black music is unsophisticated, unskilled, and often plagiarized from British settlers’ traditions.[13] These narratives do not account for the forced assimilation experienced by the enslaved, nor do they credit Black Americans for improvements they made to North American folk music, including the addition of the banjo. This denigration of Black folk music does not address that the Protest Folk Movement began in 1940 when Pete Seeger released “Songs of the Lincoln Brigade,” an album that entirely relied on the banjo’s presence. Seeger acknowledged the significance of a white artist emerging to play a traditionally Black instrument while other authors did not.

Later histories failed to address the banjo altogether. By the 1990s, histories of the folk genre were almost exclusively nostalgic histories of the North American Protest folk Movement written by participants in the counterculture.[14] While most of these histories lend a voice to Black participants in the Folk Revival, they generally do not acknowledge folk music from before the Protest Folk period beyond a passing acknowledgment of a song’s country and year of origin. This oversight is not a response to previous histories but to a change in folk music’s history.[15] Where previous historians were concerned with demeaning Black musicians, later histories hoped to capture a clear image of the resulting “Folk Revival” and the social change the Protest Folk Movement promoted.[16] These histories fail to realize that the Protest Folk Movement itself was only possible due to earlier social movements. It is ineffective to paint a picture of the social change seen throughout the Protest Folk Movement without addressing the ideological shifts required to make Black folk music popular with white audiences in the twentieth century. The inclusion of early shifts that affected a genre’s ability to cross the color line has been a successful approach for histories addressing other appropriated genres, including jazz and rock and roll.

Professor Jennifer Stoever’s “The Sonic Color Line” is an exemplary illustration of the successes of this approach when applied to Jazz. Jazz music crossed the color line at the beginning of the twentieth century, making it the first of the three genres to gain popularity with white audiences. While less political than Protest Folk Music, which became popular during the Folk Revival, Jazz music also required significant cultural shifts to be popular with white Americans in the 1910s and 1920s.[17] Even after the genre became popular with white youths, older white Americans continued to denounce the genre as indulgent and, in some cases, sexually explicit.[18] This process of transition and conflict closely mirrors folk music’s re-emergence in the 1940s. However, narratives addressing the genre need to be faster to apply this lens to their examinations of the Folk Revival. While the scale of this project cannot fully address the process of folk’s transition from déclassé to a popular cultural movement, the banjo’s history can contribute to eliminating blind spots in the field.

When providing a discursive analysis of many historical shifts, newspaper databases frequently provide a critical primary source basis. These databases include the ProQuest New York Times Historical Publications database and the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection.[19] Gaps in database access and digitization are supplemented by several ethnomusicological narratives published in the relevant period and two Black authors’ responses to the stereotyping and appropriation of Black folk music shortly before the beginning of the Protest Folk Movement. This combination of sources accurately depicts attitudes about folk music nationally, especially given that many New York Times publications were republished versions of articles previously published elsewhere.

Additional gaps in the history of the early Protest Folk Movement can be attributed to McCarthy-era censorship. Songs and self-published narratives written by folksinger Pete Seeger are substituted for newspaper sources in this section of the narrative, as Seeger certainly had agency in his decision to include race in the discourses of his songs, even as his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) trial limited media coverage of the subject.[20] Committee standards imposed widespread censorship on racial histories in folksong, and all members of the folk supergroup The Weavers, including both Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, lost their recording contracts following Seeger’s HUAC trial in 1955. By 1960, HUAC blacklisted nine folksingers for their political activism.[21] Only one folk album, Jean Ritchie’s “The Great Speckled Bird”, successfully breached the Billboard Top 100 between 1955 and 1963.[22]

In the 1890s, ten years before white Americans began to herald the death of North American Folk Music, the process of silencing Black folk culture was beginning in earnest. This was not a dismissive silence; it was the weaponization of negative stereotyping that conflated Blackness with immorality. Religious belief systems, specifically white protestant beliefs, were the earliest lenses utilized to portray Black culture as sinful. This existing model of anti-Black rhetoric was used to keep the enslaved compliant on plantations and was used during and immediately after Reconstruction to coerce Black Americans into filling pre-designated roles in the lowest rungs of society.[23] Black folk music was not spared this treatment. The banjo was so immoral that it elicited punishment from God himself. In one instance of what one New York Times reporter called an act of “summary justice,” God struck a young banjo player dead as retribution for his performance of the Scottish Ballad “In the Gloaming.”[24] The tune “In the Gloaming” was not particularly offensive on its own accord, in fact, it was a popular player piano piece. The author denounced the young man supposedly involved in the incident solely because he chose to replace the piece’s traditional piano accompaniment with banjo music. The author further alleges that, while similar instances of summary justice are uncommon, they occur reasonably often “in colored and densely ignorant communities.”[25] To this author, it was no surprise that Black Americans remained poor and oppressed. Instead, the author alleged that Black people earned their oppression through their insistence on producing godless noise on the banjo.[26]

