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The Banjo: America's African Instrument. By Laurent Dubois. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2016).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2019

Christopher J. Smith
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Type
Book Review
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 125 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2019 

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References

1 Dubois, Laurent, The Banjo: America's African Instrument (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Linn, Karen, That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Carlin, Bob, The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy (New York: McFarland, 2007)Google Scholar; Conway, Cecilia, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study in Folk Traditions (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Epstein, Dena J., Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

3 Laurent Dubois, “Faculty Bookwatch—The Banjo: America's African Instrument,” https://youtu.be/a2ccs7F--6w?t=44m31s.

4 Foundational works articulating this model include Roger Abrahams, D., Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Penguin, 1994)Google Scholar; Thompson, Robert Farris, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1984)Google Scholar; and Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, among others.

5 The reference is both to Haitian Vodou, to singers taking the stage name Trois-Feuilles, and to a face carved on the fingerboard of a Haitian banza, donated by the nineteenth-century scholar Victor Schoelcher to the Museum of the French Music Conservatory and recovered via the detective work of Jagfors and Ross, among others.