>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Jason Steinhauer: Good afternoon.
My name is Jason Steinhauer.
I'm a program specialist
at the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
Before we officially
begin today's program,
I'll ask you to take a moment
to check your cell phones
and other electronic devices
and please set them to silent.
I'll also make you aware that this
afternoon's program is being filmed
for placement on the Kluge
Center's website and YouTube
and iTunes channels, as well
as on other library YouTube
and iTunes channels and websites.
I encourage you to visit our
website, loc.gov.kluge, K L U G E,
to view other lectures delivered
by current and past Kluge scholars,
including several on music, music
history and folklife delivered
by our past Alan Lomax fellows.
Today's lecture is presented
by the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
The Kluge Center is a vibrant
scholars' center on Capitol Hill
that brings together scholars and
researchers from around the world
to stimulate and energize one
another, to distill wisdom
from the Library's rich
resources, and to interact
with policymakers and the public.
The center offers opportunities
for senior scholars,
postdoctoral fellows and Ph.D.
candidates to conduct research
in the Library of Congress
collections.
We also offer free public
lectures, conferences, symposia
and other programs, and we
administer the Kluge prize
which recognizes lifetime
achievement in the study
of humanity, and which was awarded
two nights ago here at the Library
of Congress to Jurgen
Habermas and Charles Taylor.
For more information about
these and other programs,
please visit our website and
sign up for our RSS e mail list.
Today's event is co sponsored by the
library's American Folklife Center.
The Folklife Center was
created in 1976 to preserve
and present American folklife, and
is designated by the U.S. Congress
as a national center for folklife
documentation and research.
The center continues to collect and
document living traditional culture,
as well as preserving millions of
traditional arts, oral histories,
songs, stories and creative
expressions of diverse communities.
Please visit them at their website,
loc.gov/folklife/index.html.
Today's lecture is
titled Musical Crossroads;
Alan Lomax's Southern Journey
and our Musical Crossroads.
Our speaker is CeCe Conway.
She is our Alan Lomax fellow
in the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
And Conway's research utilizes
the Alan Lomax collection
in the American Folklife
Center here at the library
to show how music has
crossed ethnic borders
to form regional culture
in Appalachia.
She has done so by tracing
the cultural heritage
of Appalachia music from African
instruments and playing styles
as interpreted in black and white
communities throughout the region.
Her talk today will be complemented
by musical illustrations
from Mali Griot Cheick Hamala
Diabate playing a southern Gambian
style akonting folk lute, the banjo,
a Malian ngoni and the guitar,
and virtuoso Blind Boy Paxton
on fiddle, banjo and guitar.
Her talk will be followed
by a musical performance
featuring Diabate,
Paxton and the Downhill Strugglers,
who were kind enough to grace us
with some introductory
music before we commenced.
About CeCe.
CeCe Conway is professor of English
at Appalachian State University
where she teaches American
Literature of the 20th Century,
Appalachian Studies and Folklore.
She's the author of the
book "African Banjo Echoes
in Appalachia", and she has also co
produced award winning films such as
"Sprout Wings and Fly,"
and the Smithsonian Folkways
Black Banjo Songsters CD.
From 2010 and 2014 she
directed the National Endowment
for the Arts funded project Black
and Global Banjo Roots Concerts
and Documentation, and
for the past eight months,
she has been in residence
with us at the Kluge Center
as our Alan Lomax fellow
in folklife studies,
and it has been a great
pleasure to have her with us.
So please join me in
welcoming CeCe Conway.
[ Applause ]
>> CeCe Conway: Hello.
Thank you all for coming.
And I want to thank Jason
for helping us get all
of this together today.
Jennifer, who is in the American
Folklife Center, played me a clip
of his, it's on YouTube,
called Sugar, From You,
and it turns out he's a fabulous
musician just as Jennifer is
and that so I've learned that
here in the Library of Congress,
as in the Smithsonian practically,
every researcher is a
brilliant musician as well.