In addition to God’s supposed direct imputation of the banjo, exemplified in His violent punishment of banjo players, white authors aligned the banjo with allegedly Satanic practices.[27] This supposed Satanic affiliation of the instrument explicitly related to voodoo practices in Louisiana. This affiliation was unsurprising given voodoo’s history. North American Voodoo combined West African Vodun and English protestant Christianity. The practice emerged from enslavers’ attempts to assimilate enslaved Africans. By adopting Christian Saints and worship practices, enslaved Africans were able to continue practicing their native religions without fear of racialized violence.[28] Spiritual folk music was not exempt from this process of assimilation. Instead, African traditions–including banjo music–melded with traditional anglo folk tunes in two distinct ways. First, enslaved peoples who complied with white demands and converted entirely to Christianity utilized simplified folk tunes to accommodate non-English speaking converts. Secondly, disguised adaptations of folk tunes were utilized to protect escapees and others who refused to assimilate, including practitioners of voodoo.[29]

By the 1890s, white southerners were wise to Black voodoo practitioners’ attempts to conceal their religions with Christian traditions. More than this, they denigrated Black spiritual communities as “primitive devil worshipers,” and their utilization of banjo was further evidence of Black voodoo practitioners’ supposed inferiority.[30] If God disliked the banjo before practitioners began using it in voodoo rituals, He certainly could not enjoy the instruments used to worship “false gods.”[31] In the eyes of external white viewers, this devil worship and all associated cultural practices reinforced the relationships between Blackness and immorality. Within these ideologies was an underlying assumption that this perceived immorality would cause tremendous harm to white civilization. The banjo supposedly led people to lie and make terrible political decisions, and the author further foreshadowed that the instrument would quickly become aligned with stereotypes of Black criminality.[32]

White authors’ portrayal of the banjo worsened when, at the turn of the century, the instrument became symbolic of the rapid development of the United States’ prison system. Beginning in the 1910s, the United States progressively increased the number of prisons and transferred control of these penitentiaries to the private sector.[33] This system incarcerated Black men at a higher rate than any other demographic. Many opponents of the prison system maintain that it deliberately targets Black males to control the flow of labor, as emancipation caused an uptick in the number of workers but not in the number of jobs available.[34] Incarceration allowed private companies to continue exploiting Black labor in a similar manner to sharecropping. This expansion of the prison system and the mass incarceration of young Black men tied the image of the banjo to stereotypes of Black criminality. Narratives detailing the trials and prison interviews of inmates included mentions of the banjo regardless of the instrument’s relevance to the article.[35] If the accused was not a banjo player, newspaper reports made sure to note the “negro plucking at the banjo in the cell block down below him.” [36] If the accused was a Black banjo player, his affinity for the instrument was dutifully noted in the headline of the article, even in instances where the accused’s banjo skills were entirely irrelevant to the crime.[37]

For example, in one instance where a Black man, Grant Reed, engaged in a family dispute which escalated to murder, Reed’s participation in a “banjo picking” competition was noted early in the article’s description of the man.[38] Reed’s success in the banjo competition is irrelevant, as the feud was over a decades-long family dispute, not the banjo-picking contest. The Reed families’ supposed enemies did not even arrive on the scene until well after the supposed contest if the article’s chronology is to be believed. The mention of the banjo within this narrative was a commentary on Reed’s personality, not as a significant factor in the conflict. In another article describing a murder-suicide supposedly relating to a scandalous love triangle, the piece dedicated more space to the accused life as an “Itinerant Banjoplayer [sic]” than the murder itself.[39] This was especially noteworthy as one victim, Elsie Dewis, was allegedly having an affair with Mabel Nixon–another woman. While the article noted the women’s affair as being socially inappropriate for the period, the author brushes over this detail to return focus to the accused’s banjo-playing lifestyle.

Playing the banjo was an indictment of Black culture within these narratives of immorality and criminality. Black men who were unwilling to labor under white plantation owners as “sharecroppers” or “tenant farmers” under the same conditions they suffered while enslaved were considered naturally lazy.[40] Jailing these men was a more straightforward solution than reforming the political system. Accordingly, while playing the banjo was not a crime, it might as well have been in the eyes of white Americans. The banjo was not entertaining to white folks, nor did its sharp percussive sound resemble traditional anglicized instruments’ tones. Traditional Anglo-American music relied on deeper and more sustained sound and did not utilize syncopated rhythm. White audiences viewed the instrument, like many other aspects of Black culture, as uncivilized and uncultured based solely on their usefulness to white audiences.[41] By extension, the banjo would serve as a more significant symbol of crime, even if the accused had no association with the banjo themselves.

