Picturing the banjo
RobertM
Picking Through Banjo Symbolism
By Sarah Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, Dec. 18, 2005
Clear your thoughts of banjo-picking as happy music. Stop those toes
from tapping. If you start humming the cheerful ripple of "Roll in My
Sweet Baby's Arms," quit it. We're at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, for
goodness' sake, and we're here to appreciate the banjo as an icon.
"Picturing the Banjo" is "the first exhibit to underscore the banjo's
symbolism in American art," the gallery's press release proclaims. The
show's 72 works include paintings, sketches, illustrations and a few
antique instruments, dating back to the 18th century. It was put
together by Leo G. Mazow, curator of American art at Penn State's Palmer
Museum. The Corcoran is the exhibition's first stop.
Sometimes a banjo is just a banjo. But not here. The gallery wants you
to know that while other banjo exhibitions have been simply about the
banjo, the Corcoran wasn't going to make that mistake. This show is
about the metabanjo, and if that sounds like an exciting premise to you,
then these three rooms divided into seven thematic categories will be
heaven. For here the banjo is not picked -- it is picked apart. It is
probed, prodded and pondered. These banjos are so laden with meaning
it's a wonder they stick to their canvases.
Forget that outmoded notion of the banjo as mere musical instrument, as
the chipper giddyup in a bluegrass band or the lilting heart of so many
old-time gospel songs. And don't come expecting any nimble
finger-rolling to be piped in over loudspeakers. You study the pictures
in silence, and if you need help solving the puzzle of these banjo
images, the descriptive wall labels are there to give you answers.
The banjo, as Mazow explained at the media opening, speaks to us about
our national identity. It represents our need to understand the African
folk culture whence it came. It marks "an effort to normalize the
element of the Other into American musical life."
In this exhibition, the banjo is racially charged and sociologically
weighty. Forget about strings and frets. These banjos are fraught.
Deeply fraught. Some are even sexually fraught. Women's lib might be
traced back to the banjo, if we correctly interpret Frances Benjamin
Johnston's 1895 photo of a mischievous Miss Apperson in Sen. George
Hearst's Washington mansion. Miss Apperson is juxtaposed with a statue
of a goddess, a vision of Victorian virginity raised on a marble
pedestal. Miss Apperson, however, is hardly so chaste . . . for in her
hands she holds a banjo. And she's having a good time with it. (Really,
isn't the instrument just one big phallic symbol? But that's a bit of
banjo symbology the curators did not spell out.)
As liberating as the banjo was for white women in the Gilded Age, it was
just as confining to antebellum blacks, the show instructs. A banjo was
shorthand for racism and enslavement. Many of the paintings in this
section ("Performing Race and Type") are either demeaning to their
subjects or oversimplified. The banjo, we are told, enforces the message.
In many cases, it clearly does. But in some, that interpretation feels
too pat. The title figure in the 1815 painting "The Banjo Man," by an
unknown artist, is a slave playing music for the entertainment of a
group of white children. The descriptive text next to the work tells us
this painting anticipates blacks being "imprisoned" by the instrument.
We can take as a given that idyllic depictions of relaxed and happy
black people are far removed from the brutal reality of slavery. But
isn't it the prosperous-looking white man taking in the scene at the
edge of the composition the one who is doing the imprisoning? If the
banjo is truly a symbol of the chains of slavery, then why is the banjo
player seated at the center of the painting, like a muse releasing the
music, setting in motion an array of dancers as gracefully idealized as
you'd find in any classical frieze?
We put the question to Mazow. "Did I say 'imprisoned?' " he asks,
scanning the text. "Maybe that goes too far." We appreciate his
flexibility. He adds that we can never truly know the artist's
intention. We're with him on that.
What the banjo is not in this exhibit is fun. It is an object of
reverence, certainly, in George Fuller's 1876 canvas "The Banjo Player,"
where you can feel the meditative concentration on the young man's face
as he strums by a fireplace. Even the chicken posed at his feet seems
lulled into listening.
