Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass, and country, its deepest history forgotten. When Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi began considering what songs to perform at the many home livestreams they played during the early days of 2020 lockdown, they started coming up with. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. Giddens is known for her eclectic style of blurring the lines between folk, country, blues, and jazz music. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean, and the colonies that became US states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York.Īfrican Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. Rhiannon Giddens is a Grammy-winning musician and singer-songwriter who has played a variety of musical instruments throughout her career, most notably the banjo. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. She then went on to create solo albums of haunting beauty and power born of African-American struggles past and present. In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Giddens is co-founder of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, which insisted reclaiming a central and historically-accurate place for black musicians in old-time music. An illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music.

Well of Souls by Rhiannon Giddens