It's thrilling because there's
so much insight in that.
I'm very appreciative of the
Kluge Center to have been here
and had this time to work.
And I want to also thank Mary Lou,
who is the queen of cordiality
and brought cookies to the band
last night; to Dan, to Jane,
our leader until a few days
ago, and our new leader Bob.
And I also from the Folklife
Center want to thank Betsy,
who's the director, and Thea,
who is a wizard at logistics,
including rescuing Cheick
Hamala from the parking lot.
And also, especially Todd and Steve,
and my wonderful intern Yacee
[phonetic], and without the three
of them, this presentation
would not be happening
on PowerPoint, I assure you.
Just thank goodness for
the younger generation.
For a little bit I'm going
to give you the short story
of the Lomaxes and the library.
I did quite a bit of this the other
day, but now this is a short story.
So let's see.
All right, Yacee, what
am I looking for now?
Thank you.
Oh, good. Okay.
Now the music isn't playing.
[ Music ]
>> CeCe Conway: Oh,
the music is playing.
[ Music ]
>> CeCe Conway: In 1933 John Lomax
and 18 year old Alan
began collecting folksongs
for the Library of Congress.
A little later John was named the
honorary consultant and curator
of the archived American folksong,
and he and Teddy Roosevelt used
to meet together to
discuss what kind
of folklore would be appropriate
to link to our wonderful lands,
and they picked the cowboy.
Now, this is Hobart Smith
who's one of the early people
that they recorded playing
"Banging Breakdown".
And you'll notice that banjo,
it's what we call a mountain banjo
and that's an inset rim and
it arrived near where I teach
in the northwestern mountains
just after the Civil War.
One of the ancestral folks
stopped off there in Wilkesboro,
sometimes considered the
moonshining capital of the world,
and brought back a pattern for the
first banjo that was made there.
And now these banjos are made
within about a hundred miles only,
apparently, of where
Virginia, North Carolina
and Tennessee come together.
That was Hobart Smith
from Saltville.
So here's Alan, young Alan, who
became the assistant in charge,
and he remained there until 1942.
[ Music ]
He and his father, and
also his sister Bess,
recorded all over the south.
And Bess was a fantastic folklorist
who became the head of the NEA
and the traditional arts and
instituted the National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowship Heritage
Awards that are being given
in this building tonight, actually.
She also is, as far as I know, the
first folklorist who put the name
of her coworker, Bessie Jones
from the Sea Islands,
on the book with her.
She and Bessie together
were credited with writing
that book, which was wonderful.
Alan also got to go on a trip
led by Zora Neale Hurston.
She took them to and Mary
Elizabeth Barnicle went, too,
and they went to the Georgia Sea
Islands and then to Eatonville,
Florida, and then Alan
and Miss Barnicle would go
on to Nassau and the Bahamas.
[ Music ]
When Alan left the Library
of Congress in 1942,
for some months he
wrote back to the man
in charge telling him
things he needed to do,
and that was really wonderful
because Alan had been so busy doing
so many things while he was
here, he never wrote them down,
and there were many things
we never found out about.
And one of the ones that was
especially interesting was a letter
talking about Pete Steele,
a wonderful banjo player,
and he said to the acting person,
get that check off to Pete Steele,
his wife's sick, I think she has
cancer, they need the $12.43 now.
So that was the sort of many
things he was doing daily.
Something else that Alan and his
father did that was really exciting
in their work was find
very ancient instruments,
and these were the quills.
They had appeared played by Henry
Thomas, [inaudible] from Texas
who had made an earlier recording,
and along with the whoops
as well, that's part of it.
[ Music ]
And the Harry Thomas
quill playing was included
in Harry Smith's anthology
of folksong,
which brought out a whole bunch
of 78s on long play records
and became kind of the bible
for the folk festival
revival of the '50s and '60s.
But it was interesting that
Alan had met these musicians
after he had worked with John
C. Work at Fisk University,
and the paying flute player gave him
a tip about finding Sid Hemphill.
