Overview

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 U.S. 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.

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9780393866803

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Reviews

For the very first time, a reader's version of a few of the earliest written observations of the instrument are on full display in the thoughtful and masterful writing of this book. This book is not only made for the banjo enthusiast but it opens a new window into 17th, 18th and 19th century world history on the ground level by those who lived it and observed the strange new cultural connections brought by a brutal plantation system.[...] Kristina Gaddy's observations lead the reader back into the 21st century to contend and reanalyze the crooked road of America's musical past. -- Dom Flemons, the American songster and Grammy Award-winning musician

For the very first time, a reader's version of a few of the earliest written observations of the instrument are on full display in the thoughtful and masterful writing of this book. This book is not only made for the banjo enthusiast but it opens a new window into 17th, 18th and 19th century world history on the ground level by those who lived it and observed the strange new cultural connections brought by a brutal plantation system.[...] Kristina Gaddy's observations lead the reader back into the 21st century to contend and reanalyze the crooked road of America's musical past. -- Dom Flemons, the American songster and Grammy Award-winning musician Beguiling... [Gaddy] weaves her story together from sources including paintings, diaries and letters, and tells it chronologically. In a less daring writer's hands, this might have become a slog, but Ms. Gaddy successfully blends archival skills with imagination. -- The Economist

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 the deep archives accessible only to the curious specialist 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 in the thoughtful and masterful writing of this book. This book is not only made for the banjo enthusiast but it opens a new window into 17th, 18th and 19th century world history on the ground level by those who lived it and observed the strange new cultural connections brought by a brutal plantation system. These men and women saw and wrote about the banjo's great transformation from a homemade tool of survival to its popularization in American culture. Kristina Gaddy's observations lead the reader back into the 21st century to contend and reanalyze the crooked road of America's musical past.--Dom Flemons, the American songster, Grammy Award-winning musician, and cofounder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops Kristina 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.'--Dale Cockrell, author of Everybody's Doin' It 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.--Tony Trischka 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.--Marc Fields, director of PBS's Give Me the Banjo and creator of The Banjo Project Digital Museum 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.--Christopher J. Smith, author of The Creolization of American Culture 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.--Tom Piazza, author of A Free State

Author Information

Kristina R. Gaddy is the author of Flowers in the Gutter: The True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis. She has received the Parsons Fund Award, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellowship, and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Rubys Artist Grant. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and Atlas Obscura, among other publications. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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