It Is Time To Reclaim the Banjo
Sule Heitner: musician, music scholar and adventurous mind. For the black community, history, culture, and tradition has always been accompanied by roadblocks and barriers. So much went unrecorded, so many artifacts misidentified, misattributed and unacknowledged, lending credence to the idea that the black community has little to no history, culture, and few traditions to uphold. This attitude can be observed from both within the black community and without, and encompasses unintentional misinformation as well as malign, deliberate disinformation. Whether deliberate or unintended, the obfuscation of history has greatly shaped the narrative surrounding one of the oldest instruments created in the Americas. The banjo has been so misunderstood and misrepresented it is almost completely disassociated with the people credited with introducing it to the world. Too often people are genuinely surprized to discover that the banjo’s origins are 100% African American. Born on the Ca...