Minstrelsy reduced the association between the banjo and crime because it made banjo music useful to white audiences–even if they only enjoyed the instrument as an ironic tool to mock Black American culture. Moving into the second decade of the twentieth century, the association between the banjo and immorality decreased as the popularity of minstrel shows boomed. While minstrel shows originally became popular in New York in the 1830s, they boomed in popularity in the 1910s and 1920s as a means to raise the morale of struggling white families throughout the First World War, the Spanish flu epidemic, and the Great Depression.[42] By depicting a morbid distortion of Blackness, white minstrel actors were able to express their discontent with the American system. This was especially true for poorer white families, who struggled to cope with the perceived oppression caused by the rapid increase of income inequality throughout the early 1900s.[43] Outlandish depictions of Blackness cemented the separation between the two races and made these lower-class white families feel more closely linked to upper-class white people than to their Black counterparts.[44] Given that few Northerners and Midwesterners had practical experience with Black people at the turn of the century, these minstrel shows heavily relied on Southern stereotypes of Black people – thus codifying Blackness into a single unified image of Southern identity and culture that was almost entirely based on myth.[45] The banjo fit nicely into these depictions, as the instrument and the associated syncopated rhythms were still almost entirely alien to white audiences until the Jazz Age. This made it relatively easy to depict Black folk music as menial and chaotic within minstrel shows, as unskilled white actors could play the instrument with little regard to sound while maintaining the illusion of authenticity for ill-informed white audiences.[46]

A form of racial caricature solidified the relationship between the banjo and minstrel shows, typically referred to as “Uncle Tom” minstrelsy. While “Uncle Tom” originated from the 1852 abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the minstrel character is distinct from the novel’s main character.[47] Notably, whereas the Uncle Tom in the novel is portrayed positively, reflecting the dignity and strength of the Black community, the minstrel version seeks to undermine these positive traits. The minstrel character is the antithesis of the novel character, who was a generally intelligent and hardworking man.[48] In contrast, the minstrel Uncle Tom is presented as unintelligent and lazy. This version of Uncle Tom, often shown picking the banjo and eating watermelon, surrendered much of his agency in an effort to please his white oppressors through musical performance.[49] As a cornerstone of turn of the century minstrel shows, the Uncle Tom character came to dominate depictions of Black Americans and his association with the banjo cemented the instrument’s role in minstrel shows, reinforcing the racial stereotypes white audiences sought from minstrel performances.[50]

Newspaper articles celebrated minstrel shows and mused about their positive relationship with Black culture. In one case, The New York Times reported on a minstrel parade depicting Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When a white man arrived in an unnamed Southern town, he was enraged to find that the “hoarde of grinning imps that has been dodging [his] footsteps” had not come to take his bags or turn on the lights in the room. The innkeeper described the parade and, enforcing the stereotype that Black people were lazy, stated that no laborers were willing to miss the parade and that, “you couldn’t get one of them to work if you gave them a dollar for each minute.”[51] The narrative then launched into a detailed depiction of the “rowdy” Black attendees playing uncoordinated banjo duets and dancing in the streets in a scene reminiscent of Mardi Gras.

While instances of the words “banjo” and “minstrel” co-occurring in newspaper articles petered off throughout the 1930s, the long-term effects of minstrelsy on Black folk music cannot be overstated. The abysmal portrayal of banjo music featured in minstrel shows, in which white actors intended to communicate that banjo music was not music, unintentionally served to normalize the sound of the banjo for white audiences.[52] What emerged was a white interpretation of the banjo, now played with genuine effort, which seemed to reflect a distinct performance style that separated the contemporary sound of the banjo from its African roots. This “new” white interpretation of the banjo was nearly identical to actual Black folk performances; it was only distinct from minstrel music. By depicting African music as wild, unorganized, and even savage, minstrel shows left room for Black folk music to be “civilized.” [53] “Civilized” folk music was not genuinely distinct from Black folk music when viewed separately from minstrel music. This ideology of an improved white sound was bolstered by the white adoption of jazz music in the 1920s and 1930s, as White narrators denigrated Black culture in an attempt to reinforce the ideologies of white supremacy in a world where race relations were increasingly unstable and subject to rapid change.[54] By “improving” the banjo and other aspects of Black culture, white Americans placed themselves in a social position above their nonwhite peers.[55]

With the banjo popularized by minstrel shows, white audiences sought to rationalize the instrument’s success. As it was, the banjo symbolized derision, which looked to codify segregation within American cultural norms. As a result, it was socially complex to use the instrument in any other way. This justification process was predominantly discursive, as newspaper journalists and academics worked side by side to rewrite histories of Black folk music. In the early 1930s, newspapers began publishing popular histories of the banjo in a narrative attempt to control Black folk histories. These journalists took three primary approaches to histories of the banjo. First, certain narratives romanticized race relations in an attempt to argue that the banjo was never a symbol or derision, instead arguing that it was always a tool for racial and transnational unity. Alternatively, certain narratives acknowledged the banjo’s African origins but assigned white musicians with the responsibility of altering the instrument to its contemporary form. Finally, some narratives denied all racial connotations of the instrument, arguing that Black people did not even play the banjo to begin with, stating in one article that there “was no affinity between them [Black people and the banjo] in the old plantation day.”[56]