And here we've got him imitating
the dog chasing the fox.
So Sid also played the fiddle.
And Alan went to Scotland and
England and Ireland and Spain
and Italy and collected from
1951 to '59, I believe it was,
and he did that partly because
he had great opportunities there.
He had been working with the BBC
in putting out records and getting
to work with really good equipment.
And while he was there not only
did he collect hours and hours,
I was staggered with
how much there was,
but he also produced radio shows
and five albums for the world music.
And so this was helping the people
who played this wonderful
music be more appreciated
and get more recognition, including
the kinkers, the travellers
who lived near around Aberdeenshire
and had been dismissed
by many people.
And eventually Jeannie Robertson
received the British Empire Medal
of Honor from the Queen and
she was the first folk singer
and the first traveller to ever
get that award in the '50s.
So that was very exciting.
Another interesting
find in the archive,
and this had not been released
on record, is a fife player,
Marion Rees, so he's
playing the tune on the fife
and in a minute he's going to play
the same tune on the fiddle for you.
And part of what else is interesting
about this is that Alan Jabbour,
who was the first director of
the American Folklife Center,
plays the fiddle, he's
a very good fiddler
and a very excellent scholar,
and his mentor was an old man named
Henry Reed who had learned many
of his tunes from Quince Dillion,
who was a Civil War fifer.
So this recording lets
us get a sense
of how a fiddler would
learn from a fifer.
[ Music ]
I think I first met Alan Lomax when
he introduced the Global Jukebox
at the American Folklife meeting.
He enacted the dances and songs
and social characteristics for us
with great enthusiasm,
and I can always see
that image of him in my mind.
And the Global Jukebox pared musical
traits with social characteristics,
so it's a and the anthropologists
were upset
because he didn't have
a Ph.D. in anthropology.
However, it's an amazing work.
And the Association for Cultural
Equity is a website where tons
of this material is available for
you to look at also from home.
A little later, in 1976, the
American Folklore Conference was
in New Orleans for the bicentennial
and I was giving, with my husband,
[inaudible] and also with
the Red Clay Ramblers.
So the two of us were giving
our first presentation
on the African roots of the banjo
and it turned out that Bess Lomax
and Alan Lomax were in the crowd.
It was intimidating,
but we survived.
So when Alan came back from
Scotland and all those other places,
he revisited all the people
his father and he had gone to.
And many of them, of
course, had died, but Estil
and Orna Ball were two
folks who were doing fine.
And Alan felt like he was
playing better than ever,
that his guitar playing
was deeper and stronger
and his singing was more confident.
And it was interesting
because Ball was the one
who helped Wayne Henderson
learn to listen and play music.
That guitar was the one
that surrounded him.
And he's one of the most fabulous
guitar makers in this country now
and he has also received
an NEA Heritage Award.
And you saw a picture of
him just a minute ago.
So I think of that
sound surrounding him
as leading him toward the
guitar sound he wanted.
Now, this is Fred McDowell,
a new person that Alan
met while he was back.
[ Music ]
One of his tunes was covered
by the Rolling Stones,
and he's playing bottleneck guitar.
He started with a cow
bone, then a pocket knife,
and then finally a bottleneck.
Julie Christie went on
this tour with Alan,
and I think sometimes didn't
feel fully appreciated,
but there's a fabulous picture that
Alan took of her, that I wasn't able
to get hold of, that has her and
[inaudible] Almeda Riddle together.
Almeda was probably close to 80
and Christie was maybe
30, early thirties.
Anyway, it was a very nice
photograph and testimony.
Hobart Smith, whom you saw
with the mountain banjo,
also played the fiddle
and the guitar.
And, in fact, when
he played the guitar,
at least for one year he played 365
days while his brother preached,
so that really built up
his stamina in his playing.
So this is Hobart playing
"John Brown Dreamed the Devil
was Dead" on the fiddle.
[ Music ]
And here we have Alan
with Wade Ward,
one of the earliest people
that the Lomaxes found.