But there is precious little joy here. Even Man Ray, the dear, soulful
doggy muse of photographer William Wegman, looks morose as he leans his
graying muzzle over a banjo in "Blue Period With Banjo." The instrument
is propped against a rubber Breath Sweet bone, just out of reach of the
weepy-looking Weimaraner. Perhaps that's why he's so blue.
The spirit of the banjo is best captured in a couple of book
illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, where the instrument figures as
part of a wonderfully stylized orchestra. The sleek, jazzy attitude in
these black-and-white drawings makes the music seem to swell on the
page. Among the seductively curvaceous saxophones, the banjo makes the
perfect counterpoint. It is rendered with exquisite geometric
simplicity, the perfect circle of its head as pure and icily modern as
that Movado watch that has no numerals.
Aside from these few sparks of life, "Picturing the Banjo" comes across
as decidedly pedagogical. It's a dry and somber lecture. It's like
poring over Shakespeare to discover that the playwright was, say, a
misogynistic meanie. It feels so postmodern, so
late-20th-century-college-English-department.
It's worth noting that one of the exhibit's chief funders is the Steve
Martin Charitable Foundation. The comedian's passion for art collecting
is well known, but his accomplishments on the banjo are of equal scope.
He has even recorded an album with banjo god Earl Scruggs.
Too bad he didn't grant the show a sense of humor along with his money.
Picturing the Banjo runs through March 6 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art,
500 17th St. NW. The museum is open Wednesday-Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.,
and Thursdays until 9 p.m. Closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.
Admission is $8, $6 for seniors and military, $4 for students and free
for members. Call 202-639-1700 or visit www.corcoran.org/ .
(Corcoran Gallery of Art)
Mike Stanger
RobertM <re...@newsgroup.com> wrote:
> Editorial Review
> Picking Through Banjo Symbolism
>
> By Sarah Kaufman
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Sunday, Dec. 18, 2005
>
> (long clip)
Just goes to show... them who knows it best is them who plays it. Just
spent 5 minutes analyzing balderdash.
Stanger
jstone999
Mike Stanger wrote:
> In article <drhdd2$ec47$1...@news3.infoave.net>,
> RobertM <re...@newsgroup.com> wrote:
> Just goes to show... them who knows it best is them who plays it.
That may be true, Mike, but the article shows that at least some
Washington Post reporters, it would seem, have a lot more understanding
of the banjo than the curators of the exhibition.
I mean, the banjo as a symbol of enslavement? Or women's liberation?
I always thought it was a musical instrument. It is for me, but then
I'm just a ex-pat American WASP who needs no empowerment--at least no
more than a bit of cowboy music can provide.
Must we make EVERYTHING political?
jeffstone
goettingen
Seven Inch Dilly
> I mean, the banjo as a symbol of enslavement? Or women's liberation?
> I always thought it was a musical instrument. It is for me, but then
> I'm just a ex-pat American WASP who needs no empowerment--at least no
> more than a bit of cowboy music can provide.
>
> Must we make EVERYTHING political?
Some would argue that everything relating to the process by which decisions
are made within groups is inherently political. At least that's true at my
house vis-à-vis acquiring banjos :-)
jstone999
Seven Inch Dilly wrote:
>
> Some would argue that everything relating to the process by which decisions
> are made within groups is inherently political.
Actually, I've been known to same something similar myself, so I'll
rephrase:
must we make EVERYTHING ideological?
>At least that's true at my
> house vis-à-vis acquiring banjos :-)
>
I wish the discussions in my house could rise to that level. I'm lucky
if my wife allows me to take part in making a decision.
>
> begin 666 lprime.gif
> M1TE&.#EA`P`6`/ ``/___P```"'Y! $`````+ `````#`!8```(+A(\)8;P-
> 'E9PT$10`.P``
And, just curious: can other people read this in their newsreader? I
can't, but am curious.
jeffstone
goettingen
Erik Newman
> Seven Inch Dilly wrote:
>
>> begin 666 lprime.gif
>> M1TE&.#EA`P`6`/ ``/___P```"'Y! $`````+ `````#`!8```(+A(\)8;P-
>> 'E9PT$10`.P``
>
> And, just curious: can other people read this in their newsreader? I
> can't, but am curious.
