A Short Overview of Jazz Banjo

A while ago, I did a short series on early jazz banjo, and some of its pioneers on my Instagram. It was a lot of fun, but Instagram isn’t the best place for long text posts, of course. I was hoping to get my blog up a little sooner than I did, but now that it is here, I am going to kick things off by archiving these posts here over the course of a couple of days. Thanks!!

As we have seen, jazz often contains a lot more erasure than we like to admit. Today, I wish to talk about the role of the banjo in jazz. This is part I, some background that shows that jazz banjo goes deeper than Belá Fleck. Banjo can seem rather hokey and bro-country sometimes, but it has a rich history. It is, as most scholars have gathered, a 17th-century Caribbean combination of the West African kora, with elements from Portuguese stringed instruments. The Black population of the Americas often played them for folk songs, and later, spirituals. Many white plantation owners or their children learned banjo from their slaves, passing the knowledge around during the Civil War. During the 19th-century, these practices were coopted by white people for blackface minstrel shows. As the 1880's began, however, more and more New Orleans bands ragtime and later jazz bands began to replace the guitar with the banjo. This instrument of West African origins was king in bands from around 1910-1930 or so. Some good players to check out are Johnny St. Cyr, who played with Louis Armstrong, Elmer Snowden, who launched many careers of famous bandleaders, and Narvin Kimball, a longtime early member of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. I will add some more next on these famous players themselves.