APM Studios
We’re back with part two of our string-tastic story of the banjo! In the last episode, musician Rhiannon Giddens helped tell the origin story of the banjo, an instrument many think of as American. But it actually comes from Africa.
Today, we’re focusing on how the banjo went from an instrument played mostly by enslaved people to one of the most popular instruments in the United States. The reason for this was a popular form of entertainment in the mid to late 1800s called minstrel shows. Later on, the banjo helped create the genre known as bluegrass. Now it's having a resurgence thanks to artists like Beyoncé.
Featured expert: Rhiannon Giddens is a Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning singer and instrumentalist. You can check out her website here!
Audio Transcript
Download transcript (PDF)
JOY DOLO: And now, get ready for world renowned podcast host, champion cat snuggler, and sort-of-OK cook, Joy Dolo!
[VOCALIZING]
Whoa, Joy, you're so pretty. Oh, my gosh. I can't believe how pretty are. And that's where the song would hit. As I walk out to my adoring fans and the paparazzi and a confetti cannon and probably some fireworks. So I need your help crafting the perfect music, Xavier.
XAVIER: I'm sorry. What is this for again?
JOY DOLO: You know? My walk out music like baseball players and pro wrestlers have.
XAVIER: Wait, is this for some sport you're playing, Joy?
JOY DOLO: Of course not. It's for everyday use. Like when I enter a grocery store or the library. I've got this sound effects machine to help me find the perfect tune. I figured since you're a DJ, Xavier, you can weigh in.
XAVIER: I'm confused. Where will this music be playing from?
JOY DOLO: Trivial detail. I'll figure it out after I have the perfect tune. It has to be really powerful, like screaming guitars. Oh, here's the screaming guitar button.
[GUITAR STING]
XAVIER: Maybe something less intense.
JOY DOLO: Hmm. Yes Yes. Yes. Let's add something warm and inviting. Like ska music.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Oh. And some sassy synth.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And big band drums.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
XAVIER: Joy, this is just a loud mess.
JOY DOLO: Yes, it is. But does it say, here comes an impressive and talented podcast host?
XAVIER: It says, here comes the splitting headache.
JOY DOLO: Hmm. Yeah, you're right. It just needs some trumpet.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Perfect!
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome to Forever Ago from APM Studios. I'm Joy Dolo and I'm joined again today by Xavier from Kigali, Rwanda. Xavier also goes by his DJ name, The Professor. Hi, Xavier.
XAVIER (SINGING): Hi, Joy. Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy. Hi, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy. The Professor, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy. The Professor at your service.
JOY DOLO: Whoa. You're really blending the new with the old there.
XAVIER: Yeah, kind of like Forever Ago.
JOY DOLO: Oh, my gosh. Yes! So if you don't know, this is part two of our look at the history of banjos.
XAVIER: If you started here, feel free to hit pause and go back to the last episode and get caught up. We'll wait.
[CRICKET CHIRPING]
XAVIER: OK. You're back.
JOY DOLO: You were gone so long. We thought you forgot about us. And for those who didn't just listen to the first episode, here's a recap of what we learned. Hit that recap music, Professor.
XAVIER: Banjos are having a moment thanks to Beyoncé's album Cowboy Carter, which topped the pop and country music charts.
JOY DOLO: Yeah, but the instrument has roots that go back over 500 years to Africa.
XAVIER: Early banjo-like instruments were used in Africa for music, dance and especially religious ceremonies.
JOY DOLO: Starting in the 1500s, millions of African people were enslaved by white European people and taken to places like the Caribbean Islands where cultures and music blended together.
XAVIER: In the early 1600s, enslaved people were brought to the land we now call the United States.
JOY DOLO: And that's where the banjo moved from being something enslaved people played to something that a lot of people played-- Black and white. We've been getting help learning about this instrument from a musician and historian named Rhiannon Giddens.
[BEYONCE, "TEXAS HOLD 'EM"]
This ain't Texas
Ain't no hold hold 'em
So lay your cards down, down, down, down
XAVIER: That's her playing the banjo on Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter album, by the way.
JOY DOLO: Hey, Rhiannon, Thanks for coming back to tell us more about what you learned.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: Hey. Yeah. I'm happy to be here. This is awesome.
JOY DOLO: So, Rhiannon, you ended the last episode with a bit of a cliffhanger. We were talking about the early 1800s. The United States was still a new country. Factories were starting to pop up in the north. Steam trains were brand new and a big deal. But this was before electricity or phones.
XAVIER: And for 200 years, enslaved people had been passing songs to each other. This is called the folk tradition.
JOY DOLO: During this time, poor European immigrants had seen enslaved people playing early versions of the banjo, and they started to pick up the instrument themselves. Music and traditions blended together again as songs were passed back and forth.
XAVIER: And then a new form of entertainment entered the picture.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RHIANNON GIDDENS: Before this, a poor person, your entertainment is basically after you work, you can like dance. You can play music, you can sing together. It's like you make it yourself. These dances would go on all night if you had even energy to do that. You didn't have any extra money to go to theaters very much. So that starts to change in the 1800s and you start getting this idea of an entertainment industry for not just the rich people at the top. And so something that had been happening already is something called blackface.
