George R. Gibson on Banjo History

(from a current discussion at https://www.banjohangout.org/topic/338798/)

'My family farm is in east Kentucky. Gas well fracking and coal mining  have destroyed 80% or more of the water table in the area; my neighbors  serve visitors with water in plastic bottles. Although the EPA only  recently decided that fracking can destroy drinking water, this has been  a problem in east Kentucky since I was a boy in the 1950s.

'The”  hillbilly” stereotype that is buried in the DNA of literate America has  allowed energy companies to conceal this destruction. Unfortunately,  when urban banjo revivalists decided the southern banjo was exclusively a  “mountain” instrument (it wasn’t), it doomed the banjo’s history to be  obscured by the hillbilly stereotype. I have never seen a southern  historian or folklorist cited in any essay, formal or informal, about  mountain banjo history - the only citations I have seen are from [19th-century] minstrelsy or from an essay by an urban banjo revivalist.  This has led to the mistaken notion that minstrelsy planted the banjo  in white mountain folk culture. Fabricating the history of a region  without consulting its scholars would be roundly condemned for any place  other than Appalachia.

'Those who distort Appalachian life and  history are described by Loyal Jones in his foreword to the second  edition of "Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Cultures": "The self  proclaimed 'experts' on Appalachia, and there have been many, are  usually frauds or are deceived by the appearances on which they happen  to focus at the moment. . . . The army of observer-writers who have  commented on it usually had a narrow focus and have found support for  whatever favorite notion each one carried. Thus, there is a mass of  confusing and contradictory writings about the place and people." Mr.  Jones followed this with a quote from John C. Campbell: "Let us now come  to the Highlands - a land of promise, a land of romance, and a land  about which, perhaps, more things have been written that are not true  than any other part of our country."

'I learned to play old-time  banjo ca. 1950 and have performed occasionally since the mid-1990s. I  only perform at venues that allow me to discuss banjo history, and I  have never made a claim about mountain banjo history that cannot be  supported.

'The University Press of Illinois just announced the  publication of “Banjo Roots and Branches” in June 2018. I have an essay  in the book that proves that white Kentuckians were dancing to the banjo  and fiddle prior to the Civil War in the western tip of Kentucky, in  south central Kentucky, and in the mountains of east Kentucky; that  pioneers in Arkansas were dancing to the gourd banjo and fiddle ca.  1830; and that western Carolinians were dancing to the gourd banjo in  the 1780s.

'The early penetration of the banjo in the Carolinas  is supported by historian John Preston Arthur (1851-1916) in "Western  North Carolina, A History from 1730 to 1913": "The banjo and fiddle have  been as constant companions of the of the pioneers of the mountains of  North Carolina as the Bible and Hymn Book." A biographer quoted an  acquaintance of Arthur's, who said: "More so than any other local  historian, he [Arthur] went to the original sources for facts. He sought  out old diaries, journals, letters and even talked with old citizens,  who shared their recollections with him."   

'My views regarding  the hillbilly stereotype and the stripmining of Appalachian culture are  outlined by Rachel Hopkin in her essay in the Winter 2016/17 issue of  the Western Folklore Journal.'

(original post here: https://www.banjohangout.org/topic/338798/)