They appear to be images of a single quote mark in two different fonts.
RobertM
If someone thinks music isn't political, they never played in a band.
Bob
RobertM
> Seven Inch Dilly wrote:
>> Some would argue that everything relating to the process by which decisions
>> are made within groups is inherently political.
>
> Actually, I've been known to same something similar myself, so I'll
> rephrase:
>
> must we make EVERYTHING ideological?
>
>> At least that's true at my
>> house vis-à-vis acquiring banjos :-)
>>
>
> I wish the discussions in my house could rise to that level. I'm lucky
> if my wife allows me to take part in making a decision.
>
> goettingen
>
Women are like banjos. If you don't like what you have, you get a
different one that is more to your liking.
Bob
Mike Stanger
"jstone999" <jsto...@aol.com> wrote:
Hi, Jeff...
Sure enough! I couldn't agree with you more.
I tend to think of leg chains as symbols of enslavement, and the whole
bit about banjo & women's lib was just as far off- girls took up the
banjo in 1900 because it was a fad, just like they get their butts
tattooed today.
hmmmm..... as a fad, I think girls learning to play the banjo was a much
better one! I think the museum exhibit designer needs to climb out of
his ivory tower and take a look around. The concept was weak.
regards,
Stanger
Donald_Borchelt
carry with it a unique history, one that not only reflects somehow the
broader social and economic development of our country, but a history which
also has had a direct influence on how we pick it today. Perhaps the
notions that the banjo is a symbol of enslavement, or an early vehicle for
women's liberation, are overly simplistic, but it is probably unfair to
judge the exhibit from the reviewer's opinion alone, without seeing it in
person. If I understand the concept behind this, the pictures, or how the
banjo has been depicted, is the point of the exhibit.
You can live in a society without deconstucting its mores, and you can pick
the banjo very well without knowing how the techniques you have learned
evolved over time, but that doesn't mean that a complex set of influences
over the generations, perhaps some even poitical or racial in nature, didn't
contribute to putting that instrument in your hands and that stroke in your
style. Don't forget, if it wasn't for a bunch of very evil white Europeans
taking a whole bunch of black Africans against their will, packing them like
sardines into the holds of their ships, making them lie in their own
excrement for weeks at a time, only to be sold as so much cattle at the
other end, you would not be enjoying what is just another musical
instrument, today.
Some years back, in the late 70s, I was the token white boy working in a
black non-profit neighborhood organization in Boston's North Dorchester
neighborhood. This was a neighborhood that over the two or three previous
decades had gone from being a jewish neighborhood to a black neighborhood,
much like the Avondale neighborhood in Cincinnati, where I grew up. The
stately old granite synagogues had all been turned into Baptist churches. I
was hired to run a program which purchased and fixed up abandoned one, two
and three family homes, through a HUD program called "Urban Homesteading."
I'm still not sure why the director hired a white boy to run his housing
program, but that's beside the point. Anyway, most of the work actually got
done by general contractors that I hired, but I also ran a small crew that
did sheetrocking and painting. Now, the folks who lived in the neighborhood
and worked for the organization came from all over. Some were from
Riverside in Cambridge, families who had lived in Massachusetts since before
the Civil War. Some were from Jamaica; they broke for tea, not coffee, and
played cricket. A lot were from the South, their families came up to Boston
after the war looking for work. Anyway, my three guys were all from the
same area of North Carolina, and they still had family "back home."
At some point, I must have told them that I played banjo, because they were
always nagging me to bring it into work. I finally did, on my last day of
work. (My wife made me quit the job; she couldn't handle the anonymous
phone calls in the middle of the night threatening my life. When you hold
back a contractor's money, he can get pretty mad.) Anyway, they were
laughing and excited when I pulled it out, until I started to play some
Scruggsy thing or another. Then they went silent, and I could see they were
all pretty uncomfortable. I was playing cracker music. To them, quite
simply, it was the music of Southern apartheid, which they had left behind.