And you can say he's listening to
his music and thrilled to do it.
I was lucky enough to
be alive when I did get
to meet Wade Ward and
also Bessie Jones.
So those were two of the
great elders they collected
from that I got to and Wade Ward
also played with Charlie Higgins,
who was an older fiddle player,
and they played for auctions.
And as he said, to
keep them from getting
when people got grumpy
there, they would try
to cheer them up with their music.
And often those were
very sad sales, actually,
back during the Depression.
Also, he claimed that Charlie
Higgins knew a thousand tunes,
and he certainly did play
well and know a lot of them.
[ Music ]
Oh, now, here we've got one
of these double items again.
But Alan did a movie
in Williamsburg.
He took musicians to the Sea Islands
to rehearse for two or three days,
and they had never met each other,
and they were so good they
were able to play together.
And the idea of the movie
was that it was supposed
to show late 18th century
music in Williamsburg.
And he took two traditions that
had not really intermingled
at that time; one from the
upper south, the banjo,
fiddle string tradition,
influenced particularly
by African American players,
and by Scot-Irish fiddlers
and then he took the Deep South
tradition which had a lot of singing
and different styles of music,
like the southeast Sea Islands,
and then they intermixed
all of that in this movie.
So it maybe never really
happened all at one time,
but it was artistically
very creative.
And it was also interesting
because after he left for Scotland
and Europe, in 1952 Harry
Smith put out his anthology,
and I believe that was the first
released record set that had blacks
and whites intermingled
on the records themselves.
And because the record companies,
the 78 record companies
had the hillbilly list
and they had a race record list, and
his anthology mixed those together
and that's, again, the
work that became the bible
for revivalists in
the '50s and '60s.
Alan was working on his video.
This was one of his last
major projects, well,
besides getting it all
released and everything,
for a video of American
patchwork, and I was leading him
to black banjo players
while we were there.
[ Music ]
This is Dink Roberts.
This is a cut from our new
Black Banjo Songster record
for Smithsonian Folkways
that we hope will make it
out next year at some point.
So you are the first audience
to hear this recording.
[ Music ]
So we just did Joe Thompson and
Odell, and Joe was really kind
of the last standing black
elder player who died in 2012,
and he was the mentor to the
Carolina Chocolate Drops,
if you've gotten to hear them.
So this is him as a young
man with his cousin Odell,
who played fiddle and banjo.
And here we're at Dink Roberts'
and Dink's wife Lilly is
about to do the rabbit dance,
and she's the only one
we know who did that.
There was a lady from the Deep
South who did a rabbit dance,
a white lady, but she did
it leaning forward instead
of backwards, the way Lilly did.
And there's Dink sitting there by
his wife Lilly, with Alan's back
to us in the white shirt,
and then the film crew.
[ Music ]
And there's Dink on that day.
[ Music ]
[ Laughter ]
Very improvisational.
That's a major characteristic
of African American music.
Now, this is a full spike lute.
You'll see more about that later.
And here is a little video of Cheick
Hamala Diabate, who you'll get
to hear in person a little
later, and he's playing the ngoni
at the Prison Coffeehouse
in Charlottesville,
and this was in the 1990s.
I think he had barely arrived.
He spoke only French at that time,
and we did the best we could.
I have a little French, but
it certainly wasn't exciting,
but we've been friends
ever since that day.
And those of you who are
banjo players will notice
that there are a lot of
banjo moves on the ngoni.
And there was his mentor,
the kora player.
Okay. So that was a short story
about the Lomaxes and
their collecting.
And then my main topic is the
roots of the banjo and the fiddle.
The banjo's heard around the world
from the Blue Ridge Mountains
to the American Folklife
Center, to Switzerland and Japan.
And the White Mountain musician has
been the symbol of that instrument.
And this recording of the
"Coo Coo" by Tom Ashley
with the young Doc Watson playing
the guitar, although he's not
on the recording, just in the
photo, was on that Harry Smith album
and this was sort of the anthem
for those of us in the revival,
so much so that we named
our son Tom Ashley.
