Banjo Roots and Branches

Banjo Roots and Branches
Author: Robert B Winans
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2018-08-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252050649

The story of the banjo's journey from Africa to the western hemisphere blends music, history, and a union of cultures. In Banjo Roots and Branches, Robert B. Winans presents cutting-edge scholarship that covers the instrument's West African origins and its adaptations and circulation in the Caribbean and United States. The contributors provide detailed ethnographic and technical research on gourd lutes and ekonting in Africa and the banza in Haiti while also investigating tuning practices and regional playing styles. Other essays place the instrument within the context of slavery, tell the stories of black banjoists, and shed light on the banjo's introduction into the African- and Anglo-American folk milieus. Wide-ranging and illustrated with twenty color images, Banjo Roots and Branches offers a wealth of new information to scholars of African American and folk musics as well as the worldwide community of banjo aficionados. Contributors: Greg C. Adams, Nick Bamber, Jim Dalton, George R. Gibson, Chuck Levy, Shlomo Pestcoe, Pete Ross, Tony Thomas, Saskia Willaert, and Robert B. Winans.

Banjo

Banjo
Author: Bob Carlin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-10-03
Genre: Music
ISBN: 149308187X

The banjo is emblematic of American country music, and it is at the core of other important musical movements, including jazz and ragtime. The instrument has been adopted by many cultures and has been ingrained into many musical traditions, from Mento music in the Caribbean and dance music in Ireland. Virtuosos such as Béla Fleck have played Bach, African music, and Christmas tunes on the five-string banjo, and the instrument has had a resurgence in pop music with such acts a Mumford and Sons and the Avett Brothers. This book offers the first comprehensive, illustrated history of the banjo in its many forms. It traces the story of the instrument from its roots in West Africa to its birth in the Americas, through its coming of age in the Industrial Revolution and beyond. The book profiles the most important players and spotlights key luthiers and manufacturers. It features 100 “milestone instruments” with in-depth coverage, including model details and beautiful photos. It offers historical context surrounding the banjo through the ages, from its place in Victorian parlors and speakeasies through its role in the folk boom of the 1950s and 1960s to its place in the hands of songwriter John Hartford and comedian Steve Martin. Folk, jazz, bluegrass, country, and rock – the banjo has played an important part in all of these genres. Lavishly illustrated, and thoughtfully written by author, broadcaster, and acclaimed banjoist Bob Carlin, this is a must-have for lovers of fretted instruments, aficionados of roots music, and music history buffs.

A Language of Song

A Language of Song
Author: Samuel Charters
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2009-05-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822392070

In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem.” In this book, Charters takes readers along to those and other places, including Jamaica and the Georgia Sea Islands, as he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Each of the book’s fourteen chapters is a vivid rendering of a particular location that Charters visited. While music is always his focus, the book is filled with details about individuals, history, landscape, and culture. In first-person narratives, Charters relates voyages including a trip to the St. Louis home of the legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin and the journey to West Africa, where he met a man who performed an hours-long song about the Europeans’ first colonial conquests in Gambia. Throughout the book, Charters traces the persistence of African musical culture despite slavery, as well as the influence of slaves’ songs on subsequent musical forms. In evocative prose, he relates a lifetime of travel and research, listening to brass bands in New Orleans; investigating the emergence of reggae, ska, and rock-steady music in Jamaica’s dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdés. A Language of Song is a unique expedition led by one of music’s most observant and well-traveled explorers.

A Fistful of Shells

A Fistful of Shells
Author: Toby Green
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2019-01-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0241003288

Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019 Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award 'Astonishing, staggering' Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph A groundbreaking new history that will transform our view of West Africa By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and Islamic world since around 1000, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies - most importantly shells: the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. It reconstructs the world of kingdoms whose existence (like those of Europe) revolved around warfare, taxation, trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, royal display and extravagance, and the production of art. Over time, the relationship between Africa and Europe revolved ever more around the trade in slaves, damaging Africa's relative political and economic power as the terms of monetary exchange shifted drastically in Europe's favour. In spite of these growing capital imbalances, longstanding contacts ensured remarkable connections between the Age of Revolution in Europe and America and the birth of a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa. A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters, and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions.

Field Hollers And Freedom Songs: The Anthology

Field Hollers And Freedom Songs: The Anthology
Author: C. Sade Turnipseed
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 293
Release:
Genre: History
ISBN: 1648895824

Taking place annually in “the most southern place on earth,” aka, the “Cotton Kingdom,” the Sweat Equity Investment in the Cotton Kingdom Symposium offers a platform to honor, celebrate, and recognize the legacy of the African Americans who labored in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. The symposium intends to trigger discussions and provide a space where the histories and contributions of those Americans can be heard and learned from. Born in the antebellum south, the “soul of America” came to be through the tearful occupation of planting, chopping, picking and ginning cotton, where it was then brined within a system of enslavement, sharecropping and international trade that in so many ways provided America its “greatness.” Carefully compiled from works presented at the symposia, this anthology looks to expose the tortured “cotton-pickin’ spirit” embedded in America’s soul. A spirit that is rendered in song, chants, spoken word and field hollers, and revealed in this volume through the selected articles, lyric poetry, proverbs, speeches, slave narratives and workshop proposals. The rich and varied content of this book reflects the uniqueness of not only the Mississippi Delta but also the histories of those who lived and worked there.