Narratives that romanticized the legacies of the banjo generally did so by arguing that minstrelsy had a positive socio-political effect on the United States. Many of these narratives highlighted the joy white Americans and foreign aristocrats drew from minstrel music. One such account noted that many members of the English royal family, including King George V and Prince Edward VIII, enjoyed minstrel shows in their private chambers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.[57] In an article appropriately titled “The Banjo in the Boudor [sic]” the author detailed the banjo’s transformation from a log cabin to the honors of princes” in England.[58] This author supposed that English leaders were “pleased to consider the affairs of the state” solely because they were given a private performance of minstrel shows.[59] Given the tense global political atmosphere in the early years of the Depression, these advocates of banjo diplomacy argued that these traveling shows of minstrel actors strengthened relationships between the United States and its European allies. If banjo diplomacy was such an effective tool for transnational political negotiations, these authors argued that no single racial group could reasonably claim cultural ownership of the instrument.[60] The authors argued that the banjo crossed the color line to improve the American socio-political atmosphere.

Proponents of the white improvement narrative agreed that the banjo crossed the color line at the turn of the century; they simply disagreed with the conclusion that Black and white people jointly owned the banjo. These accounts did not deny that an unknown tribe in West Africa invented the banjo. In its “primitive” form, enslaved peoples rebuilt the instrument as they played in Africa and played simplified tunes in their free time.[61] Seeing the potential of the instruments, enslavers adopted the instrument as their own and began the intensive process of “elevating the banjo.”[62] This process continued until the banjo supposedly reached its contemporary form during Reconstruction, solely due to white labor. By extruding the role Black culture played in the evolution of the banjo, these authors could rework stereotypes of Blackness to fit their agendas. Stating that Black Americans “toyed with the instrument carelessly” as a tool to play “snatches of popular [white] music.”[63] This article claimed that white Americans took on the responsibility of developing the instrument from this point forward, though Black people wrongfully attempted to take credit for the changes white people made to the banjo.[64] White narrators actively portrayed Black Americans as lowly criminals who blatantly plagiarized white folk traditions–including the banjo–to make the fallacious claim that the Black community owned the contemporary banjo.[65] This myth stabilized minstrel stereotypes of Black people as being daft, lazy, and dishonest while separating the banjo from its previous affiliation with these depictions.

The absolute denial of Black ownership of the banjo worked similarly. Within these narratives, the association of banjo music with the Black community was entirely fictitious. Much like the dulcimer, a Scottish lap harp that produced a sound like a banjo, the banjo had early European origins instead of African origins.[66] American settlers developed the instrument from this alleged Anglo-Saxon birth to complement contemporary folk music. These narratives claim that not only did Black Americans not invent the banjo, but as one article described it, white Southerners “had seen the negro at work, and have seen him at play; [they] have attended his corn shuckings, his dances, his folleys [sic] … I have never heard him play on the banjo.”[67] This author, and others like him, further claimed that the association between the banjo and Black identities existed solely because of minstrel music.[68] The sharecroppers portrayed in these narratives needed to be more intelligent to learn to play a complex instrument like the banjo. By illustrating that the banjo supposedly had no real affiliation with the Black community, it could be argued that this association only existed for minstrel shows. This false and theatrical misalignment could be remedied by assigning the instrument to its “proper” owners–white Southerners.[69]

Academic contributions to the emerging field of ethnomusicology initially substantiated these narrative attempts at separating Black identities from the banjo. Ethnomusicology, sometimes called “Musical Anthropology,” is the study of oral and musical folklore traditions primarily dedicated to studying folksongs’ auditory composition and cultural importance. The field primarily strives to capture the traditions of minority populations on a global scale. Ethnomusicology emerged as a separate field from music history at the beginning of the Second World War as a response to atrocities committed against minorities on a global scale.[70] In the United States and Canada, early ethnomusicologists focused on preserving previously suppressed Indigenous American linguistic traditions with a secondary focus on recapturing the Anglo folk traditions enslaved peoples adopted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although these early ethnomusicological traditions were relatively progressive, with due focus given to the complex nature of race relations in the Jim Crow era, the author’s biases as white males raised in a culture of segregation shined through in these narratives. These narratives were not exempt from the influence of centuries of racialized stereotyping. They instead built upon these stereotypes and injected their own implicit biases into narratives of Black folk music and Black cultural heritage. As experts in musical anthropology, the general public took these narratives at face value without examination of methodologies or personal backgrounds. Newspapers celebrated these racially biased narratives and placed the general white public in direct conversation with ethnomusicologists in a manner unique to the 1930s and 40s.

