ISBN10: 0870498932, ISBN13: 9780870498930, [publisher: University of Tennessee Press, Chicago] Softcover Paperback. Throughout the Upland South, the banjo has become an emblem of white mountain folk, who are generally credited with creating the short-thumb-string banjo, developing its downstroking playing styles and repertory, and spreading its influence to the national consciousness. In this groundbreaking study, however, Cecelia Conway demonstrates that these European Americans borrowed the banjo from African Americans and adapted it to their own musical culture. Like many aspects of the African-American tradition, the influence of black banjo music has been largely unrecorded and nearly forgottenuntil now. Drawing in part on interviews with elderly African-American banjo players from the Piedmontamong the last American representatives of an African banjo-playing tradition that spans several centuriesConway reaches beyond the written records to reveal the similarity of pre-blues black banjo lyric patterns, improvisational playing styles, and the accompanying singing and dance movements to traditional West African music performances. The author then shows how Africans had, by the mid-eighteenth century, transformed the lyrical music of the gourd banjo as they dealt with the experience of slavery in America. By the mid-nineteenth century, white southern musicians were learning the banjo playing styles of their African-American mentors and had soon created or ...
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Univ of Tennessee Pr, Date: 1995. Paperback. New. 394 pages. 9.50x7.75x1.00 inches. 1995. Univ of Tennessee Pr ISBN 0870498932 9780870498930 [GB]

Univ of Tennessee Pr 1995 Softcover New 394 pages. 9.50x7.75x1.00 inches.