The Banjo Sightings Database
Added 2018-08-12 21:36:27 +0000 UTCThis is a wonderful resource that I've just learned about. They have photos of 193 different banjos dating to before circa 1880 (these are considered "early" banjos).
http://www.banjodatabase.dreamhosters.com/items/browse?collection=17
"The Banjo Sightings Database was created out of a perceived need to maintain, in a centralized system, information about the early banjo as found in both public and private collections and as referenced in various published works. "
Comments
Hi Tony, a quick thank you for your comments. They’ve been fascinating to read. I’ve never thought about the banjo’s absence in places like Brazil and Cuba. Really interesting!
Mike Rebitzke
2018-08-15 23:31:31 +0000 UTCActuall banjos tend to be absent except as a result of being spread by North American or English banjo entertainers in the 19th century from the places in the New World with the largest and latest direct connections with Africa like Cuba or Brazil.
Tony Thomas
2018-08-15 03:09:54 +0000 UTCMost of us--the community of people around the world doing research on banjo origins--started out thinking about a more generalized origin for the banjo and that banjos might have started in West Africa and that if we looked harder we would find evidence of that, but the opposite is true in regard to what we actually found. We find a pattern where banjo defused from connections with particular places from the Caribbean to North America not just anywhere any black people showed up.
Tony Thomas
2018-08-14 01:45:22 +0000 UTCTony, do you have any theory why the banjo in the new world was limited to select people of African decent and in geographically select area(s)? That is very interesting to me; It had never really occurred to me that could be/was possible.
Justin Hoffmann
2018-08-14 01:06:31 +0000 UTCOne last feature is that though the colonial period sightings are few, they vastly outnumber any known reports of any kind of West African lute being played anywhere in the Americas of which there are only one or two reports even though there are many reports of other kinds of instruments being played historically and many still played today
Tony Thomas
2018-08-13 16:37:07 +0000 UTCInversely, the restricted number of sightings up to 1840 and what we learn afterward gives a picture of the impact of the development of the hoop or frame headed banjo and its popularization by the international explosion of commercial banjo entertainment and manufacture in the 1840s and 1850s.
Tony Thomas
2018-08-13 16:35:40 +0000 UTCThe early sightings in the 17th and 18th and verty early 19th century follow a progression from the Islands and Surinam to North America, but then British North America and New Orleans. The restricted nature of banjo sightings and other traces of the banjo in the colonial period seems to tract its specific development and spread.
Tony Thomas
2018-08-13 16:34:28 +0000 UTCThe interesting thing about the db is that the number of sightings before the 1830s is quite small and geographically limited which pinpoints banjos as a rather limited and specific thread of life among select people of African descent in the New World, rather than a general expression of African behavior in the New World. More Africans came to the entire New World from Central Africa especially to Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba each, but these are places of no banjo sightings.
Tony Thomas
2018-08-13 16:32:14 +0000 UTCAlready thinking of the next one, eh? You're banjo factory!
Bobby Banks
2018-08-13 07:26:12 +0000 UTCThis website is a treasure trove of inspiration in Lovin’ it
Patrick Campbell
2018-08-13 01:44:43 +0000 UTC