I'll tell you a little
story about Doc Watson.
When Ralph Winslow from
the Smithsonian met him,
Doc was playing electric guitar
and so he Ralph was only
interested in recording Tom Ashley.
But then, one of these days in
the early meeting, Doc was sitting
in the back of a truck playing the
banjo and Ralph then discovered
that he could play old time music,
too, and really encouraged him to do
that and recorded him and
brought him a lot of places,
like up here to the
Smithsonian Folk Festival.
And when Ralph died,
on NPR Doc said,
He left me better than he found me.
When I wrote my book, we thought
that the ngoni and the Wolff, Holum,
[phonetic], the semi spike griot
lutes were the primary ancestor
of our American banjo in the south.
And partly we thought this
was because of Paul Oliver
who had written a wonderful
book, a British man,
on the Savannah Syncopaters and he
had heard the musical similarities
between those players and the blues
and really didn't know as much
about banjo tradition
as we know now.
But we were wrong then and
new evidence has come I mean,
those instruments were
eventually very important,
I think particularly influencing
fingerpicking style, but again,
it has not always been so that the
White Mountain musician was the
symbol of the banjo because it was
brought here by Africans no later
than 1740 into Maryland
and the South,
and for a hundred years they were
about the only ones who played it.
They came from southern Gambia,
below the Casamance River.
The Jola people lived there.
And a fellow named Daniel Jatta was
in this country getting his M B.A.
and he began to hear
about the banjo.
So here you can see southern
Gambian and the Casamance River,
which is below the Gambia River,
and also some of the coastal areas
were places were other full spike
lute traditions existed.
This is John Snipes.
He was the first black banjo
player that I ever met.
He lived in Dobson Crossroads near
Chapel Hill in a cabin, log cabin,
with his wife, and his
grandchildren were there often.
He's playing the "Coo
Coo," the same song
that you heard Tom Ashley
play, but how different.
[ Music ]
And notice that the banjo songs
are built on little rifts.
I mean, we use that word with jazz,
but this was a much older
tradition that influenced it.
[ Music ]
Another great one he played
was "The Fox Chase," where
and this is not the Virginia
red-coated fox chasers.
These are the guys sitting out
in the woods with their jug
of liquor telling stories and
listening to their dogs rove.
And in Dink's version of "Fox
Chase" he says at the end,
God bless my red eyes, the fox says,
I've done set the world on fire,
because he ran all night
and the sun was rising.
Okay. But again, we
were wrong to think
that the griot lutes
were the first ones
because form is the most persistent,
beyond construction
and beyond function.
And notice, this is Daniel Jatta,
whom I was just telling you about,
he's playing the full spike lute,
the akonting, the folk lute,
not the griot professionalized
instrument,
and behind him is a Boucher banjo,
which was one of the most
famous first banjo makers.
And notice how similar from
the front the shapes are.
And it's no longer a gourd
after about a hundred years,
but then people well, there
were a couple of white guys
in the 1830s started playing these
instruments, the gourd instruments,
and eventually Joel
Sweeney either popularized
or invented the five-string
banjo, which had five strings.
The fifth string that was added is
not what we call the fifth string
with the short string now
that you play with your thumb,
but it was the fourth long string
that was added that made it a total
of five strings and it gave
more melodic capability
to the European styles.
Just to finish with a story
about Daniel for a second.
So he was here getting his
MBA and he went home to study
with his father, who died within
a year, so we're very lucky
that he did become
interested in that tradition.
All of his African friends
thought he was crazy,
why wasn't he making a lot
of money as an economist.
Well, eventually then
he did go to Sweden
and become an economist there,
and he started trying to lecture
about this and people
were not paying attention.
But finally, a banjo player and
lute collector and media specialist,
Ulf Jagfors, saw how
important what he was saying,
brought him to this
country in the year 2000
and revolutionized our
understanding of the banjo.