For example, a book review responding to an ethnomusicological narrative published in the late 1920s heralds the narrative as a “symbol of America’s age of innocence,” (the Antebellum Period).[71] America’s “lost innocence,” was reportedly restored in the book as the reviewer claims that the sight of “negro slave folksongs performed on the banks of the Ohio River” helped return America to a better time in its past.[72] Another newspaper review of an ethnomusicological narrative published in 1942 examined the Black folk traditions of Georgia’s sea islands. The newspaper celebrated author Lydia Parrish’s relative success in notating Black banjo songs, especially given that white notation methods “cannot even imitate what happens musically in a group of negros” as Black folk musicians did not perform with the same melodic or harmonic sequences seen in white folk music. Ms. Parish differed from many authors at the time in her emphatic denial that Black folksongs had been pilfered from white traditions, rather they had taken shared lyrics and added unique sounds to the songs. The newspaper reviewer disagreed with Ms. Parrish’s conclusion, however, alleging that a number of the banjo tunes in the book are actually white-composed “coon songs of some decades ago.”[73] Instances such as these established the trend of newspapers engaging directly in discourse with ethnomusicologists.

These interdisciplinary discourses about banjo music combined in the works of music critic and self-proclaimed musicologist Henry Edward Krehbiel. Krehbiel can be considered one of the fathers of Ethnomusicology. Krehbiel’s 1896 instructional narrative, How To Listen To Music, was the primary teaching text for the musicologists of the 1920s and 1930s. Krehbiel’s successful academic career was a side project for the author, whose most authentic passion was musical critique.[74] Krehbiel served as the chief music critic for the New York Tribune for forty years. By all accounts, Krehbiel was a highly trusted authority on music at the turn of the century. Shortly before he died in 1923, Krehbiel released the celebrated second edition of his narrative Afro-American Folk Songs: A Study in Racial and National Music. In this narrative, Krehbiel celebrated Black folk traditions as instruments of assimilation. Krehbiel alleged that jarringly simple revisions of traditional European folksongs were nothing more than tools to teach enslaved Africans the cultural expectations of a civilized society.[75] Krehbiel argued that these expectations were almost entirely foreign to the Black community before their introduction to folk songs. The author concluded that, given that Black Americans have fully assimilated into white society, Black Americans “have outgrown the conditions which alone made [Black folk Music] possible.”[76] It was, therefore, impossible that American folk music could continue as a genre. The declaration that folk music was dead by every academic measure was not a death knell for the genre but a building block for future narratives; the declaration would become the foundation of the “Revival” mythology of the 1940s.

Krehbiel’s narrative was not a one-off example of the academic denigration of Black folk Music. Instead, it established a long-standing trend of racist histories and ethnomusicologies, strengthening the associations between Black folk music and narratives of Black criminality. Between 1930 and 1950, seven additional histories of Black folk music perpetuated the idea that Black Americans had stolen white folk traditions, with many narratives referring to the songs as “borrowed folksongs.”[77] Black folk banjo accompaniments were allegedly reflections of Black Americans’ inferior intellect, and their folksongs showed their “preference for extreme textual simplicity.”[78] These over-simplified Banjo tunes were supposedly evidence of Black Americans’ biological inferiority, as early ethnomusicologists reached the consensus that Black Americans could not understand the more complex lyrics of traditional folk ballads.

In the 1930s, Black Americans published narrative responses to allegations against their culture. Many of these narratives did not deny that Black folk music was generally more straightforward than old-world folksongs. Instead, this simplicity was a much deeper commentary on the resilience and intelligence of the Black community. The enslaved ancestors of modern Black Americans adopted and altered folksongs to build new pathways for communication in situations where shared native language was not a reliable component of cultural development. Many historians and anthropologists agree that shared language is the backbone of any culture. For enslaved Americans, folksongs provided an opportunity to learn English and to share oral histories of their lives on plantations; the banjo was an extremely efficient tool to accompany these oral histories.

Renowned Black Philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke took this argument further, arguing that the simplicity of Black folksongs also allowed the Black community to preserve the lost folk traditions of the white community. Locke postulated that this would allow white Americans to relearn their ancestral folk traditions without difficulty. Locke’s narrative appropriately predicted the oncoming trend of white appropriation of Black folk protest music.[79] As stirrings of a “revival” began circulating in the mid-1930s with the re-publication of the communist propaganda piece “The Little Red Book,” the song’s simplicity became critical to white laborers’ interests.[80] The Little Red Book was a pocket-sized book containing nineteen labor protest songs that strongly resembled many Black folk tunes’ compositional style. The book was heavily utilized by union leaders in the 30s and early 40s because the simplified style of the tunes made the songs easy to learn. Illiterate laborers and those with limited comprehension of sheet music could quickly and easily learn the songs by ear and carry the lyric sheets safely in their pockets.[81] Locke’s theory of simple transmission became key to the rapid growth of the genre, and, by 1940, there was sufficient demand to justify the publication of the first recorded folk albums.

