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is as much an instrument as it is a story about the birth of a country and the evolution of a culture. Today most people think of the banjo as a symbol of rural, white America, but in fact the banjo has roots that extend even farther back into time than America itself. From the decks of the New Bedford whaling fleet to the plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas; from the boisterous minstrel stages of Boston to the banks of the Mississippi, the parlors of victorian mansions, or the dirt-floored slave quarters of the rural South, the banjo was at one time as ubiquitous a fixture of daily life in America as any other musical entertainment this country has ever known.

Banjo aboard the USS Hunchback, mid 19th C.

The farther back one travels in time, the more varied and exotic the forms of the banjo become. Tracing back the evolutionary path of this instrument, we move from steel strings and resonators to gut strings and ivory tuners, from pearl inlay and metal hardware to tacked skins and gourds, until finally we arrive at an instrument that represents a crossroads of cultures and places and traditions. The early banjo was truly a folk instrument: simple, easily constructed, and played by everyone.

But where did the banjo actually come from, and who invented it? This is a good question to ask, a fun problem to think about and, in the end, a difficult puzzle to solve with any degree of certainty. Various lutes and other hollowed-out string instruments made fom thin wood or gourds are common around the world, from Europe and Africa through the Middle East and across Asia – it is a universal design that branched off and began its final evolutionary leap toward what is now the modern banjo during the height of the Atlantic slave trade.

Click to see & hear a Tibetan Dranyen

While it is true that the modern, five-string banjo is a uniquely American phenomenon, it is also true that, like so many other “American” phenomena, the banjo has its roots in the cultural traditions of other nations and other peoples. The early predecessors of the modern banjo came to America below the decks of slave ships that were, at the time, criss-crossing the Atlantic ocean. Along with their human cargo, these ships also carried back from Africa the collective musical, artistic and cultural heritage of a wide array of people – musicians, artisans, and thinkers whose ideas and traditions would soon take hold in America; traditions that would, in time, come to claim a place in our own culture as influential and as relevant as those of their captors.

West African Xalam (click to hear)

These early slave banjos were likely close relatives of the sort of stringed instruments still played today in West Africa, like the ekonting, the kora, and the xalam. They would have had hollowed-out bodies hewn from thin pieces of wood or dried gourds, with a thin top surface, usually fashioned from a tautly-pulled skin or thin piece of wood. These instruments would have been largely fretless, with rounded necks and two, three, or four melody strings.

Five-string gourd banjos like the ones on this site are, as far as anyone knows, figments of historical fiction. There is, in fact, no known, surviving example of an American gourd banjo, and thus no hard evidence to suggest the existence of a popularly used, five-string gourd instrument. However, based largely on evidence from artistic representations of other instruments, there is reason to believe that early four-string banjos (with one shortened drone string) were, in fact, widely played. The five-string gourd banjo, then, is an amalgamation. It combines the modern five-string banjo, whose development is commonly credited to Joel Walker Sweeney (b. 1810, d. 1860) with its immediate predecessors, the three- and four-stringed gourd banjos played throughout the southern United States. The five-string gourd banjo represents a critical moment in the history of the banjo, when the instrument itself was becoming something totally different than the instruments that had preceded it.

Det. from Old Plantation, c. 1790

From its inception, the banjo was a homemade instrument, and there were a wide variety of differences in construction from region to region, from maker to maker, and from instrument to instrument. Eccentricity and innovation, then, were the rule, not the exception. From tackhead banjos fashioned out of grain measures built by soldiers on the battlefields of the Civil War to fancy minstrel banjos with turned necks and detailed marquetry made by cabinet makers for wealthy customers in late-Victorian-era American cities, the banjo was anything but uniform.

My banjos are made with this tradition in mind. The instruments presented on this website are, whenever possible, intended to be “historically appropriate.” I do not try to duplicate any particular historical banjo – from a museum, or photograph – but instead I try to duplicate an approach to banjo making with the goal of creating a series of instruments that would not have seemed at all out of place on the back porches, river banks, and plantations of rural 19th century America.

Click to see video of an akonting played