This presentation is a synthesis of research conducted with early banjos. It outlines the organological characteristics of early banjos—pre-industrial gourd- and calabash-bodied instruments. It argues that a materialist approach to organology alone cannot determine if an instrument is a banjo and suggests that we must consider an instrument’s provenance, usage, and cultural context. It outlines the organological characteristics shared across early banjos, how those characteristics differ from known African instrument antecedents, and discusses the known cultural context of the banjo, which was created by people of African descent in the Americas and used as accompaniment for ritual dance.

Contemporary Black banjo performance is hauntological at its core. Invoking ancestors through artistic choices like tunings, timbres, and interpolations of historical repertoire, performers conjure phantasmal soundscapes from a dark past. Musicians often invoke individual forebears by name or historical account, connecting their contemporary performances with the Black past in order to force a reckoning with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives. In this respect, we may understand contemporary Black banjo music to be a form of what Kodwo Eshun has called “Alien Music”: it arrives from another time to disrupt and trouble our relationships with the category called “human.” There are, however, key differences: Eshun’s Afrofuturist Alien Music arrives from the future, undermining the human by its invocation of the extraterrestrial and the cyborg. Black banjo music arrives (seemingly) from the past, and achieves the same purpose by invoking dehumanized figures from Black history (e.g. the slave). The presence of these figures confronts listeners with the subjectiveness and unreliability of the category of the human throughout history and today, just as Eshun’s alien music urges us to transcend it in the future. While their temporal orientations may seem opposite at first glance (in truth, this may not be so), Black banjo music and Afrofuturist music share a strong kinship. This chapter draws on my firsthand experience as a Black banjo player, Afrofuturist theory from Eshun, Isaiah Lavender III, and others, and blues scholarship from Julia Simon to explore the time-bending properties of contemporary Black banjo music.

This presentation provides a brief biography of Dr. Joan Dickerson and her contributions to the Pittsburgh banjo scene. Dickerson is one of a few custodians of the classic banjo—a style from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that is readily associated with ragtime, parlor music, and dance orchestras. With nearly 40 years of experience as a collaborator, educator, and a collector in Pittsburgh, her life offers a rich record about the intersections of race, gender, and music making. Drawing from personal conversations and materials in Dickerson’s private collection, this presentation celebrates her pursuits of creative fulfillment and community building through the banjo.

This presentation draws from research and public programming with the Black banjo and fiddle fellowship. Given the historical and interracial complexities surrounding the banjo's use throughout the long twentieth century, this study examines the tensions that emerge when employing "Black banjo" as a pedagogical framework. This presentation centers auto-ethnogrampic reflections and feedback interviews on the presenter’s work developing and teaching banjo technique classes and banjo history that center Black experiences at the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music. This presentation expands the parameters of culturally responsive banjo pedagogy, challenging established frameworks of American traditional music education that have historically decentered race and critical historical context from technical instruction. Ultimately, the presentation theorizes "Black banjo" pedagogy as a contemporary political project rather than solely a race-centered practice.