In 1940, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie released their first albums. Though the social movement that allowed the men to secure a recording contract before releasing the albums likely stretched back to the mid-30s, academics recognized the albums’ releases as the start of the Folk Revival. Seeger’s album was of particular importance to the early Revival Movement, as the popular anti-fascist tunes featured on the album included skillful banjo accompaniment. Seeger was well aware of the racial connotations of his decision to include a traditional Black American instrument in narratives of ethnic and racial oppression. While his early works primarily focused on openly fascist leadership in Europe, most often directing his commentary at Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, with later albums targeting Francisco Franco’s continual dedication to fascism, Seeger frequently utilized narratives of foreign racism to expand discourses of American oppression. In his 1940 album “Songs of the Lincoln Brigade,” Seeger read a spoken word poem to banjo accompaniment addressing President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Within this song, appropriately titled “Dear Mr. President,” Seeger called for the United States’ intervention in World War II and condemned Adolf Hitler’s treatment of racial and ethnic minorities in Germany.[82] Seeger informed the president that if it speeds the end of racialized violence, he will lay down his banjo for a more potent weapon of unity. Seeger was willing to fight. He said, “Because I want a better America with better laws… no more Jim Crow and no more rules like ‘you can’t ride this train ‘cause you’re a negro’ or ‘you can’t live here ‘cause you’re a Jew.’”[83]

Seeger’s popularity and the government’s fear that his approach to political change would be successful in undermining governmental oppression lends credibility to Alain LeRoy-Locke’s theory that Black folk music would become popular with the white community based on its accessibility, though the effect transferred to new protest songs as well as traditional tunes. Seeger’s music was successful for the same reason “The Little Red Book” had been; it was easy to learn lyrically and musically. Seeger published teaching records and accompanying books to teach audiences to play along with him. Seeger’s banjo instructional albums and accompanying books reflect his personal opinions on the representation of Black identities in folk music. Every folksong has a moral, a lesson the singer would like his audience to take from the tune. Seeger’s early works taught his audience that racism and fascism were not simply international terrors; fascism had a distinct American face. In the beginning of his 1948 banjo instruction booklet, Seeger was sure to honor the instrument’s heritage, noting “the American folk style of playing [the banjo] seems to me to be basically African” before launching into a meticulous history of the instrument.[84] Although Seeger is not an Ethnomusicologist or Historian, Seeger’s history is the most in-tact history of the banjo, complete with images and narratives dating back to Ancient Egypt, where hieroglyphs depict Egyptian priests and priestesses playing instruments that were visually identical to the banjo and oral histories of enslaved peoples’ experiences with the instrument in the United States. Seeger celebrated the banjo’s Black heritage and advocated for the instrument’s use as a protest tool in every single book he published after 1948–nineteen books in total. Seeger claimed that the banjo was “the best option” for the accompaniment of protest folk music.[85] This representation and advocacy paved the way for altered discourses on race in the folk genre. Three of Seeger’s songs would be performed at the 1963 March on Washington, and another became a global anthem for decolonization throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Seeger’s relatively mild protest of American oppression may not seem significant in the banjo’s history. The image of a white man playing the banjo and calling for equality was unheard of at the time. The United States Government began to crack down on supposedly anti-American or communist rhetoric under the leadership of Joseph McCarthy. By 1950, McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee began targeting activists and celebrities directly through congressional trials. Along with heavy media censorship, Seeger risked punishment by the United States government for his decision to voice his dissent against the country’s racially oppressive regime. Nevertheless, these small statements and single-line attacks significantly impacted American culture and became wildly popular among both Black and white audiences. Seeger slowly ramped up his attempts to include calls to action in his songs over the next decade and a half, releasing fourteen albums by 1955.[86] Seegers’s decision to continue including these inflammatory components in his songs ultimately resulted in his indictment for “subversion” by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954.

The Protest Folk Movement of the mid-twentieth century required the active revision of Black histories and the aggressive denigration of Black folk music. These discursive approaches enabled white musicians to establish a supposedly unique genre of folk music and separate the banjo from its African roots. Though early white “Revival” music fought to return agency to the Black innovators of banjo music, ultimately, white appropriation of the banjo reshaped images of cultural ownership in the middle of the twentieth century. As folk music boomed in popularity in the 1960s, a period often referred to as “the Peak Revival” period, chart segregation continued to push Black musicians to the periphery of the folk genre and solidified the image of folk music as an exclusively white genre. The resulting association of folk music was that it better represented poor white people than it did the oppression of people of color.

Histories of the supposed Revival Period have done very little to return this agency to minority actors, even as minority women played key roles in the Protest Folk Movement. Contemporary histories owe attention to artists like Odetta, Simone, Baez, Saint Marie, and Tanega. The “Revival” was not simply composed of white male actors like Seeger, Dylan, and Guthrie; Brown and Black voices were present and audible. Joan Baez, a mixed-race woman, was the first artist to emerge as a “Peak Revival” figure, and Dylan owes his success to Baez’s willingness to share her platform with him.[87] Odetta, Norma Tanega and Nina Simone, as Black women, have not been allowed to platform themselves as folk musicians. Chart segregation labeled these Black voices “Spiritual” or “R&B” even as they performed the same songs as white folk artists.[88] These women’s races and their access to white audiences are significant factors in the success of the Protest Folk Movement. These factors can and should be illuminated as a new generation of historians, specifically those too young to remember the protest folk music of the 1960s and 1970s, approach the topic as the first authors with no nostalgic connection to the period.

