![]() ![]() “African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Conclusion.” In From Jubilee to Hip Hop: Readings in African American Music, edited by Kip Lornell, 15–22. As always, the devil is in the details.Ĭonway, Cecilia. The following bibliographic sources deal with these overlapping currents in all their complexity-from the banjo's seemingly inescapable linkage with slavery, to the near erasure of this linkage through white appropriations of and claims to the instrument, to the never-ending series of revivals and reclamations that navigate this rocky terrain-an instrument that perhaps more than any other tells the story of America, its potential and peril represented equally across a span of centuries. The instrument served as a means of preserving and syncretizing various African aesthetics and belief systems among African-Americans, and also served as an emblem of cultural crossover and collaboration with Anglo-Americans but equally, it was used as a tool of cultural exploitation, serving as an emblem of racist slander and stereotyping through its use in blackface minstrelsy in particular. In historical terms, much more than the guitar, the banjo is the best example of an instrument that's forever been caught between colliding vectors of American culture-black and white, masculine and feminine, rural and urban, among others. A Christian/Manichean worldview that understands the devil as the wholly evil antagonist who claims wayward souls doesn’t smoothly align with and subsume an African worldview that understands Esu and Legba as figures of constructive disorder who are also, when properly petitioned, teachers and guides. ![]() Some of the confusion on this has to do with the way two different folklore streams, one from Europe (featuring the biblical devil, Satan) and one from Africa (featuring a pair of related crossroads trickster deities, Esu and Legba), seem to have fused on American soil, coalescing into a folktale that was well known in African American communities below the Mason-Dixon line. In Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition, Adam Gussow describes how the Devil-at-the-crossroads legend was born out of a collision between cultures, religious systems, and musical traditions not accorded equal status: This resonance may have something to do with how the origin story above aligns with the origin story of America-and how flexibly the crossroads narrative can be interpreted by different individuals and social groups. Although the story was never related by Johnson himself it will forever be seen as a crucial part of his legend, where the crossroads' perceived power as a liminal, transformative space, a space of both possibility and danger, resonates with audiences to this day. At the crossroads, Satan grants Johnson an otherworldly talent, and access to worldly pleasures, in exchange for selling his soul. ![]() This fable’s best-known manifestation is set almost a hundred years ago when bluesman Robert Johnson is said to have visited a road-crossing in rural Mississippi to have his guitar tuned by a mysterious figure, usually thought to be the Devil. The legend of the crossroads is often framed in terms of a Faustian bargain-a site where deals are struck with powerful yet potentially malevolent forces. The banjo is an instrument that sits at the crossroads of American culture.
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