XAVIER: Blackface is when white performers paint their faces black to pretend to be somebody of African descent.
JOY DOLO: Blackface has a racist and painful history. Actors in Europe had been using blackface for hundreds of years. In the US, blackface became a popular part of something called a minstrel show.
XAVIER: A minstrel show is a stage show where white performers would sing, dance, and tell jokes while wearing blackface makeup.
JOY DOLO: The white actors would greatly exaggerate features or characteristics of enslaved Black people. Rhiannon says it was a way of making fun of Black people and reinforcing hurtful stereotypes about them.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: You start seeing people making fun of Black people to entertain other white people. So basically they put on this blackface and they sing this very comic song about being Black in America, which is obviously not a very comic life. And then the banjo gets adopted in the 1830s as part of the minstrel show. And that really changes things for the banjo because all of a sudden you need a commercial way to produce banjo. So people start making banjos and that changes the gourd to the round hoop style of the banjo that we all know today.
JOY DOLO: Remember, banjos had always been made by using a dried gourd for its body. Since gourds are just large pieces of fruit, they grow in all different shapes and sizes. Plus it takes time for them to grow.
XAVIER: Cool for fruit. Not so cool if you want to quickly make a predictable sounding instrument. You could never make the same banjo twice because no two gourds are exactly the same.
JOY DOLO: But with a wooden hoop, the banjo became much easier to replicate. Manufacturers could crank them out. From here on, minstrel bands took off.
XAVIER: There were a few instruments that were part of a typical minstrel band, including bones.
[CLICKETY-CLACKETY NOISE]
JOY DOLO: Animal bones were used to make a clickety clackety noise and keep the rhythm.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: Blackface minstrelsy with banjos, fiddles, tambourine and bones is like enormous. They go to England, it goes to Australia, it goes to any kind of English colony, any kind of place where they've already been and taken over. Minstrelsy follows and it becomes really the first American cultural export. 100 years before rock and roll, it's minstrelsy that people associate with something that's coming out of the nation state of America, and it's hugely popular for decades.
JOY DOLO: We're going to hear more about how the banjo and minstrel shows changed in just a minute. But for that, let's take a break and hear the answer to last episode's
CREW: First Things First.
JOY DOLO: In case you forgot or haven't listened to the last episode, I asked Xavier to play some stringy things in chronological order. They were silly string, a string phone a.k.a. tin can phone and string cheese. Do you remember your answers from last week?
XAVIER: Hmm, yes. I think they were the string phone and string cheese and the silly string.
JOY DOLO: Exactamundo. So OK, Xavier, are you ready to hear the answers?
XAVIER: Yes.
JOY DOLO: Here they are.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Wow, you did pretty good at Xavier.
XAVIER: Really?
JOY DOLO: OK. Yeah, you did. So the first one up, you got exactly right. It was the string phone or the tin can phone. Yeah.
XAVIER: I knew it.
JOY DOLO: The tin can phone was first used in 1667 by British physicist Robert Hooke. The way it works is like this-- you take two cans or cups or plastic bottles and poke a hole in the bottom of each. Then you attach one end of a string through each hole and pull the string tight. The sound your voice makes is made of molecules wiggling back and forth. Those molecules wiggle the bottom of your can, which in turn passes those wiggles down the string to the other can. The bottom of that can turns those wiggles back into something the person on the other end can hear.
These types of phones were commercially built for a short time. They were set up to transmit voices up to about half a mile. Could you imagine talking to somebody half a mile over string?
XAVIER: What?
JOY DOLO: I know!
XAVIER: That's unheard of.
JOY DOLO: I know. It's like string texting.
[LAUGHTER]
Everybody grab a string. I'm going to the grocery store.
XAVIER: Why do we need such advanced technology when we just have some old tin cans and a piece of like unbelievably long string?
[LAUGHS]
JOY DOLO: I've been doing it wrong the whole time. Well, string phone, absolutely right. You did such a great job. And then second up was actually silly string. So you said string cheese. But the second one was actually--
XAVIER: What?
JOY DOLO: Yeah. So silly string. So this foamy string that's shot out of a cannon was invented in 1972, it was a total accident. Scientist Leonard Fish and Robert Cox had developed a formula for a spray on cast before they could take their million dollar idea to the world, they needed to find the perfect spray nozzle. To their surprise, one of the test nozzles shot a stream 30 feet across the room. Obviously, this is way more fun than developing a cast. And the two went on to sell their new invention to toy company Wham-o.
And finally, string cheese. This lovable lunchtime snack is credited to a guy named Frank Baker in 1976. He came from a family of cheese makers in, where else? Wisconsin.
[LAUGHS]
Wisconsin is next to Minnesota. Do you know where Wisconsin is?
XAVIER: It's classic.
[LAUGHTER]
Who would have known? Who would have known?
JOY DOLO: Who could have guessed, Xavier?
XAVIER: Stop it.
JOY DOLO: The cheese state.
