Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History

by Kristina R. Gaddy, Rhiannon Giddens Narrated by Chanté McCormick

Overview

An illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music.



In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean, and the colonies that became US states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York.



African Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass, and country, its deepest history forgotten.

Editorial Reviews

The New Yorker

"Tracing the development of the banjo…this meticulous history also illuminates the difficulties of unearthing a story rooted in the experiences of the enslaved."

Tony Trischka

"Kristina R. Gaddy has done a great service to lovers of the banjo, with its deep roots in Africa, and these and Caribbean shores, dating back to the 1600s. Her fecundity of research intertwines the story of the bangeau, banger, bangil with the horrors meted out to enslaved peoples. Though rich in detail, with fascinating period quotes, this is not a dry scholarly tome, but a heartfelt, absorbing telling. You see the story unfold through the eyes of contemporaries, thus bringing a welcome human dimension to the tale of an instrument often stereotyped, but as Kristina points out, one with a history that imbues it with ‘sacred’ qualities."

Bluegrass Unlimited - Chris Wathen

"[Kristina R. Gaddy] has written exactly the book the banjo world needs right now.… [C]onnect[s] today’s musical strains to their deep roots that are just beginning to be rediscovered and acknowledged."

The Economist

"Beguiling…Ms. Gaddy successfully blends archival skills with imagination."

Wall Street Journal - David Yezzi

"In her compelling, thoroughly researched history, Kristina R. Gaddy reveals a different instrument entirely, one intimately rooted in the African diaspora and capable of expressing flights of sorrow and joy…The time is ripe for lovers of the banjo to learn about its hidden past."

Dale Cockrell

"Kristina R. Gaddy’s deep and rich history of the banjo reveals that the instrument is much more than a means to powerful music-making—it was for centuries the portal to a social and spiritual life through which African Americans tasted freedom, however fleeting. I’ll never hear, see, or enjoy the banjo again without reflecting on how the horrors of Black slavery gave reason and form to ‘America’s Instrument.'"

Goldmine - Dave Thompson

"So vividly does [Kristina Gaddy] write, and so enthusiastically does she convey her meaning, that many of the songs play unbidden in your mind, through the rhythm of her sentences, the lyric of her vocabulary. As much as Well Of Souls is a gripping, fascinating, story, it is also a beautifully written one…a novel in documentary’s clothing."

New Yorker

"Tracing the development of the banjo…this meticulous history also illuminates the difficulties of unearthing a story rooted in the experiences of the enslaved."

Marc Fields

"Kristina R. Gaddy recenters the banjo as a Black instrument and as an icon of the African diaspora, before and beyond its perversion in the hands of Blackface Minstrels. Like a skillful archeologist, with empathy and respect, Gaddy excavates the sites, sightings, and citations of Black banjo as a central part of dances and rituals of celebration, remembrance, and resistance throughout the Americas. The erasure of this soulful history is an injustice that Gaddy corrects."

Economist

"Beguiling.… Ms. Gaddy successfully blends archival skills with imagination."

Christopher J. Smith

"Kristina R. Gaddy has crafted a sensitive, insightful narrative of the ‘hidden histories’ of the banjo as an emblem of African endurance in exile. Centering the courage and the human costs of the African diaspora, Well of Souls provides historiographic insight and human connection that, while unblinkingly cataloging the horrors of the slave trade, also celebrates the creativity and cultural resiliency of those who resisted erasure. Through the lens of the banjo’s history and recovered meanings, Gaddy honors the traditions and the humans who carried them."

BookPage

"Superb.… Gaddy’s lively storytelling re-creates scenes from 17th-century Jamaica to 19th-century Washington, D.C., and beyond, illustrating not only the birth and development of the banjo but also its co-optation by white people."

Booklist (starred review)

"Gaddy brings the rich and complicated history of this seemingly humble instrument to light in this well-researched and equally well-written volume…This is a glorious and invaluable chronicle for music lovers and everyone interested in American culture."

Bookpage - Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

"Superb…Gaddy’s lively storytelling re-creates scenes from 17th-century Jamaica to 19th-century Washington, D.C., and beyond, illustrating not only the birth and development of the banjo but also its co-optation by white people."

BBC Music - Steph Power

"A potent combination of research and storytelling…What emerges is an extraordinary narrative of African Americans' resistance to brutalisation and the myriad attempts to destroy, pervert, exoticise or appropriate their cultural practices."

Tom Piazza

"Profound and invigorating, exhaustively researched and brilliantly conceived, Kristina R. Gaddy’s Well of Souls carries the reader across the globe and through centuries to restore our understanding of the banjo’s central place in the spiritual and ritual life of the African diaspora. The meaning and significance of the insights to be found here, and the worlds summoned, will change you. It is a stunning, and major, achievement."

Dom Flemons

"For many years, the banjo’s early Afro-Caribbean history has been shrouded in mystery. Part of this is because the information has been locked away in deep archives accessible only to curious specialists interested in the deeper roots of the banjo. I have spent a great portion of my career advocating for much of this history to be placed in the forefront. For the very first time, a reader’s version of a few of the earliest written observations of the instrument are on full display. With thoughtful and masterful writing [Gaddy] opens a new window into seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century world history by those who lived it and saw the strange new cultural connections brought by a brutal plantation system. Her observations lead the reader back into the twenty-first century to contend with and reanalyze the crooked road of America’s musical past."

Economist

"Beguiling.… Ms. Gaddy successfully blends archival skills with imagination."

Kirkus Reviews

2022-08-12
Though the banjo has a uniquely jaunty sound, underneath the bluegrass playfulness is an often painful history.

Gaddy traces the instrument’s origin to the rituals of enslaved Blacks in the American South, the Caribbean, and South America. Regardless of its exact form, the instrument played a crucial role in religious and ceremonial dances, and Gaddy tracks its early history through Suriname and Haiti. Some slave owners sought to suppress it, while others tolerated it. In fact, one of the first depictions of a banjo is in a painting of a spiritual dance performed by enslaved people on an 18th-century North Carolina plantation. The author shows how the arrival of Christianity among enslaved people was a setback for the banjo. “For hundreds of years, drums, fiddles, banjos, and wind instruments were part of religious dances,” she writes. “Now, as a result of conversion to Christianity, there were none. The banjo and Christianity didn’t seem to mix.” The next step in the evolution of the banjo came from an odd place: a White musician named Joel Sweeney (1810-1860), who was taught to play by an enslaved man. Sweeney did much to popularize the sound, as did the minstrel shows popular at the time. In the 1840s, William Boucher, an instrument maker, began constructing and selling banjos, defining the pattern of construction along the way. Eventually, the banjo would return to Black communities, but it would take several decades. Though Gaddy weaves an undeniably interesting tale, the focus often remains on the history of slavery rather than the banjo. While she demonstrates how the two are intertwined, there are long sections of the book that do not connect to the instrument’s story. This is not a fatal flaw, but rigorous editorial streamlining would have resulted in a more focused, coherent book. Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens provides the foreword.

A deep dive into the social history of the banjo.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175011525
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	691,153

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