The Banjo Project: The Story of America's Instrument

Short Synopsis

"The Banjo Project" is a history of America's quintessential musical instrument from its African roots to the present, featuring performances and commentary by contemporary masters such as Earl Scruggs, Pete Seeger, Bela Fleck, Taj Mahal and Mike Seeger. In its diverse musical forms and contested social history, the banjo highlights conflicts still at the heart of American culture today.

Description/Treatment

The Banjo Project: The Story of America’s Instrument is a two-hour public television documentary, resource website and comprehensive DVD package tracing the odyssey of America's quintessential instrument from its African roots to the present. Brought to the New World on slave ships, the banjo has shaped most American musical forms: the minstrel show, ragtime and early jazz, blues, old-time, the folk revival, bluegrass and country. Its rich social history highlights lingering conflicts -- race, class, region and gender -- still at the heart of American culture today. The banjo has been both a tool and a symbol for spreading Southern regional culture to the rest of the world. The Banjo Project weaves together the narratives of historic banjo figures such as Joe Sweeney, Gus Cannon and Uncle Dave Macon with archival footage and recordings, commentary and performances by contemporary masters such as Earl Scruggs, Pete Seeger, Taj Mahal and BelaFleck.

Writer-producer Marc Fields is a five-time regional Emmy winner, including one for his jazz documentary, Willie the Lion. The Music Director is Tony Trischka, a 2007 Grammy nominee, IBMA winner and one of the most acclaimed banjo players of his generation. Consulting Producer Michael Kantor is the producer-director of the landmark PBS series, Broadway: The American Musical (national primetime Emmy) and the upcoming history of American comedy, Make ‘Em Laugh.

The fiscal sponsor is The Center for Independent Documentary, a 501(c)3 organization based in Massachusetts. Major production grantors include The Southern Humanities Media Fund, with additional support from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, The Tides Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts and Emerson College, as well as several private donors.Two PBS affiliates, Nashville Public Television and New Jersey Public Television, have indicated their serious interest in being the PBS point of entry stations.

Outreach and educational activities include:

1) Expanding the current website at www.thebanjoproject.org; in its finished version it will be a resource for banjo history, with sample curricula for American studies and popular culture classes, teachers guides and downloadable video and music clips;

2) Producing a live stage/multi-media history of the banjo featuring Tony Trischka and ensemble, with video projections and dancers, for educational institutions and arts venues, presented in collaboration with Vanaver Caravan, a dance company dedicated to world folk culture education; and

3) Archive and research library of the materials collected for the documentary/website/DVD -- the original tapes, transcripts, research, images, recordings, correspondence, etc. -- will be donated to the National Banjo Center, a permanent museum and archive created by Piedmont Folk Legacies.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

"Probably no instrument has ever had to fight its way through such bitter antagonism as the banjo…"

-- Gatcomb’s Banjo and Guitar Gazette, 1887

If any musical instrument can be said to be quintessentially American, it is the banjo. Even in its construction, it tells a story of cultural exchange and creolization: the banjo is a drum with strings, a symbolic blending of African and European musical identities. Brought to the New World in the memories and traditions of enslaved Africans, repeatedly re-invented by African- and European-Americans, the banjo has shaped most American musical forms: the minstrel show (the dominant popular entertainment in the US in the 19th century), ragtime and early jazz, old-time folk and the folk revival, as well as blues, bluegrass, country, and new hybrids yet to be labeled.

The Banjo Project uses the banjo’s diverse musical styles, contested social history and colorful players as a narrative vehicle for exploring issues at the heart of American culture today: the interplay of black and Anglo-Irish folk cultures, the lingering stigma of minstrel show caricatures of blacks and stereotypes of “hicks” and “hillbillies,” regional conflicts and exchanges (North and South, city and country), and the tensions between folk and commercial culture. In its long history, the banjo has symbolized patriotism and protest, pain and pleasure, low entertainment and sophisticated leisure; it has been a black instrument, a white instrument, a laborer's pastime and a socialite's diversion, a young person's fad and an old-timer's friend. In almost all of its different guises, the banjo has been a tool for spreading Southern regional culture to the rest of the world.