So you see how different
the griot lutes are.
And then this is Jesus Jarju, and
he's playing an akonting also.
He's from the Jola people.
But notice that it's pear-shaped and
that was an older style instrument.
I mean, it's the same
concept, it sounded the same,
but more recently they discovered
that the round gourd
worked better musically,
and so that's what almost
all of them are made now.
But there's the pear-shaped,
the old pear-shaped akonting.
And here's the first painting that
we know of of the gourd banjo, 1792.
Notice that it's the pear-shaped.
A sort of Homer like depiction
in Liberty and the Arts.
It's a painting in Philadelphia.
And it's a fabulous
painting to have been made,
celebrating the new country
and including African
Americans in the painting.
Okay. Now we get to hear Cheick
Hamala play, and he's going to play
at least three tunes for you.
The first one on the akonting
so you can hear that sounds,
then one on the banjo, and
then finally one on the ngoni.
Another thing that's unusual
about ngoni playing is
that he sometimes picks
up with his little finger,
and banjo players don't
usually do this.
However, Dink Roberts, who was
the person I worked with the most
that you heard one of
his songs, did do that,
and so that also is some evidence
that there were eventually
griot lute influences.
So there's the akonting.
>> Yeah. My name is Cheick Hamala
Diabate, from Mali, West Africa.
Actually I'm griot.
The griot is a storyteller.
They say if one griot dies,
like one library burn, just cry.
So we're happy to be here.
I play this instrument
called [inaudible].
All come from to ngoni,
what I like to say.
[ Music ]
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
Also, I have an American banjo here.
So when I first come to
America, I bring only my ngoni,
but when I come here, I was playing
with a lot of American banjo player.
We be in travel, and I tried to
learn the banjo from [inaudible].
But actually the banjo come from
my instrument, and when I tried
to play the banjo, I told them
this is very easy for me to play.
They say, yeah, it come from ngoni.
And Bob Carlin find me this banjo.
And this one, the first one I play,
I get from Peter Ross [phonetic]
from Baltimore, but he was coming
to my house, watch my hands
when I play my ngoni, and he
make this left hand banjo for me,
and this is a regular banjo.
We've been playing all around the
world with Bela Fleck, Bob Carlin,
Jim Silva, many, many, many people.
So I'm very happy to have this
instrument and to get back to mine.
Yeah.
[ Tuning instrument ]
And the song I'm going to play,
I call that Bani [phonetic].
Don't say all the time yes.
You got to say no for your dignity.
This song I learn I was little.
I know the song is from my
grandfather, my mom liked this song
and I say, okay, when I come play,
I want to play this song for you.
I sing for my mom.
She's not here today, but all the
women here, this song for you.
And actually for my
good friend CeCe.
[ Music ]
[ Applause ]
And I like to say something.
I live here alone.
When I first come here, I
don't speak any English.
It's not easy, but and
it's too cold for me.
You see my hand.
[ Laughter ]
I tell Mali people, oh, America
is good, but it's too cold for me.
I need to try to fix how
to get back now to Mali.
Ah, yes, because it's super --
this morning I was so,
you know, [inaudible].
Yeah, I like to be here.
And this ngoni here.
Actually, ngoni, what is
now [inaudible] four string,
but the one I have here, I
don't know how many, eight,
but I put more string
because I play all the world.
I play China, everywhere.
Musician, we put together
the music we play.
But for us, we don't we don't read
the music, but we play by hear.
Anybody play when I hear,
we just play together.
And here this one is the cow skin
and the body is the
wood, special wood.
We go to [inaudible]
in Mali and fix easy.
And the string before user use
the horse hair for the string.
Now we use the nylon string.
And when I come here, I just get
it from the what do you call this,
[inaudible] the tuner because we
are original tuning by letter,
but here I have a tuning
like they [inaudible]
and also something like it.
Okay. I don't know what to okay.
[ Music ]
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> CeCe Conway: Thank you so much.