[LAUGHS]
His family was a big supplier of mozzarella cheese for pizza shops that were popping up all over the country. Frank cut a chunk off and put it in a very salty brine bath, which gave it that rubbery texture we think of today. He brought it to some local bars for people to snack on. They gave it the thumbs up and the rest is history. Xavier, were you surprised by any of these answers?
XAVIER: OK, first of all, I thought of string cheese. For some reason, I thought the Great Depression, because I thought of Kraft cheese like pasteurized cheese.
JOY DOLO: OK.
XAVIER: Instead of mozzarella.
JOY DOLO: Right. Yeah.
XAVIER: And then the silly string. I mean, it sounded more like 2000s prank videos than Flint Lockwood from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
[LAUGHS]
JOY DOLO: Well, great guesses. Great job, Xavier.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, Forever Ago friends. We love hearing your ideas and questions, so we want to know what topic would you like to explore on Forever Ago? What history would you like to learn more about? Maybe there's a certain invention, person, or time period you're curious about. Whatever it is, we want to hear it. Listeners, send us your episode ideas at foreverago.org/contact. And while you're there, you can send us your questions, compliments and fan art. We love getting fan art. We're huge fans of fan art. Give us some fan art. Again, send it to us at foreverago.org/contact.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CREW: Brains On Universe is a family of podcasts for kids and their adults. Since you're a fan of Forever Ago, we know you'll love the other shows in our universe. Come on, let's explore.
CREW: Entering Brains On Universe. To find my favorite podcasts. Brains On. Smash, Boom, Best. Forever Ago. Picking up signal.
[VOCALIZING]
CREW: Brains On.
CREW: Brains On, a science podcast for kids and families.
CREW: One wild fact about Antarctica is that if you dig about 100 feet underground, you can find traces of a tropical rainforest.
CREW: Wait, what?
CREW: Yeah.
CREW: Huh? Zurk! Where did the signal go? Must find Brains On now!
CREW: Listen to Brains On wherever you get your podcasts.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
XAVIER: You're listening to Forever Ago. I'm Xavier.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: And I'm Rhiannon Giddens.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOY DOLO: And now, the host with the most, the heiress of history, her royal majesty of antiquity, put your hands together for Joy Dolo!
[MUSIC PLAYING]
XAVIER: Still trying to find your walk out music?
JOY DOLO: Trying to? Come on, Xavier. I definitely found it. This is perfect walk out music.
XAVIER: It's definitely going to get people to walk out.
JOY DOLO: OK. OK. I'll keep working on it. Anyway, back to the past.
We were talking about minstrel shows and how they took the banjo from something played exclusively by enslaved Black people and poor immigrants and brought it into the mainstream.
XAVIER: Before minstrel shows, if you want to make a banjo, you hollowed out a gourd, dried it, attach it to a long stick and added some strings.
JOY DOLO: After minstrel shows began to catch on, the banjo started getting more popular. So people started looking for ways to make a lot of them and faster.
XAVIER: Enter the wooden hoop banjo.
JOY DOLO: By replacing the gourd with a wooden hoop, the banjos could all look and sound the same and they could be quickly mass produced.
XAVIER: And while this was happening, the banjo started capturing people's attention. There was something magnetic about it.
JOY DOLO: By the mid 1800s, banjos became a status symbol for the white upper class. It was cool to have one. People were gaga for banjo.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Rhiannon says as banjo music became more popular, you eventually saw Black people playing it on stages. But for white audiences to accept them, these black performers were forced to wear blackface, too.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: There's black people who are doing blackface because that's the only way they can get a job in the entertainment industry. I mean, it's really bananas. The whole thing is hard to understand, but we still see pieces of minstrelsy in our culture that go into our Hollywood movies. They go into our musicals.
JOY DOLO: For example, minstrel performers would often wear baggy clothes and white gloves. When animation became popular in the early 1900s, cartoon characters would borrow some of this look.
XAVIER: Specifically, the white gloves. Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Bugs Bunny all wear them and a bunch of other characters.
JOY DOLO: Since these early cartoons were in black and white, the gloves made their hands easier to see on screen. But many historians also argue it was a reference to the long history of minstrel entertainment in the US.
XAVIER: And it wasn't just the look. Minstrel songs were the pop music of their time.
JOY DOLO: Even though there were no radio and record players during the heyday of minstrel music, songs were still passed along from town to town. Xavier, have you ever heard the songs of Oh! Susanna or I've Been Working on the Railroad?
XAVIER: So you're telling me that the first proper song that I played on my piano was a minstrel song?
JOY DOLO: Which one was it?
XAVIER: Oh! Susanna.
JOY DOLO: Oh. Yeah. They came from minstrelsy. Yeah.
XAVIER: What?
JOY DOLO: It's surprising, isn't it? You never know, sometimes with this stuff. There are so many songs like these that we still learn and sing today. Most of them had offensive racist lyrics. Over the years, the bad lyrics got changed or taken out completely, but the themes and melodies stayed. Honestly, when I think about it, I feel like upset because I feel like I was kind of tricked a little bit. Like I feel like I was taught something that was like supposedly innocent, but it was also rooted in this like nastiness. How do you feel about it, Xavier?
