Question 1

What does “banjo” mean?

Accepted Answer

A West African instrument rebuilt in slavery — gourd body, hide head, a short high drone string. The root of American string music, and now widely mistaken for a white one.

Question 2

Where does “banjo” come from?

Accepted Answer

West and West-Central Africa, carried into the Americas by enslaved people who rebuilt the instrument out of gourds and hide. The word most likely comes through Kimbundu mbanza. Hans Sloane described and engraved its ancestor being played by enslaved musicians in Jamaica in his 1707 Voyage, from observations made in the 1680s; Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1785 that "the instrument proper to them is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa." Two misattributions need striking. The first is Joel Walker Sweeney, the white Virginia minstrel still credited with inventing the five-string banjo by adding the drone string — the drone appears on surviving eighteenth-century gourd banjos made before he was born, and Sweeney learned to play from enslaved musicians near his home. The second is the framing of the banjo as Appalachian and white by nature: Cecelia Conway fieldwork documents European Americans in the mountains borrowing the instrument from Black players, and clawhammer picking descending from West African down-picking technique. The instrument was recoded as white across the twentieth century and has been reclaimed since the mid-2000s.