Notes

  1. Note to reader: I maintain the belief that the term “Folk Revival” is a racially biased misnomer. The term is replaced with “The Protest Folk Movement” or placed in quotations in future references to this time period. You cannot have a revival without the death of the genre; this paper argues that Black folk music has never dissipated and that a true Revival did not occur. ↑

  2. “Facts About the Banjo: How It Came to Be Developed from a Calabash to Its Present Form,” The Avalanche, (September 10, 1890). ↑

  3. “It Was the Banjo He Wanted,” Colorado State Capital, (October 18, 1890, Volume 1 edition, sec. 5). ↑

  4. “Afro-Americans,” The Colorado Statesman, (February 22, 1913, 19 edition, sec. 22). ↑

  5. David Spalding, “What is Folk Music?” Canadian Journal For Traditional Music, Fall 1988. ↑

  6. This song was retitled “The Daemon Lover” in the 1850s and “House Carpenter” in the 1960s. Readers are most likely to find renditions of the song under the title “House Carpenter”. I personally suggest Joan Baez’s 1962 recording of the song, though contemporary artists have released additional renditions in recent years. ↑

  7. George Pullen Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals, (Locust Valley, NY, J.J. Augustin Inc., 1944), 265. ↑

  8. Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs: A Study, (s.n., 1914), 154. ↑

  9. Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, 210. ↑

  10. The relative lack of examination of Black folk traditions is included in the discourse of Desirée J. Garcia’s book The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream. ↑

  11. Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, 60. ↑

  12. Alain Leroy Locke, The Negro and His Music, (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936), 15. ↑

  13. George Pullen Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals, 261. ↑

  14. My criticism of these “nostalgic” histories does not necessarily mean that I disapprove of these narratives’ messages overall. Fantastic examples of such narratives include (but are not limited to) : Ronald D. Cohen’s Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 and Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. ↑

  15. This conclusion is drawn from Michele-Rolph Trouillot’s theory of historiographic silence as proposed in his narrative Silencing the Past. My previous works have engaged with this process of silencing Black folk musicians based on changes in 20th century Folk history. For more information see: Brianna Ciancio, “Mythologies of a Revival: Racism and Silence in 20th Century Folk Histories,” (HIST 6013, University of Colorado at Denver, Fall 2022). ↑

  16. Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 9. ↑

  17. The phrasing of Jazz music as “less political in nature” than Folk music specifically relates to lyrical content and usage as tools for protest. Outside of these very specific parameters, Jazz music has an undeniable political and racially charged history, as reflected in Professor Soever’s book. Deeper examinations of these racial connotations can be seen in Professor Kariann Yokota’s 2006 journal article/Oral History project “Bronzeville, Little Tokyo, and the Unstable Geography of Race in Post-World War II Los Angeles”. The article is available via the Auraria Library or JStor. ↑

  18. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016), 29. ↑

  19. Newspaper analysis of this subject was limited to these databases as a result of library database access issues. I maintain that the two databases do not present a significant problem to a wider analysis of North American attitudes. ↑

  20. While this era of media censorship is briefly mentioned later in this narrative, there is not enough space for a complete examination of the subject, readers may choose to read Historian Ronald Cohen’s narrative Rainbow Quest for more information. ↑

  21. Brianna Matson, “Sing All My Troubles Over: The Cultural Impact of Music at the 1963 March on Washington,” MA Thesis, (University of Colorado Denver, 2024), 7-8. ↑

  22. Brianna Matson, “Sing All My Troubles Over,” (University of Colorado Denver, 2024), 41. ↑

  23. Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring, Shout Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 125. ↑

  24. “THE BANJO,” New York Times, (August 19, 1890). ↑

  25. “THE BANJO,” New York Times. ↑

  26. “OLD SOUTHERN VOODOOISM: Amulets, Magic Potions, Witch Hazel, Serpents, and Toads. GRISLY ORGIES OF THE NEGROES. Curdling Incantations and Barbaric Rites — Bones of Dead Men for Luck — Sufferings of the Obi Man’s Victims,” New York Times, (November 18, 1894). ↑

  27. “OLD SOUTHERN VOODOOISM,” New York Times. ↑

  28. Rory O’Neill Schmitt, New Orleans Voodoo: A Cultural History, (Charleston, NC: History Press, 2019), 39. ↑

  29. Rory O’Neill Schmitt, New Orleans Voodoo, 41. ↑

  30. “OLD SOUTHERN VOODOOISM,” New York Times. ↑

  31. “OLD SOUTHERN VOODOOISM,” New York Times. ↑

  32. “OLD SOUTHERN VOODOOISM,” New York Times. ↑

  33. Christopher R. Adamson, “Punishment After Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865-1890,” (Social Problems 30, no. 5, 1983), 556. ↑

  34. Christopher R. Adamson, “Punishment After Slavery”, 560. ↑

  35. “Trio Of Tragedies: DEEDS OF A NEGRO WHEN FULL OF WHISKEY,” The Colorado Dailey Chieftain, (November 30, 1902). ↑