XAVIER: The exact same way. I couldn't have said it better. Seriously.
JOY DOLO: Yeah. It's interesting. In the 1900s, the popularity of minstrel stage shows faded, but the banjo lived on. One of the most famous banjo players was a musician named Earl Scruggs. In the 1940s, Earl adopted a way of using three fingers to pluck the strings. He didn't invent the style, but his take on it allowed him to play lightning quick. To this day, people call it Scruggs style picking, and it's one of the trades of Bluegrass music, which he pioneered.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Earl was white. And so were most of the musicians who started playing like him. Over time, people began to think of the banjo as something white musicians like Earl played, not something from Black culture.
XAVIER: That's why Rhiannon was so excited when she learned the true history of the banjo.
JOY DOLO: Rhiannon is mixed race. Her mom is Black and her dad is white. And learning this stuff helped her connect to the banjo and to old folk music. One of her musical journeys sent her looking for the oldest known music made by enslaved Black people in the Caribbean. She came across a snippet of music written down in the 1680s. It wasn't even a full song.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RHIANNON GIDDENS: So just this little tiny scrap of melody. But then what you can do like with the lives of the enslaved and also the lives of poor people. There's not a lot of evidence. There's not a lot of things in their own voice. There's not a lot of paper trail. So you have to take the things that you do find and they become really important and precious. So that little scrap of melody, I created a whole piece around it, and it begins an opera that I wrote about a guy from Senegal who was enslaved and sold into slavery in North Carolina. But just thinking about ways to connect to these older stories with what we have.
XAVIER: Today, Rhiannon is a driving force behind bringing the banjo and its African roots back to pop music too.
JOY DOLO: Along with her bandmates in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, she helped bring long forgotten tunes back to life.
XAVIER: And let's not forget Beyoncé's Texas Hold 'Em.
[BEYONCE, "TEXAS HOLD 'EM"]
This ain't Texas. Woo!
RHIANNON GIDDENS: When a light gets shined on it like say, with the recent Cowboy Carter album, in that way, and to be a part of that and to watch people of color and everybody like all over the world doing TikToks to this sounds of not just my banjo, but my 1858 Replica banjo which is a very specific sound that is very tied to African-American culture, made me really happy. And like where that goes, I don't know because it's not enough. One record or one song, it's a great introduction, but there's a lot of work being done in this area by a lot of great people and has been done for generations.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOY DOLO: Thanks for coming on this epic two-episode musical journey with me, Xavier.
XAVIER: It was really interesting. Thanks for having me, Joy. We learned so much.
JOY DOLO: Yeah, like how minstrel shows were an ugly part of US history where white people performed in blackface, makeup and used jokes and songs to make fun of Black people.
XAVIER: They were hugely popular and the banjo became one of the main instruments in the minstrel bands.
JOY DOLO: Later, musical pioneer, Earl Scruggs brought his own picking style to the banjo and helped birth Bluegrass music.
XAVIER: Today, people like Rhiannon Giddens and Beyoncé are trying to shine a light on Black musicians and instruments that have been forgotten.
JOY DOLO: Speaking of forgotten, don't think I forgot about my walkout music. I've got one more version to try out. Xavier. Get ready for the triple threat-- host, actress, and karaoke superstar Joy Dolo!
[MUSIC PLAYING]
XAVIER: That's actually really good, Joy. I'd get chills if you walked into a room with that playing.
JOY DOLO: Really? I mean, of course. Now, do you mind if we start the whole episode over? I need to come on with my new walk out music.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This episode was written by--
MARC SANCHEZ: Marc Sanchez.
JOY DOLO: It was produced by--
NICO GONZALEZ WHISTLER: Nico Gonzalez Wisler.
JOY DOLO: And--
RUBIE GUTHRIE: Ruby Guthrie.
JOY DOLO: Our editors are--
SANDEN TOTTEN: Sanden Totten
JOY DOLO: And--
SHAHLA FARZAN: Shahla Farzan.
JOY DOLO: Fact checking by--
NICO GONZALEZ WHISTLER: Nico Gonzalez Wisler.
JOY DOLO: Engineering help from Alex Simpson and Lorraine Germada. With sound design and original theme music by
MARC SANCHEZ: Marc Sanchez.
JOY DOLO: We had additional production help from the rest of the Brains On Universe team.
MOLLY BLOOM: Molly Bloom.
RACHEL BRIESE: Rachel Briese.
ROSE DUPONT: Rosie DuPont.
ANNA GOLDFIELD: Anna Goldfield.
LAUREN HUMPERT: Lauren Humpert.
JOSHUA RAY: Joshua Ray.
CHARLOTTE TRAVER: Charlotte Traver.
ANNA WEGEL: Anna Weggel.
JOY DOLO: And--
ARON WOLDESLASSIE: Aron Woldeslassie.
JOY DOLO: Beth Perlman is our executive producer. And the executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavati and Joanne Griffith. Special thanks to Ciara.
XAVIER: And if you want access to ad-free episodes and special bonus content, subscribe to our Smarty Pass.
