East Tennessee Historical Society to host talk on “Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History” with author Kristina Gaddy

As a compliment to the East Tennessee History Center’s feature exhibition, I’ve Endured: Women in Old-Time Music (on now through April 19), Kristina Gaddy, author of Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History, will give an overview of banjo history and women who have played the instrument and influenced it from its origins to the present.

This lecture can be streamed live on the East Tennessee Historical Society Facebook page. For more information, visit easttnhistory.org.

About the Book
An illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music.

In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo’s key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo’s beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean, and the colonies that became U.S. states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York.

African Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass, and country, its deepest history forgotten.