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Book Report

By: Kate Tsaramanidou~Maria Papadogianni~Venetia Flemetaki~Nefeli Chatz.

History of the banjo

Early, African-influenced banjos were built around a gourd body and a wooden stick neck. These instruments had varying numbers of string. The five-string banjo was popularized by Joel Walker Sweeney, an American minstrel performer from Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

In the 1830s Sweeney became the first white performer to play the banjo on stage. His version of the instrument replaced the gourd with a drum-like sound box and included four full-length strings alongside a short fifth string.

In the Antebellum South, many black slaves played the banjo and taught their masters how to play

Various instruments in Africa, chief among them the kora, feature with a skin head and gourd (or similar shell) body. The African instruments differ from early African American banjos in that the necks do not possess a Western-style fingerboard and tuning pegs, instead having stick necks, with strings attached to the neck with loops for tuning. Banjos with fingerboards and tuning pegs are known from the Caribbean as early as the 17th century. 18th- and early 19th-century writers transcribed the name of these instruments variously as bangie, banza,banjer, bonjaw and banjar

History of the banjo

The banjo is a four-, five- or (occasionally) six-stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity as a resonator, called the head. The membrane, or head, is typically made of plastic, although animal skin is still occasionally but rarely used, and the frame is typically circular. Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by Africans in America, adapted from African instruments of similar design.

Banjos belong to a family of instruments that are very old.The banjo is frequently associated with country, folk, Irish traditional and bluegrass music. Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in African American traditional music, before becoming popular in the minstrel shows of the 19th century. The banjo, with the fiddle, is a mainstay of American old-time music.

There are several theories concerning the origin of the name banjo. It could have come from the Yoruba word or term "Bami jo" which means "dance for me".

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