JOY DOLO: Also, this is our last episode of season 5, but we're already hard at work on season 6, so it's OK if you want to be a part of an episode we're working on about messages, record yourself describing how you think we'll send messages in the future and send it to us at foreverago.org/contact.
XAVIER: While you're there, you can send us episode ideas, drawings, and questions. See you later!
JOY DOLO: Ciao for now.
[VOCALIZING]
Whoa, Joy, you're so pretty. Oh, my gosh. I can't believe how pretty are. And that's where the song would hit. As I walk out to my adoring fans and the paparazzi and a confetti cannon and probably some fireworks. So I need your help crafting the perfect music, Xavier.
XAVIER: I'm sorry. What is this for again?
JOY DOLO: You know? My walk out music like baseball players and pro wrestlers have.
XAVIER: Wait, is this for some sport you're playing, Joy?
JOY DOLO: Of course not. It's for everyday use. Like when I enter a grocery store or the library. I've got this sound effects machine to help me find the perfect tune. I figured since you're a DJ, Xavier, you can weigh in.
XAVIER: I'm confused. Where will this music be playing from?
JOY DOLO: Trivial detail. I'll figure it out after I have the perfect tune. It has to be really powerful, like screaming guitars. Oh, here's the screaming guitar button.
[GUITAR STING]
XAVIER: Maybe something less intense.
JOY DOLO: Hmm. Yes Yes. Yes. Let's add something warm and inviting. Like ska music.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Oh. And some sassy synth.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And big band drums.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
XAVIER: Joy, this is just a loud mess.
JOY DOLO: Yes, it is. But does it say, here comes an impressive and talented podcast host?
XAVIER: It says, here comes the splitting headache.
JOY DOLO: Hmm. Yeah, you're right. It just needs some trumpet.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Perfect!
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome to Forever Ago from APM Studios. I'm Joy Dolo and I'm joined again today by Xavier from Kigali, Rwanda. Xavier also goes by his DJ name, The Professor. Hi, Xavier.
XAVIER (SINGING): Hi, Joy. Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy. Hi, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy. The Professor, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy. The Professor at your service.
JOY DOLO: Whoa. You're really blending the new with the old there.
XAVIER: Yeah, kind of like Forever Ago.
JOY DOLO: Oh, my gosh. Yes! So if you don't know, this is part two of our look at the history of banjos.
XAVIER: If you started here, feel free to hit pause and go back to the last episode and get caught up. We'll wait.
[CRICKET CHIRPING]
XAVIER: OK. You're back.
JOY DOLO: You were gone so long. We thought you forgot about us. And for those who didn't just listen to the first episode, here's a recap of what we learned. Hit that recap music, Professor.
XAVIER: Banjos are having a moment thanks to Beyoncé's album Cowboy Carter, which topped the pop and country music charts.
JOY DOLO: Yeah, but the instrument has roots that go back over 500 years to Africa.
XAVIER: Early banjo-like instruments were used in Africa for music, dance and especially religious ceremonies.
JOY DOLO: Starting in the 1500s, millions of African people were enslaved by white European people and taken to places like the Caribbean Islands where cultures and music blended together.
XAVIER: In the early 1600s, enslaved people were brought to the land we now call the United States.
JOY DOLO: And that's where the banjo moved from being something enslaved people played to something that a lot of people played-- Black and white. We've been getting help learning about this instrument from a musician and historian named Rhiannon Giddens.
[BEYONCE, "TEXAS HOLD 'EM"]
This ain't Texas
Ain't no hold hold 'em
So lay your cards down, down, down, down
XAVIER: That's her playing the banjo on Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter album, by the way.
JOY DOLO: Hey, Rhiannon, Thanks for coming back to tell us more about what you learned.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: Hey. Yeah. I'm happy to be here. This is awesome.
JOY DOLO: So, Rhiannon, you ended the last episode with a bit of a cliffhanger. We were talking about the early 1800s. The United States was still a new country. Factories were starting to pop up in the north. Steam trains were brand new and a big deal. But this was before electricity or phones.
XAVIER: And for 200 years, enslaved people had been passing songs to each other. This is called the folk tradition.
JOY DOLO: During this time, poor European immigrants had seen enslaved people playing early versions of the banjo, and they started to pick up the instrument themselves. Music and traditions blended together again as songs were passed back and forth.
XAVIER: And then a new form of entertainment entered the picture.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RHIANNON GIDDENS: Before this, a poor person, your entertainment is basically after you work, you can like dance. You can play music, you can sing together. It's like you make it yourself. These dances would go on all night if you had even energy to do that. You didn't have any extra money to go to theaters very much. So that starts to change in the 1800s and you start getting this idea of an entertainment industry for not just the rich people at the top. And so something that had been happening already is something called blackface.
XAVIER: Blackface is when white performers paint their faces black to pretend to be somebody of African descent.
JOY DOLO: Blackface has a racist and painful history. Actors in Europe had been using blackface for hundreds of years. In the US, blackface became a popular part of something called a minstrel show.
