October 25th: George Gibson @ Blue Ridge Comm. College
Added 2018-10-16 00:23:52 +0000 UTCI will be assisting Gibson on Thursday, October 25th at 7 p.m. in the Bo Thomas Auditorium at Blue Ridge Community College (Flat Rock, NC). Registration is $5 per person.
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The Center for Cultural Preservation, WNC’s cultural history and documentary film center, launches the 2018-19 Keeping the Fires Burning cultural history series with banjo historian George Gibson.
Gibson has been studying the history of the banjo for decades and has done original research to demonstrate how the West African instrument was transmitted to American colonists and to Appalachian mountaineers over the past two centuries.
Gibson is owner of over a dozen historical banjos and he will be demonstrating their use as he discusses how the Kentucky style of banjo playing arrived from Africa, the role the gourd banjo played in Arkansas music history, that the banjo was played in the Carolinas as early as the 1700s, and much more.
In addition to a lecture and banjo demonstration, Gibson will be signing a new book, hot off the presses from the University of Illinois Press, that includes his essay discussing the banjo’s fascinating history. www.saveculture.org
Comments
Now, if only ya'll were going to be just a little closer to central IL...
Jake Tolbert
2018-10-16 13:47:07 +0000 UTCGeorge found some highly obscure reference(s) about people dancing to gourd banjo music in Arkansas during, I think, the 1830s. His chapter in 'Roots and Branches' also shares references to a gourd banjo and fiddle being played at a Christmas Party in rural Indiana during the Antebellum period and a number of other remarkable early mentions.
Clifton Hicks
2018-10-16 04:00:18 +0000 UTCHey Clifton, I haven’t ordered “Roots and Branches” yet. Is there something in there about “the role the gourd banjo played in Arkansas music history”, as the summary up above states? That intrigues me since that’s where my family is from.
Mike Rebitzke
2018-10-16 02:56:36 +0000 UTC