  36. Smith, “TOM HORN SHRINKS WHEN RIDDLED WITH FIRE OF HARD FACTS,” The Rocky Mountain News. (October 22, 1902). ↑

  37. “Trio Of Tragedies,” The Colorado Daily Chieftain. ↑

  38. “NEGRO SHOOTS TWO WOMEN AND THEN KILLS HIMSELF,” The Rocky Mountain News, (November 30, 1902). ↑

  39. “NEGRO SHOOTS TWO WOMEN AND THEN KILLS HIMSELF,” The Rocky Mountain News. ↑

  40. Sandra Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 127. ↑

  41. “BEHOLD THE NEGRO HE SINGS; WHITES APPLAUD,” Boulder Dailey Camera, (July 7, 1915, 25 edition, sec. 96). ↑

  42. Sandra Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 136. ↑

  43. Sandra Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry, 128. ↑

  44. Sandra Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry, 141. ↑

  45. Sandra Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry, 149. ↑

  46. “NEGROES ON THE STAGE: How They Are Recruited, Their Natural Qualifications and Adaptability,” New York Times, (April 2, 1911). ↑

  47. Claire Oberon Garcia, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Charise Pimentel, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 146. ↑

  48. Claire Oberon Garcia, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Charise Pimentel, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help, 17. ↑

  49. “The Modern ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ Parade,” New York Times, (February 11, 1906). ↑

  50. Claire Oberon Garcia, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Charise Pimentel, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help, 149. ↑

  51. “The Modern ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ Parade,” New York Times, (February 11, 1906). ↑

  52. Claire Oberon Garcia, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Charise Pimentel, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help, 5. ↑

  53. “The Negro and the Banjo,” The Herald Democrat, (September 18, 1915). ↑

  54. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line, 180. ↑

  55. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line, 229. ↑

  56. “The Negro and the Banjo,” The Herald Democrat. ↑

  57. “The Banjo in the Boudor,” Rocky Mountain Sun, (May 12, 1894). ↑

  58. “The Banjo in the Boudor,” Rocky Mountain Sun, (May 12, 1894). ↑

  59. “The Banjo in the Boudor,” Rocky Mountain Sun, (May 12, 1894). ↑

  60. “The Banjo in the Boudor,” Rocky Mountain Sun, (May 12, 1894). ↑

  61. “Negro Songs.” New York Times, (November 4, 1905). ↑

  62. “Origins of the Banjo,” The Herald Democrat, (March 31, 1901). ↑

  63. “Afro-Americans,” The Colorado Statesman. ↑

  64. “Afro-Americans,” The Colorado Statesman. ↑

  65. “Afro-Americans,” The Colorado Statesman. ↑

  66. “Origins of the Banjo,” The Herald Democrat. ↑

  67. “The Negro and the Banjo,” The Herald Democrat. ↑

  68. “The Negro and the Banjo,” The Herald Democrat. ↑

  69. “The Negro and the Banjo,” The Herald Democrat. ↑

  70. David G. Hebert, “Introduction from the Editor,” essay, in Ethnomusicology and Cultural Diplomacy (Lanham, Carlisle, UK: Lexington Books, 2022), 1–15. ↑

  71. Songs Echoing America’s Age of Innocence: Old River Tunes and Refrains Collected and Edited by Carl Carmer SONGS OF THE RIVERS OF AMERICA. Edited by Carl Carmer. Music Arranged by Dr. Albert Sirmay. 196 Pp. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. $3.50, (New York Times, January 17, 1933). ↑

  72. “Songs of the Slaves: Georgia’s Sea Islands Yield a Rich Collection SLAVE SONGS OF THE GEORGIA SEA ISLANDS. By Lydia Parrish. With an Introduction by Olin Downes. 256 Pp. New York: Creative Age Press, Inc. $3.50,” (New York Times, July 5, 1942). ↑

  73. “Songs of the Slaves: Georgia’s Sea Islands Yield a Rich Collection,” New York Times. ↑

  74. Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, 154. ↑

  75. Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, 210. ↑

  76. Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, 60. ↑

  77. George Pullen Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals, 60. ↑

  78. Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, 265. ↑

  79. Alain Leroy Locke, The Negro and His Music, 1. ↑

  80. Alain Leroy Locke, The Negro and His Music,14. ↑

  81. Alain Leroy Locke, The Negro and His Music, 8. ↑

  82. Pete Seeger, “Dear Mr. President,” Stinson Records, 1940. ↑

  83. Pete Seeger, “Dear Mr. President.” ↑

  84. Pete Seeger, How to Play the 5-String Banjo: A Manual for Beginners, Published by the author, 1948, 5. ↑

  85. Pete Seeger, How to Play the 5-String Banjo: A Manual for Beginners, Appendix 5. ↑

  86. Pete Seeger and Jo Metcalf Schwartz, The Incompleat Folksinger, (The University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 21. ↑

  87. Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970, (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 9. ↑

  88. David A. De Turk and A. Poulin, The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival, (New York, NY: Dell Publishing, 1967), 255 ↑

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