XAVIER: A minstrel show is a stage show where white performers would sing, dance, and tell jokes while wearing blackface makeup.
JOY DOLO: The white actors would greatly exaggerate features or characteristics of enslaved Black people. Rhiannon says it was a way of making fun of Black people and reinforcing hurtful stereotypes about them.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: You start seeing people making fun of Black people to entertain other white people. So basically they put on this blackface and they sing this very comic song about being Black in America, which is obviously not a very comic life. And then the banjo gets adopted in the 1830s as part of the minstrel show. And that really changes things for the banjo because all of a sudden you need a commercial way to produce banjo. So people start making banjos and that changes the gourd to the round hoop style of the banjo that we all know today.
JOY DOLO: Remember, banjos had always been made by using a dried gourd for its body. Since gourds are just large pieces of fruit, they grow in all different shapes and sizes. Plus it takes time for them to grow.
XAVIER: Cool for fruit. Not so cool if you want to quickly make a predictable sounding instrument. You could never make the same banjo twice because no two gourds are exactly the same.
JOY DOLO: But with a wooden hoop, the banjo became much easier to replicate. Manufacturers could crank them out. From here on, minstrel bands took off.
XAVIER: There were a few instruments that were part of a typical minstrel band, including bones.
[CLICKETY-CLACKETY NOISE]
JOY DOLO: Animal bones were used to make a clickety clackety noise and keep the rhythm.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: Blackface minstrelsy with banjos, fiddles, tambourine and bones is like enormous. They go to England, it goes to Australia, it goes to any kind of English colony, any kind of place where they've already been and taken over. Minstrelsy follows and it becomes really the first American cultural export. 100 years before rock and roll, it's minstrelsy that people associate with something that's coming out of the nation state of America, and it's hugely popular for decades.
JOY DOLO: We're going to hear more about how the banjo and minstrel shows changed in just a minute. But for that, let's take a break and hear the answer to last episode's
CREW: First Things First.
JOY DOLO: In case you forgot or haven't listened to the last episode, I asked Xavier to play some stringy things in chronological order. They were silly string, a string phone a.k.a. tin can phone and string cheese. Do you remember your answers from last week?
XAVIER: Hmm, yes. I think they were the string phone and string cheese and the silly string.
JOY DOLO: Exactamundo. So OK, Xavier, are you ready to hear the answers?
XAVIER: Yes.
JOY DOLO: Here they are.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Wow, you did pretty good at Xavier.
XAVIER: Really?
JOY DOLO: OK. Yeah, you did. So the first one up, you got exactly right. It was the string phone or the tin can phone. Yeah.
XAVIER: I knew it.
JOY DOLO: The tin can phone was first used in 1667 by British physicist Robert Hooke. The way it works is like this-- you take two cans or cups or plastic bottles and poke a hole in the bottom of each. Then you attach one end of a string through each hole and pull the string tight. The sound your voice makes is made of molecules wiggling back and forth. Those molecules wiggle the bottom of your can, which in turn passes those wiggles down the string to the other can. The bottom of that can turns those wiggles back into something the person on the other end can hear.
These types of phones were commercially built for a short time. They were set up to transmit voices up to about half a mile. Could you imagine talking to somebody half a mile over string?
XAVIER: What?
JOY DOLO: I know!
XAVIER: That's unheard of.
JOY DOLO: I know. It's like string texting.
[LAUGHTER]
Everybody grab a string. I'm going to the grocery store.
XAVIER: Why do we need such advanced technology when we just have some old tin cans and a piece of like unbelievably long string?
[LAUGHS]
JOY DOLO: I've been doing it wrong the whole time. Well, string phone, absolutely right. You did such a great job. And then second up was actually silly string. So you said string cheese. But the second one was actually--
XAVIER: What?
JOY DOLO: Yeah. So silly string. So this foamy string that's shot out of a cannon was invented in 1972, it was a total accident. Scientist Leonard Fish and Robert Cox had developed a formula for a spray on cast before they could take their million dollar idea to the world, they needed to find the perfect spray nozzle. To their surprise, one of the test nozzles shot a stream 30 feet across the room. Obviously, this is way more fun than developing a cast. And the two went on to sell their new invention to toy company Wham-o.
And finally, string cheese. This lovable lunchtime snack is credited to a guy named Frank Baker in 1976. He came from a family of cheese makers in, where else? Wisconsin.
[LAUGHS]
Wisconsin is next to Minnesota. Do you know where Wisconsin is?
XAVIER: It's classic.
[LAUGHTER]
Who would have known? Who would have known?
JOY DOLO: Who could have guessed, Xavier?
XAVIER: Stop it.
JOY DOLO: The cheese state.
[LAUGHS]
His family was a big supplier of mozzarella cheese for pizza shops that were popping up all over the country. Frank cut a chunk off and put it in a very salty brine bath, which gave it that rubbery texture we think of today. He brought it to some local bars for people to snack on. They gave it the thumbs up and the rest is history. Xavier, were you surprised by any of these answers?
XAVIER: OK, first of all, I thought of string cheese. For some reason, I thought the Great Depression, because I thought of Kraft cheese like pasteurized cheese.