And I'll remind you that there will
be a 30-minute concert starting
at 1:00, so you'll get to hear
Cheick Hamala again later.
I like to call him the Bach of Mali.
And he also became good buddies
with one of the folks we invited
to the Black and Banjo Roots
gatherings in 2010 and '12,
and they then began
playing together.
We invited Don Vappie from New
Orleans, who's sort of the Bach
of New Orleans, and plays
the four-string jazz banjo
and so then they began
playing together.
So they're creating
totally new music.
Now, before we and I think we
may have solved the problem
of the PowerPoint that
wouldn't stop.
So we'll hope for that, but we're
going to use this screen and see.
But before we do that, I want
to say that Tuesday night
at the Kluge prize awards
recipient Philosophers Habermas
and Taylor spoke of their
important perspectives
on behalf of the humanities.
As a folklorist in the discipline
I consider especially relevant
to the 21st electronic and global
century, folklife offers a strategy
for Habermas' communication in the
public sphere and for Taylor's view
about a major challenge
for democracy.
We cherish our sense of
community, our ethnicity,
or perhaps our nation, for
as C. Vann Woodward said,
"Our history is part
of our identity".
But then how do we
approach the other.
Traditional music has repeatedly
offered an impressive means
for musical crossroads.
Music often crosses ethnic,
class and gender borders
enthusiastically rather
than aggressively.
In many ways, for example,
African American music has
influenced the creation
of perhaps each of our
Appalachian and Southern creations
of American musical genres.
This gradual shift from ethnic
to regional traditions may
illustrate how this process benefits
various ethnic groups, and so
I think it's really important.
Another thing that I
didn't mention earlier.
When Alan Lomax was in Scotland,
he and some of his buddies,
like Hamish Henderson,
created the public festival
so that traditional
singers could have a place
at the Edinburgh Festival,
not just classical things.
So they were working on this effort
to be with in the public sphere.
Okay. I'm going to play
you a little bit of a movie
about Daniel Jatta interviewing one
of the oldest ngoni
players still living.
>> He said before the nylon
strings, palm tree roots were used,
according to the son
of the nylon strings.
>> CeCe Conway: Palm tree roots.
[ Foreign language ]
And they're going to make
getting ready to make palm wine.
Again, the southern Gambia folks
had not been really influenced
by the palm at the time
of the slave trade and,
they also still have
not been influenced,
but it's partly [inaudible].
That is a palm bark.
And that's a young Jesus
Jarju right there playing.
But even Daniel's father
told a story --
or told him don't stay
out late at night alone
because you might get
kidnapped and taken away
by the devils in hickory shoes.
[ Foreign language ]
And this is not an
akonting, but a different one
of these lute traditions.
And there's lots of interesting
websites and more information
than you can probably ever read
on some of these instruments.
[ Music ]
[ Foreign language ]
So this is a tuning and its name
each note is part of the name
of the town where they believe
the first akonting was made many,
many years ago.
And notice some of these moves.
Those are the Laurent banjo
players, like heaving down.
>> From me and do you want
to started play these also.
>> CeCe Conway: Hammering on is
what we call it, or pulling off.
Those are techniques.
Another thing about
Cheick Hamala's playing,
notice that he was using his
foot taps to set a rhythm,
and he was also tapping the head
of the ngoni to set a rhythm,
and those are characteristics
of a lot of black banjo players
and even a few white players.
This is a down stroke and there's
a technique called drop thumbing
that's considered what makes a banjo
player more than a backporch picker
because you not only hit the
drone string but you drop
down into the melody strings, and
the Jola people use that technique.
So that's another piece
of evidence of continuity.
Okay. Here you have a
painting from the 1950s
by the first African American
missionary who went to Liberia,
and they're paintings
of older times,
So you can see the fellow
going up in the palm tree
and are they trading
with that chip or slaves,
and slave people being
taken out there.
This is a painting from 1800s
in South Carolina and notice
that the skit has started to change.