The Banjo

The Banjo
Author: Laurent Dubois
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2016-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674968832

The banjo has been called by many names over its history, but they all refer to the same sound—strings humming over skin—that has eased souls and electrified crowds for centuries. The Banjo invites us to hear that sound afresh in a biography of one of America’s iconic folk instruments. Attuned to a rich heritage spanning continents and cultures, Laurent Dubois traces the banjo from humble origins, revealing how it became one of the great stars of American musical life. In the seventeenth century, enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America drew on their memories of varied African musical traditions to construct instruments from carved-out gourds covered with animal skin. Providing a much-needed sense of rootedness, solidarity, and consolation, banjo picking became an essential part of black plantation life. White musicians took up the banjo in the nineteenth century, when it became the foundation of the minstrel show and began to be produced industrially on a large scale. Even as this instrument found its way into rural white communities, however, the banjo remained central to African American musical performance. Twentieth-century musicians incorporated the instrument into styles ranging from ragtime and jazz to Dixieland, bluegrass, reggae, and pop. Versatile and enduring, the banjo combines rhythm and melody into a single unmistakable sound that resonates with strength and purpose. From the earliest days of American history, the banjo’s sound has allowed folk musicians to create community and joy even while protesting oppression and injustice.

Senegal

Senegal
Author: Sean Connolly
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2015-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1841629138

Senegal Travel Guide - Expert holiday tips and travel advice including Dakar hotels, restaurants, cuisine, colonial and religious architecture, museums and culture. This guide also covers suggested itineraries and tour operators, music, storytelling, wildlife and natural history, indigenous people, Sufism, Touba, Cap-Vert, Nepen Diakha and Ouakam.

The Gambia

The Gambia
Author: Sean Connolly
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2024-01-30
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1804690619

Co-authored by regional expert Sean Connolly and Philip Briggs, the world’s foremost guidebook writer on Africa, this third edition of Bradt’s The Gambia remains the most comprehensive guide available to mainland Africa’s smallest country. This new edition integrates recent developments, from recently opened restaurants and hotels to the new roads and bridges that make circumnavigating the country easier than ever. The guide provides detailed coverage of ecolodges and camps, information on festivals, music workshops and opportunities to experience local culture, plus advice about birdwatching possibilities in a country popular with first-time birders to Africa. As well as encompassing popular coastal resorts, the guide provides information required to explore the relatively undeveloped interior and proposes excursions into neighbouring Senegal, making it ideal for visitors on organised holidays and independent travellers alike. Bradt’s The Gambia reveals all the practical information needed to explore this welcoming and safe country (not for nothing is it nicknamed the ‘Smiling Coast’) with its plethora of beach resorts, catering to all tastes and budgets, that line the 80km stretch of tropical coastline running from the capital Banjul to the remote southern border. Small in size but rich in character, The Gambia offers perhaps the closest English-speaking ‘winter sun’ destination from Europe. Justifiably popular with birdwatchers, the lush mangrove- and jungle-fringed River Gambia is also home to crocodiles, hippos, rehabilitated chimpanzees and various monkeys. The Gambia offers rich heritage tourism for moderately adventurous travellers, from the mysterious megalithic stone circles at Wassu and Ker Batch to fortified Kunta Kinteh (James) Island and the former slave-trading village of Juffureh – the heart of novelist Alex Haley’s Roots country and part of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites. And why not enhance your visit further by experiencing colourful local markets, witnessing kankurang spirit masquerades or joining a kayak cruise from the sleepy river port of Janjanbureh, or paying homage to The Gambia’s inspiring journey towards democracy and reconciliation at Memory House? All in all, Bradt’s The Gambia is the perfect companion for discovering this safe, welcoming and tourist-friendly English-speaking country which provides an ideal short-stay introduction to West Africa’s unique atmosphere.

Popular World Music

Popular World Music
Author: Andrew Shahriari
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2015-10-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 131734538X

Exploring Popular World Music is the first introductory level text written to introduce students to popular music styles from around the world. Focusing on styles that all students will know -- from Reggae to Klezmer, from Afro-Pop to Kodo drums--the book offers a comprehensive, listening-oriented introduction to the world's popular musical cultures. Each chapter will focus on a specific music style and its associated geographic locale. The salient musical and cultural features associated with each example are discussed in detail to increase our appreciation of the music. Relevant artists will be highlighted and suggestions for further reading and listening will be offered. By the end of the book, the student should be able to 1) recognize a variety of world music styles, 2) articulate musical and cultural knowledge associated with each style, and 3) identify important artists related to the genre. Supplementing the text will be a web site fcreated by the author) featuring the author's world music map, enabling students to explore pop music cultures as they relate to each other; as well as an iTunes playlist for all the highlighted selections in the book. This book should strongly appeal to Intro to World Music Courses for non-majors who wish to study popular rather than traditional musics of the world, which would encompass a large majority of students enrolled in these courses.