No coincidence, then, that the banjo has been so frequently snubbed and dismissed. Over the years there have been more jokes about banjos than any other instrument, and -- until Earl Scruggs arrived at the Grand Ole Opry -- banjo players were generally expected to be clowns as well.

"The banjo has always symbolized something other than music in our culture. It’s completely saturated with cultural associations. It’s an icon, it’s not justmusic. Every time you pick up the banjo, it's going to symbolize something -- usually wild, rural, simple and clownish…"

--Pete Ross, gourd banjo maker, in an interview for The Banjo Project, (2003)

“Unpacking”the banjo, we reveal how the banjo has been the archetypal (and often stereotypical) image of the South while the banjo's music has been a transformative cultural force, from the plantation era and minstrelsy through bluegrass and the Folk Revival in the 1950s, into the classical music halls and its recent re-discovery by a new generation of young white and African-American musicians. Whether it’s Joel Walker Sweeney in blackface, the Jazz Age flapper whamming on a 4-string or Pete Seeger leading an anti-war rally with his long-necked Vega, the banjo has been the symbolic prop for stereotypes about race, class, gender, region and political persuasion right up to the present day.

At the center of The Banjo Project are characters whose powerful roles in American culture have been overlooked by historians. These banjo-playing "cultural middlemen" crossed boundaries of race, class, region, gender and distinctions between folk and commercial culture. Our story features the lives and music of key representative figures such as:

• The Snowden Family, whose parents were slaves on a Tidewater plantation and came to the Ohio territories as settlers, bringing with them their musical talent and traditions, entertaining their white neighbors -- including future minstrel man Dan Emmett -- with banjo, fiddle and a song that may have been the source for Emmett's "Dixie"…
• Joel Walker Sweeney - who learned banjo from plantation slaves in Virginia, honed his blackface minstrel act with early traveling circuses and popularized the banjo on the international stage as a member of the Virginia Minstrels...
• Lotta Crabtree - who came from California Gold Rush country with a banjo on her knee, learned dancing from Lola Montez and a black"breakdown" dancer, and became one of the biggest stars of American theater after the Civil War…
• S.S. Stewart - the Philadelphia banjo teacher, manufacturer and relentless promoter who made it his mission in the 1880s to "refine" banjo for respectable men and women, denying its black origins and making banjo playing fashionable...
• Charlie Poole - the former mill hand from Spray, NC whose novel three-finger picking style, showmanship and string band recordings pioneered the country and bluegrass sound, while his humor and rambling ways made him a legend of the North Carolina piedmont…
• Dock Boggs - who traded his gun for a banjo at age twelve, and in 1927 was invited to New York to record his dark, idiosyncratic country-blues style, then returned home, sold his banjo and worked in the Virginia coal mines for thirty years until being "rediscovered" by Mike Seeger in the folk revival of the late 1950s…
• Uncle Dave Macon - one of the first stars of the Grand Ole Opry, called “the king of the hillbillies,” an extraordinary vaudeville showman whose comic antics and wry commentary often overshadowed his encyclopedic knowledgeof banjo styles and folk traditions, both white and black.
• Gus Cannon -- born on the Newell plantation in Mississippi, Cannon absorbed rural styles -- blues, minstrel and medicine shows, stringbands -- and combined them with ragtime and Tin Pan Alley novelties. His recordings with the Jug Stompers in the late 1920s were watershed works in American popular music, including "Walk Right In," which became a top-40 hit thirty years later…

To bring such key figures to life, The Banjo Project will include commentary and performances by contemporary masters Earl Scruggs, Pete and Mike Seeger, Ralph Stanley, Bob Carlin, Taj Mahal, Cynthia Sayer and Bela Fleck (among others), supported by archival footage and recordings (some rare and recently discovered), with historical analysis and context from leading scholars such as Joe Wilson, Kip Lornell, W.T. Lhamon, Neil Rosenberg, Rex Ellis and Cece Conway.

Despite the fact that the banjo's history can be seen as an ongoing cycle of appropriation and marginalization by American popular culture, the banjo's "half-barbaric twang" still thrills new audiences. Most contemporary fans, however, have little or no knowledge of the banjo’s origins or its long, complexhistory.

The Banjo Project is panoramic history with lots of great music!