When Beyoncé incorporated the banjo in her song Texas Hold ’Em in 2024, fans and critics alike marveled at the innovative twist. The song opened with rapid string plucking by Grammy-winning Black banjo player Rhiannon Giddens, and helped challenge the public image of an instrument commonly associated with Appalachian bluegrass. But it’s little known that the banjo is rooted in Black America.
The instrument’s origins harken back several centuries and across the Atlantic Ocean. The banjo’s precursor is the akonting, a gourd-bodied lute found in west Africa. Enslaved and free Africans in the Americas played the banjo for several centuries until the instrument largely disappeared from popular Black music during the Harlem Renaissance. But in recent decades, the banjo has seen a resurgence among Black American musicians who are reclaiming the narrative of the stringed instrument. The story of Black banjo music is a quintessentially American one: a tale tied to transatlantic enslavement, cross-cultural influence and ancestral memories of home.
As a Black musician, Deidra Hall feels a deep connection to the past whenever she strikes the strings of her banjo. The Nevada City, California-based ethnomusicologist says the twangy sound transports her to a spiritual realm. “There is just something in it that strikes me in my soul, and it feels ancient to me,” Hall said. “It feels like my ancestors are speaking through me when I’m playing it.”
West African griots of centuries past plucked stringed instruments to communicate stories, and 37-year-old Hall said: “When I play the banjo, it is proof of the survival of that griot tradition.”
The turning point for the Black banjo renaissance began in April 2005, during the Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Black banjo players Súle Greg Wilson and Tony Thomas, as well as Appalachian State University professor Cece Conway, hosted the three-day conference following the release of Conway’s book African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia. Black banjo players and white allies from throughout the US gathered to discuss the origins of the banjo. When it was over, Wilson initiated a jam session where people pulled out their instruments. “So I jumped around playing, trying to do Sly and the Family Stone at Woodstock,” said 69-year-old Wilson. “It was now a real community gathering and not a presentation.”
More than two decades since the gathering, there has been an eruption of interest among Black banjo players. “Back then, and for the next five or six years, I could name every Black banjo player in the country,” Wilson said. “Now I can’t. That is amazing – the seed that we planted.” Wilson, a Tempe, Arizona-based musician and educator, now creates method books on how to play the banjo, and teaches younger banjo players about the Black American origins of the music.
Dom Flemons, a Chicago-based Grammy-winning musician, attended the Black Banjo Gathering in his early 20s when he’d only been playing the instrument for a few years. The gathering is where he met Giddens, with whom he would go on to form the group Carolina Chocolate Drops alongside Justin Robinson a few months later. The band brought global attention to the Black banjo tradition, inspiring a new generation of musicians. “There was such a need for Black representation of this old-time music,” 44-year-old Flemons said. “An all-Black string band hadn’t been seen for close to 100 years by that point.”
As the group grew over the years, Flemons documented every step of the band’s development, and contributed a collection of 2,500 items including pictures, videos and audio recordings to the University of Chapel Hill’s Southern Folklife Collection. Flemons wanted to ensure, he said, “that compared to what I inherited, which was just a bunch of very old pictures of Black culture from way, way back, that there was a modern exponent of Black string band culture”.
The Carolina Chocolate Drops transformed Hannah Mayree’s understanding of the origins of American folk music. In 2018, the Oakland, California-based musician started the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, a non-profit with the aim of returning the banjo to the hands of people of African descent. The organization accepts donated banjos, repairs them and gives them to Black musicians for free or at a low cost. Participants also learn how to repair their instruments and build banjos out of gourds and animal skins. The project also hosts group practice sessions for Black banjo players virtually and through in-person meetups around the nation, including in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Baltimore, the Washington DC area and New York City.
“I’m proud of us because we’ve been able to create these instruments as a community and make it so that they now live with people, they live in their homes and they live with their families,” 37-year-old Mayree said. “People have recorded EPs of them playing their banjos.” Mayree’s self-titled album of banjo music will be released on 10 October.
Black banjo players have created a community among each other, where experienced artists offer advice and mentorship to up-and-coming musicians. Flemons and Wilson have worked with the project to teach a new generation of players to carry on the tradition. “We’re creating audiences and people who appreciate this music who are Black,” Mayree said, “so that the performers can see themselves when they look out at an audience.”
A ‘reverse journey for the banjo’
While Black Americans have embraced the banjo in recent decades, the instrument’s past was marked by trauma and resilience. When enslaved Africans were captured and brought to the Americas, they were forced to sing, dance and play banjo-like instruments to inspire exercise onboard the slave ships. The enslaved people brought with them the technical knowledge to create instruments made of gourds with flat and broad necks.
In the 1600s, enslaved west Africans in the Caribbean created the banjo by replacing the necks of west African lutes with fingerboards and installing tuning pegs. The instrument was then transported to North America in the 1700s. In the US, banjos were exclusively played by Black musicians until around the 1830s.
The next decade saw the appropriation of the banjo in minstrel shows, where white musicians wore blackface and mimicked Black song and dance. Minstrel performers would visit slave quarters and Black communities to learn how to play banjo tunes. The five-string banjo with wooden frames were popularized by minstrel players such as Joel Sweeney throughout the 1800s.
“If you were going to be a successful popular musician in that time period, you were going to be a minstrel, and so the odds are you’re going to play the banjo,” said Hall, who began playing the instrument in 2023. “It just really drove home the bit that you’re creating this caricature of enslaved Africans and even, post-slavery, of Black people in general.”
Following the civil war, Black banjo players incorporated the style of west African two-finger picking with strumming techniques popularized by white minstrel performers. Black minstrel troupes toured throughout the world. In the early 1900s, Black musicians meshed banjo with piano to create ragtime music. By the 1920s, the tenor banjo underscored jazz orchestras.
The banjo fell out of the Black mainstream consciousness during the Harlem Renaissance era throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, when Black artists rejected enslavement narratives to celebrate cabarets and jazz instead. “The Black people of this time, most of them were around the second or third generation of people born out of bondage, and they were really trying to separate themselves from the image of minstrelsy,” Hall said. “They were really trying to get away from those caricatures, and the banjo was so closely related to that – it was why a lot of African Americans stopped playing it and actively sought to erase that part of our history.”
After long hiatuses, Black banjo players such as Odell Thompson and Etta Baker began performing for the public again in the late 1960s and 70s; however, the instrument largely remained associated with white folk music for several more decades.
Now the banjo connects the descendants of formerly enslaved west Africans to their ancestors, while also stirring a cultural awakening for Ethiopian American banjoist Michael Kebede. The policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, Kebede began playing the banjo six years ago during the Covid-19 pandemic. He played several shows with Mayree throughout New England earlier this year. Raised in Ethiopia, Kebede said the instrument has helped him feel a deeper sense of connection with the Black American community; he’s also started playing Ethiopian folk music on his banjo. “That kind of reverse journey for the banjo feels profoundly connecting and meaningful to me,” 37-year-old Kebede said. “The banjo went to the Americas in the hands of enslaved people … and I bring my banjo back to Ethiopia every time I visit.”
The banjo serves as a tool for liberation, according to Hall, who recently wrote an essay about it on Substack. For enslaved west Africans, she said, the instrument served as a symbol of resistance; amid the hardship, they retained their culture and continued pursuing joy and music.
“Being able to reclaim the banjo and reclaim that space that was stolen from us is a way of reclaiming our ancestral identities,” Hall said, “and putting ourselves in this space on the world stage where we belong.”