It has a flat fingerboard and it
has pegs and there are probably --
most of them designs around the
rim carved, still the gourd head.
And so this came in more
southernly than the earlier pictures
of the akonting that we have,
and probably through the Caribbean
influence and the Spanish influence.
Here we've got a black
in minstrel clothes,
and notice there's an
akonting that he's leaning on.
Notice this is a minstrel drawing
and the [inaudible],
of course, the problem.
We'll get back to that in a minute.
But notice that the long stick neck
is the full spike akonting there
before the minstrels shifted
from the African banjos
to their new open back.
This is Joel Sweeney, one of the
first white men to learn to play.
This is a Boucher banjo,
like the one in the painting.
Here is one of the first
actual Virginia banjos made
by a cabinetmaker.
Here you have, again, a mount.
And then in minstrelsy
it's interesting
that they began first as dancers.
And Juba Lane was the only
black in early minstrelsy.
He was described by Charles Dickens,
and he finally went to London
where he could enjoy
his talent more easily.
Eventually the banjo became
the center of minstrelsy,
but here you have a single
banjo player with the dancer.
There were serious and
frustrating stereotyping during
that whole period.
However, in many ways I think
minstrelsy was an attempt
to address the fact that in it was
the first popular entertainment
in this country, and in some ways
an attempt to address the new issue
of black and whites
living close together.
And had it been more successful,
maybe we wouldn't have
had the Civil War.
What did come of interest
as the instrument makers were
erasing the African roots
of the banjo, and were beautiful
banjos, the Fairbanks banjos
of the 1900s are about the best.
Now the African roots of the fiddle.
And we can zoom through
these photos.
Jefferson practiced the
violin three times a day,
but he also played the fiddle
for Patrick Henry to dance
when Jefferson was on
his way to Williamsburg.
The cittern.
Jefferson gave the only description
of a tuning for the banjo,
and he compared it to a guitar,
but it was an English guitar,
and so it's not the
tunings that we have today.
And actually, the way
he described it,
it could have been
one of two tunings.
Isaac Jefferson was
his ace blacksmith.
He could make more nails
faster than anybody else.
And he said how Jefferson's brother
Randolph used to come and dance
and play the fiddle
with the black folks,
and he just should
have been more careful.
In Jefferson's own hand he wrote
down the tune "Money Musk",
and I think Jerome's going to
play that for you a little later.
And it was also played by Eston
Hemmings, Sally Hemmings' son,
and possibly Jefferson's.
There's Modu [phonetic],
the coolest [inaudible]
of the one-string fiddle,
and other related folks.
This is the house where Sally
Hemmings lived with her sons
after Jefferson died that
he had arranged for her.
I'm just going to play this split
second of Tommy Jarrell's for us.
>> How about playing me a tune.
He said you play me a tune.
Well, to kind of satisfy
him I thought
of something [inaudible] back
steps in there, something,
I don't know what, and
I handed it to him.
I said now you play me a tune.
And right here's the
first one he played.
[ Music ]
It was in the Civil
War and right there
>> CeCe Conway: The fiddle
was in the Civil War.
>> is where men are bald-headed.
See that there patch
place right there?
That's kind of his
coppery head on there.
And I looked at it and
where he noted that fiddle,
I could see every place where
he noted and it was just bright
as any new penny you ever saw.
>> CeCe Conway: Thomas Jefferson
Jarrell, a great fiddle player,
and he had got the
fiddle from Zach Payne,
and that's Payne's spray
with the fiddle there.
In the Civil War both
sides had banjo players.
In this one the black man's
getting to play his own.
And the other one, the
white fellow sitting next
to the black man has probably
possibly taken over that one.
But anyway, there were two styles
that black fiddlers played,
and they were the primary the
fiddlers in the 18th century,
all through the 1700s
for whites and blacks.
And part of the question is
where did they learn
the white dance music.
So we can be appreciative
to these folks
who let us learn how
the sounds were.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov