Well of Souls

Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History

By: Kristina R. Gaddy, Rhiannon Giddens - foreword

Narrated by: Chanté McCormick

Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

An illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music.

In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. 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. 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.

African Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass, and country, its deepest history forgotten.

©2022 Kristina R. Gaddy; Foreword copyright 2022 by Rhiannon Giddens (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

No Lead Role for the Banjo Here

This seemed to be a scholarly review of the origins of the banjo submersed in a scholarly review of the role music and dance played in enslaved Black society in North America, from its earliest time to about the Civil War. I wasn’t able to stay engaged in the extraordinary detail about dancing, drumming and clothing described in the case studies the way the effort made to present them deserved. But if you are, you will greatly enjoy this book.

You will learn a lot of the subtle variations of the construction of the early banjo and the context in which they were used. But like the role of the banjo in early slave music culture, the banjo in the story played a secondary role.

Unique subject

A different performer might be interesting, but this is only because this review makes you include something you “dislike” which is a chore.

Struggled with it

I really wanted to like this but did not find the writing compelling. it was more of a litany of fact's and much of the time felt like a giant run on sentence.