JOY DOLO: OK.
XAVIER: Instead of mozzarella.
JOY DOLO: Right. Yeah.
XAVIER: And then the silly string. I mean, it sounded more like 2000s prank videos than Flint Lockwood from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
[LAUGHS]
JOY DOLO: Well, great guesses. Great job, Xavier.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, Forever Ago friends. We love hearing your ideas and questions, so we want to know what topic would you like to explore on Forever Ago? What history would you like to learn more about? Maybe there's a certain invention, person, or time period you're curious about. Whatever it is, we want to hear it. Listeners, send us your episode ideas at foreverago.org/contact. And while you're there, you can send us your questions, compliments and fan art. We love getting fan art. We're huge fans of fan art. Give us some fan art. Again, send it to us at foreverago.org/contact.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CREW: Brains On Universe is a family of podcasts for kids and their adults. Since you're a fan of Forever Ago, we know you'll love the other shows in our universe. Come on, let's explore.
CREW: Entering Brains On Universe. To find my favorite podcasts. Brains On. Smash, Boom, Best. Forever Ago. Picking up signal.
[VOCALIZING]
CREW: Brains On.
CREW: Brains On, a science podcast for kids and families.
CREW: One wild fact about Antarctica is that if you dig about 100 feet underground, you can find traces of a tropical rainforest.
CREW: Wait, what?
CREW: Yeah.
CREW: Huh? Zurk! Where did the signal go? Must find Brains On now!
CREW: Listen to Brains On wherever you get your podcasts.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
XAVIER: You're listening to Forever Ago. I'm Xavier.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: And I'm Rhiannon Giddens.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOY DOLO: And now, the host with the most, the heiress of history, her royal majesty of antiquity, put your hands together for Joy Dolo!
[MUSIC PLAYING]
XAVIER: Still trying to find your walk out music?
JOY DOLO: Trying to? Come on, Xavier. I definitely found it. This is perfect walk out music.
XAVIER: It's definitely going to get people to walk out.
JOY DOLO: OK. OK. I'll keep working on it. Anyway, back to the past.
We were talking about minstrel shows and how they took the banjo from something played exclusively by enslaved Black people and poor immigrants and brought it into the mainstream.
XAVIER: Before minstrel shows, if you want to make a banjo, you hollowed out a gourd, dried it, attach it to a long stick and added some strings.
JOY DOLO: After minstrel shows began to catch on, the banjo started getting more popular. So people started looking for ways to make a lot of them and faster.
XAVIER: Enter the wooden hoop banjo.
JOY DOLO: By replacing the gourd with a wooden hoop, the banjos could all look and sound the same and they could be quickly mass produced.
XAVIER: And while this was happening, the banjo started capturing people's attention. There was something magnetic about it.
JOY DOLO: By the mid 1800s, banjos became a status symbol for the white upper class. It was cool to have one. People were gaga for banjo.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Rhiannon says as banjo music became more popular, you eventually saw Black people playing it on stages. But for white audiences to accept them, these black performers were forced to wear blackface, too.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: There's black people who are doing blackface because that's the only way they can get a job in the entertainment industry. I mean, it's really bananas. The whole thing is hard to understand, but we still see pieces of minstrelsy in our culture that go into our Hollywood movies. They go into our musicals.
JOY DOLO: For example, minstrel performers would often wear baggy clothes and white gloves. When animation became popular in the early 1900s, cartoon characters would borrow some of this look.
XAVIER: Specifically, the white gloves. Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Bugs Bunny all wear them and a bunch of other characters.
JOY DOLO: Since these early cartoons were in black and white, the gloves made their hands easier to see on screen. But many historians also argue it was a reference to the long history of minstrel entertainment in the US.
XAVIER: And it wasn't just the look. Minstrel songs were the pop music of their time.
JOY DOLO: Even though there were no radio and record players during the heyday of minstrel music, songs were still passed along from town to town. Xavier, have you ever heard the songs of Oh! Susanna or I've Been Working on the Railroad?
XAVIER: So you're telling me that the first proper song that I played on my piano was a minstrel song?
JOY DOLO: Which one was it?
XAVIER: Oh! Susanna.
JOY DOLO: Oh. Yeah. They came from minstrelsy. Yeah.
XAVIER: What?
JOY DOLO: It's surprising, isn't it? You never know, sometimes with this stuff. There are so many songs like these that we still learn and sing today. Most of them had offensive racist lyrics. Over the years, the bad lyrics got changed or taken out completely, but the themes and melodies stayed. Honestly, when I think about it, I feel like upset because I feel like I was kind of tricked a little bit. Like I feel like I was taught something that was like supposedly innocent, but it was also rooted in this like nastiness. How do you feel about it, Xavier?
XAVIER: The exact same way. I couldn't have said it better. Seriously.
