Exhibition Seeks to Reinstate Banjo to Its Rightful Place

LEXINGTON, Mass. — Banjos have bounced on the knees of slaves and mountain folk, leaned in the corners of Boston mansions and stolen the stages of music halls.

But the humble banjo, which evolved from its African roots to become 19th century America’s most popular instrument, strummed its way right out of the musical mainstream.

An exhibition called “The Banjo: The People and the Sounds of America’s Instrument,” on view at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington through Sept. 3, seeks to restore “America’s instrument” to its rightful place.

“There’s a lot of different stories to be told. It’s one of the few really American instruments,” said Jim Bollman, a collector who donated many of the instruments in the Lexington exhibition.

That’s not to say the banjo has strummed its last chords. After all, it remains a main ingredient in folk and bluegrass music, and the instrument sees periodic revivals, such as in the success of the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack, which won this year’s Grammy for album of the year.

More than 60 banjos are on display, including an akonting--the banjo’s predecessor from Gambia. There also are ornate “presentation banjos” made of cherry, mahogany and rosewood--even whalebone--inlaid with mother-of-pearl floral patterns, and silver- and gold-plated strings.

Other instruments range from a Henry P. Stichter banjo made in 1847 to a brand-new Deering “Crossfire” solid-body banjo. More than 50 of them come from Bollman’s personal collection; some would fetch tens of thousands of dollars.

There are also displays of sheet music, lithographs, pottery and posters featuring the instruments, including William Sydney Mount’s 1865 painting “The Banjo Player.” Also featured are items that demonstrate the role of minstrel shows, with their crass and cruel characterizations of blacks, that were so much a part of the instrument’s history.

Bela Fleck’s Grammy is on view, and there’s also a poster of Kermit the Frog with a banjo on his knee in “The Muppet Movie.”

Over the years, the banjo’s down-home strains have largely become associated with whimsy and folklore, and even a sense of the corny, said Phyllis Barney, executive director of the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance in Silver Spring, Md.

“If you want to evoke a feeling of home or country, you just need a couple of bars of the banjo, and if you have your eyes closed, you’re looking across a wheat field,” she said.

It is believed that the banjo’s predecessor was the akonting, fashioned from gourds and animal hides that came to America with slaves.

It was largely an instrument of Southern blacks in the early 1800s and was rarely seen in the North. It was an everyman’s instrument that even the poorest porch musician could afford.

“You could make a banjo out of a dead groundhog and a coffee can and a few sticks of wood and some stove bolts, and they regularly did that in the South,” Bollman said.

But the impatient banjo didn’t stay South. It became a favorite prop of minstrel shows that traveled north and west with circuses. “It’s kind of an icon for minstrelsy, and by extension racism and bigotry,” Bollman said.

The shows became enormously popular. By the 1860s, some 160 minstrel companies played to huge crowds around the nation, introducing the country to the worst stereotypes of blacks but also to black spirituals and songs as well as Irish ballads, German folk songs and opera.

“When you want genuine music--music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky

The new popularity also meant a booming market. Hundreds of patents were issued for improvements, and instrument makers, including A.C. Fairbanks, William A. Cole and Bay State in Boston, began manufacturing “presentation banjos” for the wealthy.

At the Heritage Museum show, Eugene and Gwynne McKenzie of Memphis lingered over the presentation banjos made to please the ears and the eyes.

“They’re so beautiful,” said Gwynne McKenzie, 66. “I think they put the art in it not so that it would be displayed, but because they wanted to play a beautiful instrument.”

As jazz guitar slowly edged out the banjo in popular music, its fortunes faded, and the Depression knocked the banjo out of the hands of common folks.

“People didn’t need them, and they weren’t crucial to living for someone to get through the day, just like lots of other excesses,” Bollman said.

Today, the banjo maintains an important spot in American music tradition but is rarely heard on the airwaves. Traditional music enthusiasts were all the more dumbfounded by the success of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”--so much so that folk groups recently held a “Roots Music Industry Summit” in Nashville.

“There is a real need to get away from being spoon-fed your entertainment, so music buyers are more interested in digging a little deeper” into traditional American music, Barney said.