Now, I'm not saying that Boston is the promised land of racial tolerance,
far from it. In the end, there is at least as much segregation and
intolerance in Boston as in North Carolina, probably to this day. But if
you think that the banjo doesn't still carry some heavy symbolism with black
folks today, you are mistaken. It may be more complicated that just "a
symbol of enslavement," but I believe it is still there.
Tony Thomas, the founder of the listgroup "black banjo," wrote an article
in the Old Time Herald awhile ago. Allow me to quote from it:
"Yet, in addressing the real history of the music, you cannot escape the
issue of race. As my dear friend Allen Feldman likes to say, race pervades
and you cannot ignore it or remain neutral. The old time South had a great
racial mixture in music and culture as well as murderous terror against
Black people. Youth influenced by cultural and political radicals revived
old-time music in the late 1950s and early 1960s to embrace the culture and
the struggles of poor and oppressed people, not to flee to the suburbs. The
original Friends of Old Time Music had concerts not only for Tom Ashley and
Dock Boggs, but also for Son House and Dock's friend, Mississippi John Hurt.
Black Banjo Then and Now revives and intensifies this discourse. We cannot
help but confront the fact that not only was the South of the "old times"
pervaded with racism, but that the society we live in, including the
playing and discussion of old-time music, blues, and every other music, is
pervaded with racism ."
The banjo is a serious musical instrument. You can pick it guilt-free, that
it not the point. But don't think that the music, styles, and techniques
that we enjoy today evolved independent or outside of the historical context
that it was and still is a part of. Sometimes a banjo is just a banjo. And
sometimes it isn't.
- Don Borchelt
jstone999
writing is superb. And you remind us all of something that we never
REALLY forgot: that the banjo is laden with meaning for both African
and white Americans, and this meaning is not always comfortable.
As for myself, I was writing with too much flippance and
imprecision--also, as usual. So instead of just firing off some more
wise-cracking, let me explain what I'm really getting at.
What concerns me is precisely that the banjo IS a serious musical
instrument, surounded with history, myth, and symbolism. This remains
a very large part of what drew me to the banjo. My complaint is--and
having not seen the exhibition, I can't really speak with any
authority, but I must say that the report "rings" true in this
sense--that there has been a tendency within the academic world to
deconstruct (and I mean "deconstruct" in the original Derrida sense)
serious things to the point of their becoming nonsense. And I believe
this is what has happened here.
My complaint is best conveyed in passages such as this:
>The banjo, as Mazow explained at the media opening, speaks to us about
>our national identity. It represents our need to understand the African
>folk culture whence it came. It marks "an effort to normalize the
>element of the Other into American musical life."
Phrases like "the element of the Other"--a phrase attributed to the
curator--take us way beyond attempts to understand; they elevate
pretentiousness and academic gobbledygook; they take us beyond the
theme of the "banjo as an icon" (a theme I can heartily appreciate)
into the world of academic ideologies: Marxism, Freudianism, Radical
Feminism, and all sorts of other "isms", whether the banjo is no longer
an "icon" but a semiotic archetype for racist, elitist, oppressivist
Weltanschauungen.
I get the feeling that the pictures themselves were not the issue,
rather the accompanying text. According to the reporter:
>The descriptive text next to the work tells us
>this painting anticipates blacks being "imprisoned" by the instrument.
To which the curator responds with the admission that he may have gone
too far. But then, academics ALWAYS go too far when in their PN mode
(the Pretentious Nonsense mode).
Thus Mike Stanger, saying that the players know best, hits the nail
right on the head. I mean, you show thoughtfulness without pretentious
in your above post; why can't they let the pictures do the talking, and
let those who have ties with the banjo--rather than helium-headed
academics--do the talking or write the text.
jeffstone (who might just have degenerated back into flippant mode, in
spite of himself)
goettingen
Michael Hofer
If someone thinks music isn't political, they never played in a band.