JOY DOLO: Yeah. It's interesting. In the 1900s, the popularity of minstrel stage shows faded, but the banjo lived on. One of the most famous banjo players was a musician named Earl Scruggs. In the 1940s, Earl adopted a way of using three fingers to pluck the strings. He didn't invent the style, but his take on it allowed him to play lightning quick. To this day, people call it Scruggs style picking, and it's one of the trades of Bluegrass music, which he pioneered.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Earl was white. And so were most of the musicians who started playing like him. Over time, people began to think of the banjo as something white musicians like Earl played, not something from Black culture.
XAVIER: That's why Rhiannon was so excited when she learned the true history of the banjo.
JOY DOLO: Rhiannon is mixed race. Her mom is Black and her dad is white. And learning this stuff helped her connect to the banjo and to old folk music. One of her musical journeys sent her looking for the oldest known music made by enslaved Black people in the Caribbean. She came across a snippet of music written down in the 1680s. It wasn't even a full song.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RHIANNON GIDDENS: So just this little tiny scrap of melody. But then what you can do like with the lives of the enslaved and also the lives of poor people. There's not a lot of evidence. There's not a lot of things in their own voice. There's not a lot of paper trail. So you have to take the things that you do find and they become really important and precious. So that little scrap of melody, I created a whole piece around it, and it begins an opera that I wrote about a guy from Senegal who was enslaved and sold into slavery in North Carolina. But just thinking about ways to connect to these older stories with what we have.
XAVIER: Today, Rhiannon is a driving force behind bringing the banjo and its African roots back to pop music too.
JOY DOLO: Along with her bandmates in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, she helped bring long forgotten tunes back to life.
XAVIER: And let's not forget Beyoncé's Texas Hold 'Em.
[BEYONCE, "TEXAS HOLD 'EM"]
This ain't Texas. Woo!
RHIANNON GIDDENS: When a light gets shined on it like say, with the recent Cowboy Carter album, in that way, and to be a part of that and to watch people of color and everybody like all over the world doing TikToks to this sounds of not just my banjo, but my 1858 Replica banjo which is a very specific sound that is very tied to African-American culture, made me really happy. And like where that goes, I don't know because it's not enough. One record or one song, it's a great introduction, but there's a lot of work being done in this area by a lot of great people and has been done for generations.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOY DOLO: Thanks for coming on this epic two-episode musical journey with me, Xavier.
XAVIER: It was really interesting. Thanks for having me, Joy. We learned so much.
JOY DOLO: Yeah, like how minstrel shows were an ugly part of US history where white people performed in blackface, makeup and used jokes and songs to make fun of Black people.
XAVIER: They were hugely popular and the banjo became one of the main instruments in the minstrel bands.
JOY DOLO: Later, musical pioneer, Earl Scruggs brought his own picking style to the banjo and helped birth Bluegrass music.
XAVIER: Today, people like Rhiannon Giddens and Beyoncé are trying to shine a light on Black musicians and instruments that have been forgotten.
JOY DOLO: Speaking of forgotten, don't think I forgot about my walkout music. I've got one more version to try out. Xavier. Get ready for the triple threat-- host, actress, and karaoke superstar Joy Dolo!
[MUSIC PLAYING]
XAVIER: That's actually really good, Joy. I'd get chills if you walked into a room with that playing.
JOY DOLO: Really? I mean, of course. Now, do you mind if we start the whole episode over? I need to come on with my new walk out music.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This episode was written by--
MARC SANCHEZ: Marc Sanchez.
JOY DOLO: It was produced by--
NICO GONZALEZ WHISTLER: Nico Gonzalez Wisler.
JOY DOLO: And--
RUBIE GUTHRIE: Ruby Guthrie.
JOY DOLO: Our editors are--
SANDEN TOTTEN: Sanden Totten
JOY DOLO: And--
SHAHLA FARZAN: Shahla Farzan.
JOY DOLO: Fact checking by--
NICO GONZALEZ WHISTLER: Nico Gonzalez Wisler.
JOY DOLO: Engineering help from Alex Simpson and Lorraine Germada. With sound design and original theme music by
MARC SANCHEZ: Marc Sanchez.
JOY DOLO: We had additional production help from the rest of the Brains On Universe team.
MOLLY BLOOM: Molly Bloom.
RACHEL BRIESE: Rachel Briese.
ROSE DUPONT: Rosie DuPont.
ANNA GOLDFIELD: Anna Goldfield.
LAUREN HUMPERT: Lauren Humpert.
JOSHUA RAY: Joshua Ray.
CHARLOTTE TRAVER: Charlotte Traver.
ANNA WEGEL: Anna Weggel.
JOY DOLO: And--
ARON WOLDESLASSIE: Aron Woldeslassie.
JOY DOLO: Beth Perlman is our executive producer. And the executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavati and Joanne Griffith. Special thanks to Ciara.
XAVIER: And if you want access to ad-free episodes and special bonus content, subscribe to our Smarty Pass.
JOY DOLO: Also, this is our last episode of season 5, but we're already hard at work on season 6, so it's OK if you want to be a part of an episode we're working on about messages, record yourself describing how you think we'll send messages in the future and send it to us at foreverago.org/contact.
XAVIER: While you're there, you can send us episode ideas, drawings, and questions. See you later!
JOY DOLO: Ciao for now.
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