If there’s any instrument in the quiver of American music that can simultaneously summon heartbreak, salvation and joy, it just might be the banjo.
If there's any instrument in the quiver of American music that can simultaneously summon heartbreak, salvation and joy, it just might be the banjo. It's a simple mechanism of hoop, animal skin, neck and strings -- and yet its music invokes a myriad of musical styles and stories from within the ragged pages of the American story.
"The banjo for me also represents an embrace of our Blackness, of our history in this country," said Wellman, founder of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music. "It’s just something that’s passed through the family," said Wellman."There’s an expectation that’s what we’ll do." Something about the banjo's intertwining of percussion and melody carried hints of African music, filtered through several hundred years of DNA across multiple continents, coalesced into something purely American. As she plunged into its origins she could hear its stories unraveling like a gut string.
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