The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Before I fell in the love with the banjo, I was a book lover. I mean, I still am. But when I was in college, I took so many literature classes for fun that I amassed enough credits to earn a dual degree in English, along with my bachelor's in journalism.  I was raised in a house of reader parents. My mom is the kind of woman who checks out a stack of books at a time from the library. My dad also reads constantly, usually history or mystery, but at a much slower rate. My love of books developed slowly. My appetite for reading was sparked when I began collecting comic books in the early 1990s, then graduated to graphic novels, then my love for Star Wars led me to the Expanded Universe novels, and finally I began to read the almighty ...  LITERATURE!   From high school onward, I have never not been in the middle of some book. Naturally, when I became interested in the banjo, I not only began amassing a large collection of associated music, but I also started compiling a stac...

Originally published in 1977, Dena Epstein's seminal book, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War , provided definitive evidence that the banjo was first developed by African slaves, derived from similar instruments that are still played in countries like Gambia.