The average American, if asked to conjure an image of a banjo, would likely picture the modern version of the instrument. The inspiration is the earth, really, because that’s where the instruments are coming from.”Ī vision of banjos coming from the earth may take a number of twenty-first-century people by surprise. In an interview via Zoom she said, “We want to inspire everyone to reach back to who their ancestors were, and who we are now, and how we can honor that and bring integrity back into what we’re doing with music. Hannah Mayree is the founder of the Black Banjo Reclamation Project and an Oakland, California-based singer-songwriter and banjo player. In this way, it can reconnect the African diaspora to their ancestral land and to their cultural legacy. Then the BBRP addresses the bigger objective to retake possession of the narrative and tell the story of the banjo from the Black perspective. It does this in two connected ways: by producing most of the components and by teaching banjo-building skills in community workshops. The Black Banjo Reclamation Project, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, aims to put banjos into the hands of everyday people. Quite literally, every main component of a gourd banjo-one that’s built in the manner of its African precursors-arises from the land. That fact of provenance alone puts any conversation about the history of the banjo inside the larger conversation about American history, and slavery in particular.īeing connected to the land also has a more immediate meaning, referring to the arable earth beneath our feet. It’s the indelible link to the continent of Africa, the geographic and cultural origin of that range of instruments which have evolved into the modern banjo. Of all the melodic musical instruments in the world, perhaps none is more connected to the land it comes from than the banjo.
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