And the guy in the rear said "Oh Dear"
good pickin to you
Michael
Michael Hofer
Balderdash was accurate and polite.
If I were a banjo Id respond by borrowing a line oftimes used by the famed
Stooge Jerome ( Curly ) Howard.
" Im a victim of circumstance"
One of the major goals of artists is to create something , someone will buy.
Also Ill add interpretation of art has never been very scientific, so who
expects any accuracy?
Goes back to marketability. The writer also has to make something from what
she has to work with that is viewed a sale item..
good pickin to you
Michael
"jstone999" <jsto...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1139071600....@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
John D
Very powerful and perceptive post. The section below probably accounts in
large part for the apparent lack of black banjo players today.
My question though, is in retrospect, if you could do it again what kind or
genre of music could you have played on your banjo that wouldn't have gotten
that response? In other words, what would most blacks identify with as
back home banjo music rather than "bluegrass as cracker music"?
Or phrased another way, what music can we use to create more diversity in
banjo players? I think if the black community would revive their interest
in banjo playing, it could open up whole new musical avenues. Obviously as
the rest of the post intimates, there are a lot of underlying issues
involved.
John D
"Donald_Borchelt" <djb...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:95Odnb6_iZv...@comcast.com...
Donald_Borchelt
pretty busy, and also I wanted to think a little bit about what I wanted to
say. First, I don't think I could have played anything that wouldn't have
elicited that response from my rehab crew, because just about everything I
pick comes out sounding like cracker music, whether its ballads, blues,
hoedowns or hornpipes. That, basically, is the sound I am trying to get.
Now I wouldn't probably apply the term cracker, myself, but I definitely
want to hear some country in it, whatever it is I'm picking. Maybe if they
could have heard the Flecktones, they wouldn't have thought of that as white
folks' country music, but the Flecktones hadn't been invented yet.
As far as what would get more black folks playing five string banjo, well, I
don't think I am the one to ask about that. Maybe Tony Thomas, the guy who
started the black banjo listgroup, has an answer. It isn't like the music
doesn't have cross-over appeal outside of its roots. Look at how popular
bluegrass music has become in Japan, and in Europe, too. Ironically, and
obviously, African-Americans have roots far closer to this music than folks
who grew up in Tokyo or Prague. One thing to think about- I suspect most
people today come to five-string banjo (and bluegrass or old-time music in
general) from some other musical direction, they don't generally start with
it. A few blacks have gravitated to five-string banjo picking, not many,
just enough at this point to demonstrate the truth of the old axiom that the
exception proves the rule. I would bet in the end that the inhibiting
factor is only partly the "cracker" image. Probably even more important
today is the stark fact that there just aren't very many other black
bluegrass or old-time musicians around to pick with. There is a big
emotional hurdle to overcome, no matter how nice everybody is about it, to
be the only black or the only white in a group. After awhile, it comes to
feeling natural, but it takes some getting used to. (I have had a little
experience in this; besides the job I described earlier, for a semester or
so when I went to Boston College, I was also the only white student in the
black dorm. Wait, my roommate was white, too. Another banjo picker, I
might add.) Anyway, I think that over time, more black folks will come to
banjo picking, but then again, maybe not. Its up to them, not us. I would
just be thrilled if more young black musicians picked the blues, or blew the
harp. That ain't happening much, either.
In case anybody misunderstood me, I don't personally believe we should all
walk around overwhelmed with personal guilt about the darker aspects of our
country's history. What's done is done. We do owe people respect,
sincerity, and understanding. If we did that, our problems would solve
themselves. I'm still trying, myself, with admittedly mixed success. I
mean, look at how mean I've been to Patrick.
- Don Borchelt
"John D" <jdorazi...@epix.net> wrote in message
news:2jcFf.5884$lb.5...@news1.epix.net...
jstone999
Michael Hofer wrote:
> If I were a banjo Id respond by borrowing a line oftimes used by the famed
> Stooge Jerome ( Curly ) Howard.
> " Im a victim of circumstance"
You mean, "soicumstance".
nyuck nyuck
Jeff